It’s time to stop pretending that the GOP is a conservative party. The truth is, they’ve been steadily abandoning conservative principles for decades and now are guided primarily by grievance, vengeance, and the pursuit of power, leaving actual conservatives without a party.
If one thing defines conservativism, it’s a love of small government and personal freedom. The GOP? They cheer as Ron DeSantis brings Disney World and college boards under government control. They push for government control of libraries, school curricula, personal medical and family-planning decisions, private business investments, and even what people are allowed to wear. From a party that has been fretting about “the nanny state” for decades, the hypocrisy is shameful though not surprising. (A reminder to all the busybodies on the right and left: We’re Americans and we’ll read, say, believe and wear whatever the hell we want.)
Conservatives advocate for local rule and states’ rights, but the GOP increasingly aims to impose their views about guns, abortion, gender, immigration, and health care on the country as a whole. Conservatives honor the free market and eschew government interference, but in a 2016 YouGov poll a majority of Republicans said the free market is bad for America, and GOP politicians are now salivating at the thought of bringing Big Tech companies to heel.
Conservatives are also renowned lovers of the Constitution, but when Trump called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in order to overturn his election loss, the silence on the right was deafening … and predictable. When Rep. Ralph Norman called for Trump to declare martial law to nullify the election and prevent the constitutional transfer of power, there was similarly no outcry. In fact, Norman was reelected the following year, as was nearly every congressional leader who voted to baselessly overturn the 2020 election.
How about law and order? Calls for political violence have become so common among GOP leaders that they hardly make the news. There was almost no GOP praise for the brave officers who died on Jan. 6, and in fact many Republicans cheered when Marjorie Taylor Greene stated that the insurrection would have succeeded on her watch because the protestors would have been armed.
Where conservatives revere personal responsibility, the GOP is obsessed with blaming everyone but themselves for their problems. As Paul Waldman writes, “To be on the right today is to believe yourself oppressed by impossibly powerful forces, including the government, the news media, the education system and a changing society that increasingly rejects your beliefs.” While a principled conservative could engage these systems and offer viable alternatives the GOP has devolved into the same whiny, snowflaky victimhood they so often decry on the left.
Unfortunately, this can’t be dismissed as a fringe phenomenon. As Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic, “[Conservatives] might argue that there are still loyal Republicans out there who will defend the Constitution. …But we must ask when those Republicans are going to rise up and oppose the enemy in their midst. …And if they won’t — or can’t — then that should tell Americans everything they need to know about the party and its base.”
Traditional conservative values aren’t for everyone, but at least they’re debatable and offer an intellectually grounded critique of liberal excesses — unlike the petulant rants and delusional conspiracies that now pass for right-wing journalism. Without a conservative philosophy, the MAGAfied Republican party is left with little more than impotent rage, which their leaders happily stoke and then leverage to line their own pockets.
Conservatives have stood silent for too long while their ostensible party has betrayed everything they believe in. I’ve stopped hoping that responsible conservatives will retake the Republican party from corrupt billionaires and MAGA seditionists, and the formation of a new conservative party seems even more far-fetched. The best option for the good of the country would be for honest conservatives to join centrist Democrats and together nullify the extremists in both camps, but that too is fanciful thinking. Our best hope now may be that the GOP, as it self-immolates, doesn’t take the country with it and that a new, actually conservative party can grow from the ashes.
Urie is a lifelong Idahoan and graduate of the University of Idaho. He lives in Moscow with his wife and two children.
