DES MOINES — Even before Iowans cast their votes in the first official contest of the year on Monday, this campaign has already made one thing abundantly clear: the Republican Party is even more divided than we thought.
For several years, talk about the civil war within the GOP was typically described as a fight between conservatives and the Establishment. But a combination of the historically large field — 17 candidates at one point — and the political force of Donald Trump has revealed that there are many more divisions than that.
Let’s start with the so-called Establishment. The easiest way to describe the Establishment is as a group of people whose primary interest is in seeing Republicans win elections. They tend to be ambivalent about ideology.
These Republicans were the type who criticized Ronald Reagan before he won in 1980, but who have been calling themselves Reagan Republicans for decades since. They were fine with winning as big government “compassionate conservatives” in 2000, and also happy to ride the wave of the Tea Party to victory a decade later. They may talk about supporting free markets and limited government, but they are also happy to expand government if they believe it would win elections or satisfy big business donors.
But the Establishment can’t all be lumped together, because they all have varying levels of commitment to ideology, and they tend to split into an “Old Establishment” and a “New Establishment.” The “Old Establishment” tends to lean more heavily on tradition, experience, and gravitate toward candidates with long records and familiar backgrounds. The “New Establishment,” however, tends to want to make the party, young, hip and less reliant on old white males.
The split between these groups has become most apparent in the bitter fight between former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. In this battle, Rubio is attacked as an inexperienced upstart who hasn’t put in the time required to take on the responsibilities of the presidency, whereas critics see Bush as part of a boring old guard refusing to relinquish control of the party to the next generation.
Just as we cannot refer to the Establishment as one monolithic entity, nor can we describe everybody else as conservative. There are those ideological conservatives who are more pragmatic and less consistently opposed to the Establishment, and there are also those who are fiercely in opposition to the Establishment who aren’t particularly conservative.
To get more specific, there is a broad category of movement conservatives who see winning elections merely as something necessary to advance a specific agenda rather than an end in itself. Even though the movement is often clashing with elected Republicans and GOP officials, there is really a broad spectrum of opinion on how to balance ideology and practical politics.
All movement conservatives, for instance, would be opposed to Obamacare, but some pushed the idea of trying to defund the program even without GOP control of the Senate or the presidency, whereas others thought this process that triggered a government shutdown was a doomed effort.
This divide has become most apparent in the fight between Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Rubio supporters argue that he balances a commitment to conservative philosophy and policy goals with a more pragmatic outlook and a cheerful disposition that means he can win a general election. They say Cruz is too scorched earth and ultimately unelectable.
Meanwhile, Cruz supporters see him as somebody who will pursue conservative principles once elected and believes that crushing the Establishment is a necessary part of achieving conservative ends. They say Rubio is ultimately a squish, as evidenced by his dealings with Democrats during the immigration fight.
But what’s become clear in this election is that there are another set of voters, more loosely connected to the Republican party, who sound populist tones and often have the same enemies as anti-Establishment conservatives. Yet they are much less concerned with actually advancing a clear conservative agenda.
This fissure can be seen in the closing fight between Trump and Cruz. Though early on, they were seen as appealing to the same set of voters, it isn’t really quite true.
Cruz supporters want to advance a specific set of ideas, and they believe that doing so requires making fundamental changes to how business is conducted in Washington. Trump supporters aren’t particularly ideological. They are frustrated because they think America is in decline economically, culturally and militarily, threatened by other nations on the world stage and by foreigners here at home. They don’t care about economic arguments in favor of free trade or constitutional arguments for executive restraint. They don’t bat an eye when Trump touts the importance of government seizures of private property for non-public use or the virtues of single-payer healthcare.
A Cruz supporter is the type of person who complains about the appropriations process in Washington, how the GOP leadership is undermining conservatives, and sees it as important to end corporate welfare institutions such as the Export-Import Bank. Trump supporters would be fine with more government spending, on, say, infrastructure, haven’t particularly paid much attention to fights about the chairmanship of congressional committees, and would probably be fine doubling corporate Export-Import bank subsidies if Trump told them it would help crush China.
During the primary season, these disparate groups have been engaged in a bitter fight that’s been long-brewing, and that’s before the voting has even begun. It’s unclear at this point if any candidate is capable of putting together a winning coalition in the fall.
