Why the GOP Gets So Much Wrong

The problem isn’t the way conservatives think, it’s that they seem to have given up on thinking at all

There was a small kerfuffle in my home state of Minnesota recently when Scott Jensen, the Republican candidate running for governor, was caught on film complaining to supporters that there are litter boxes in the state’s classrooms so kids who identify as cats have a place to pee.

You know that’s not true, and it’s pure dumbness to even bring it up. Anyone with a brain should know that, but not our Republican candidate for governor. Despite his claim to have a medical degree, it seems he fell hook, line, and sinker for one of the nuttier hoaxes making its way around the conservative internet.

There’s a pattern here. Dr. Jensen rose to prominence by attacking public health measures and spreading medical misinformation during the darkest days of the pandemic. He betrayed the Hippocratic Oath he took as a family physician and put people’s lives at risk, especially the lives of those he’s hoping will vote for him. You may have seen reports that Republicans buying into his sort of nonsense died at a much higher rate during the pandemic than Democrats. A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found Republicans have a 76% higher excess death rate than Democrats.

There are, in other words, consequences to public lunacy. Yet it’s become the basic playbook if you want to be a Republican politician these days. I remember back in 2012 when Bobby Jindal, the Republican Governor of Louisiana and a rising star often mentioned as the party’s next presidential candidate, saw where his party was headed and said “Stop being the stupid party.”

That was the last time we heard much out of Bobby Jindal.

The party instead traded its long tradition of careful foreign and domestic policy for the anger and hate of the Tea Party movement, which always struck me as being as empty and addictive as crack cocaine. Then along came the even more toxic brew of Trump and his red MAGA hats. Now there’s nothing left but grievance and conspiracy-mongering. The thinking side of conservatism has become a spent force, overtaken by the party’s reptilian brain.

Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, two scholars known for careful non-partisan analysis, predicted much of this in a 2012 essay for the Washington Post entitled “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are The Problem.” They described the modern GOP as “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

I’d merely point out the long list of real-world failures of conservative governance. The tragic overabundance of COVID deaths in heavily Republican areas is only Exhibit A.

There is also the spectacle of the top Republican leadership in Florida taking a break from trolling the rest of us about our efforts to fight climate change to ask for billions of dollars to help their state clean up in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, which was exactly the sort of disaster climate change models predict. It’s just one example of the utter failure of conservative climate policy.

The hard right talks non-stop about crime and immigration, in many cases even blaming crime on immigrants. Yet any actual plan to address either crime or immigration will inevitably be blocked by Republicans, who are far more interested in using the issues to beat up on Democrats.

The economy is supposed to be the big Republican issue, and their dark money is flooding the airwaves with attack ads blaming inflation on the Democrats. Yet we just got a look at what actually happens when you apply knee-jerk conservative talking points to real-world economic problems. It took Britain’s new conservative prime minister Liz Truss just about a week in office to bring her country’s economy to the brink of a meltdown.

If you look at things from a broader perspective, two out of the last two Republican administrations ended in economic and social calamity that required massive infusions of federal spending to repair.

You can make your own list of conservative policy failures. Just read the news more carefully than the average voter.

And therein lies the problem. Careful reading of the news isn’t high on the list of things persuading voters these days. The Republicans use that to their advantage, inflaming the tribal passions, primordial fears, and outright lunacy that haunt our society. They’ve become addicted to winning power without doing the honest work of thinking through what might be accomplished with that power. Now the getting of power is the only thing left to keep the party going.

Republicans are succeeding by connecting with the rawer emotions. I’ve been writing for some time that the best way to counter this is to connect with the more noble ones, especially the high ground the GOP has abandoned in their unrelenting pursuit of power. Truth. Justice. Patriotism (the genuine kind, not the lapel-pin version). Moral principle (see the Senate race of Walker vs. Warnock, of which right-wing radio host Dana Loesch has said, “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”).

But I’ve also learned in my long career of creating brand campaigns that emotional connections are strengthened when you mix in a more rational reason to believe, and the Republicans keep handing these to the Democrats. I’d suggest a closing argument for the coming mid-term election that is easily supported by facts. Say this: Any vote that hands power to the Republican Party will inevitably leave you sicker, poorer, and less safe.