Will Republicans Ever Get Serious?

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) looks on as the House of Representatives continues voting for new speaker at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, 2023. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

One might suppose that the last three years would be a wake-up call. What’s it going to take for the Republican Party to get serious? Right now, we have 20 or so holdouts who have grave doubts about Kevin McCarthy (proud member of the World Economic Forum) as Speaker of the House, justifiably so, and they are holding up his election, which strikes me as quite brave.

I completely get the intuition that he is not the right man for the job, simply because he looks and sounds for all the world like a part of the problem that got us into this mess in the first place. He certainly isn’t the one to lead us out of it. The point is that the Republicans desperately need to do more than manage the status quo. We need dramatic change and now before it is too late.

If these times don’t send that message, nothing will. Consider lockdowns, grueling inflation that keeps slamming real income, brutal shot mandates, travel restrictions, church and school closures, digital surveillance, mass demoralization, drug addiction, low labor force participation (back to 1978), ridiculous debt, slow growth, likely recession, and the possibility that we are careening into a genuine depression.

Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker

There is also the problem that no one seems to want to talk about, which is an out-of-control administrative bureaucracy that has reduced our elective bodies to little more than gaggles of mannequins giving the public the illusion of control without the reality. The only path to fixing this problem is to gut the whole thing, one agency and one bureaucracy at a time. This is the only real path toward restoring the Constitution, which (we would like to think) is something that should serve as the prevailing law of the land.

The United States really is at the precipice. We can go the way of other empires before us: Rome, Aztec, Spain, Britain and watch global power shrink alongside reduced economic prospects and entrenched and corrupt bureaucracy. But there is no law of history that makes this inevitable. It is possible to turn it around by ending the foreign meddling, the outrageous spending, the legal sclerosis, the crushing bureaucracy and taxation.

One would hope that ideals at some point—especially given the obvious emergency conditions—would trump political interest and quid-pro-quo corruption. But so far, it is only a small minority within the Republican Party that seems to understand this. Voters send these smooth-talking politicians to Washington to make a difference but most often they bank their victories and go back to the swamp to do business as usual.

Meanwhile, the voters are increasingly furious at the system. Forget trust itself. Back when Eisenhower was president, trust in favor in government was 75 percent, as incredible as that seems. The assassination of John F. Kennedy began a long decline. Since 2008, trust in government has never been above 25 percent. Today it stands at 20 percent, which might as well be a polling error trending toward zero.

Data: Pew Research Center

What are the implications of this? It means the end of the consent of the governed. Everything we know from history and political philosophy, from David Hume to Étienne de la Boétie to Thomas Jefferson, suggests that this is unsustainable. It is certainly unjust for a government of which hardly anyone approves to lord over a population of the unwilling.

The Republican Party regulars look at this number and know that they are holding on for dear life but instead of doing something about it, they are trying to pillage the system for all it is worth while they can, and using the usual rhetoric to trick voters into believing that they are part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The stalemate on Capitol Hill right now over the Speaker position is about much more than one man and his presumed right to rule. It really is about the future of the party and the future of the country. The holdouts that NPR demonizes as the “hard right” are merely seeking some honesty and change. Their intuition, no matter the “concessions,” is that they are being lied to yet again. I genuinely hope that voters are watching this carefully and are prepared to punish lawmakers who too quickly signed off on the status quo.

The last three years have shown us just how deep the corruption really is. The more we look at COVID relief funds, the more we see that it was not about virus mitigation. It was about using a pandemic to rob the public and pass out money to friends. And we look at the antics of the Federal Reserve to prop up the system and know for sure that what they did is directly responsible for the high inflation now. We further observe that there have been no apologies, no admissions of wrongdoing, and no real accountability.

How much anger is there right now among the rank-and-file? Plenty. Trump snagged the nomination in 2016 not because of the particulars of his program (how many voters were really demanding more tariffs, much less pandemic lockdowns?) but because he seemed to be the angriest and most reckless man on stage.

Trump’s victory should have sent a message that the tyranny of the status quo is not long for this world. In my view, he squandered the opportunity and instead of getting the government off our backs across the board, he fastened on even more (even if he accomplished some good in the regulatory realm). As a result of this experience, the rank-and-file have grown smarter, angrier, and more ferocious than ever. Whenever I travel and speak around the country, I’m always shocked to discover that I am the most moderate-sounding voice in the room.

Of course none of the mood of the public is being reflected in opinion on mainstream news. To listen to NPR and the New York Times, you would think that everything is going along swimmingly but for dangerous elements on the radical right. This is utter rot and people are starting to figure this out.

There is great evil alive in this land, and it comes down to an ancient problem: oligarchs are using the country and its vast wealth to feed themselves and their friends at the expense of everyone else. As a man of libertarian temperament, I wish I could say that it was solely due to government, but we’ve all been schooled in the manner in which the biggest players in the private sector are very much part of the problem, including of course Big Media and Big Tech.

We really don’t know how this story ends. We have no historical experience in a highly developed country ruled by ostensibly democratic forms when the whole of a reigning establishment—public and private—loses the confidence of the public. What actually is the recourse under these conditions? There is really only one path toward fixing the problem: moral courage to do what is right.

We see from events on Capitol Hill right now just how rare that is. And that does not bode well for our future.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.