As they survey a desolate electoral landscape and a new year that promises only more woe, Britain’s Tories could find company in misery this week by taking a look across the pond at the state of their brethren in the Republican Party.
If you’ve been following events on both sides of the Atlantic over the past few months, you could be forgiven for thinking the two great right-of-centre parties in the English-speaking world have been engaged in some warped transatlantic competition for ineptitude, insanity and irrelevance. But while the agonies of Tories and Republicans have different causes, protagonists and outcomes, they reflect the same crisis of modern conservatism.
Events are moving quickly and by the time you read this anything may have happened, but another Groundhog Day is dawning in Washington with the Grand Old Party trying for a third day to elect a Speaker of the House of Representatives.
The backstory should be familiar: in November’s midterm elections, despite economic woes and an unpopular Democratic president, Republicans barely eked out a majority in the House (and lost ground in the Senate). The new House met for its first day of business on Tuesday with a wafer-thin Republican advantage of 222-212.
Under House rules, no business can be done, no bills considered or committees assembled, until a Speaker has been elected. The office holder does not just lead half of the legislative branch of government; they are next in line to the presidency after the vice-president.
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House rules further stipulate that to be elected Speaker, a member must secure a majority of voting members of the whole chamber. Normally the member previously chosen as leader of his or her party in the chamber can expect to be elected Speaker. In this case, Kevin McCarthy, a California congressman who has led the Republicans since 2019, was the man in line.
But the House rules mean that, with a margin this thin, it takes only five dissident members of the majority bloc to produce a stalemate. Party discipline is normally so rigid this kind of stand-off is rare — it last happened in 1923. But, this being the 21st century, when political mayhem is the norm, you can guess the rest.
After eleven votes across three days McCarthy was well short of a majority. A core of 20 Republicans, most of them from the populist wing of the party, refused to back their leader and put forward alternative Republican names. Hence the stalemate. The larger lesson is that whatever the outcome, the Republican Party has provided renewed evidence that it is broken.
The vectors of political stress here are complex. This is not simply another battle in the war between populists and the establishment; Trumpists and the old guard. Donald Trump himself has thrown his support behind McCarthy, and some of his most ardent supporters in the House such as Marjorie Taylor Greene have done the same.
It’s also fair to note that resistance to McCarthy is understandable. He is the very model of a Washington insider, the sort of character who gives cynics a bad name. Unhindered by any visible convictions or intellectual talent, a journeyman politician who wears his beliefs lightly and his opportunism on his sleeve, he has ascended the greasy pole through a combination of bovine perseverance and unctuous ingratiation.
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But the elusive search for a McCarthy ethic is not the main reason for the crisis. It is that a sizeable number of Republicans actually find the responsibility of governing less appealing than the luxury of posturing for the benefit of their public. They are part of the modern class that sees politics as performance art — angrily spouting grievances, “owning” the opposition with a clever tweet, proclaiming their victimhood — with no interest in actually writing laws.
This is well seen in the concessions the rebels are wringing from McCarthy to secure their backing. He agreed to a rule change so that a vote to remove him as Speaker could be triggered by just one House member (the current rule requires a majority of the members). This is a recipe for chaos, a further step towards turning the legislature into a rolling circus of political entertainment. But that’s the point.
The Republicans are scarcely a party any more in the traditional sense: a gathering of like-minded individuals who seek election to advance a cause through legislating and governing. Some, to be fair, still actually want to do something, but many now prefer to be something — with a million followers on social media and a cable news contract to follow.
In an odd inversion, the Democrats, who used to be seen as the party that preferred purity of principle over power, have become ruthlessly efficient at achieving their aims. With only the slimmest of majorities they spent the past two years with iron discipline pursuing their left-wing agenda: five trillion dollars in new government spending and the relentless advance of their progressive creed of cultural and social transformation through the institutions of government and the law.
There’s a strong demand for an effective conservatism that pushes back against the elite authoritarianism that characterises the left’s control of the commanding heights of the West’s culture and society. Instead what we have, on either side of the Atlantic, is a study in the futility of modern conservatism: in Britain, a governing party that declines to be conservative, in America, a conservative party that declines to govern.
