A Confederacy of Posters

The Republican Party no longer plans to govern, it just wants to own the libs.

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When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent 50 migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, last month, it was a cruel and bizarre political stunt. The migrants, who entered the US legally after applying for asylum, were falsely promised jobs and assistance, then flown to the bourgeois vacation spot and abandoned. The point DeSantis was trying to make is that rich liberals, and Democrats writ large, don’t actually care about the surge of migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border, and so the crisis should be shoved in their faces. Martha’s Vineyard residents did help the stranded migrants, but that obviously didn’t matter to DeSantis—the publicity was the point, and he got loads of it. 

The stunt and the resulting fallout dominated the Twitter political discourse and the regular media for over a week, an eternity in news cycle terms. The migrants sued DeSantis and other state officials, experts raised questions about whether the whole affair was actually a crime, or whether he had misused state funds. Liberals denounced DeSantis’s callousness while conservatives praised his cleverness. In the election-obsessed political media, there was speculation about whether the stunt would hurt DeSantis electorally with Florida’s Venezuelan community, and whether this (and similar bussing stunts pulled by Texas Governor Greg Abbott) would shift the political conversation away from abortion and toward immigration, widely seen as a favorable issue for the GOP in this year’s midterms. 

Generally lost in all of this is what Republicans want to do about immigration in general and the southern border in particular. The major policy dispute is over the Biden administration’s decision to allow migrants who show up at the border seeking asylum to enter the U.S. while they await their hearings. Republicans like DeSantis and Abbott want to revert to the Trump-era status quo under which these asylum seekers were required to stay in Mexico while their cases were processed (which can take years). Usually left unsaid is that Republicans assume these asylum claims aren’t legitimate—though many of the asylum seekers are fleeing the corrupt leftist regime in Venezuela, which should make them sympathetic figures to conservatives. The GOP also has the idea that Joe Biden’s messaging is sending the message to migrants that they should come to the U.S., though Vice President Kamala Harris has explicitly told Guatemalans, for instance, to “stay in your country.”¹

But most stories about the Martha’s Vineyard stunt didn’t delve too deeply into this. And in fact, Republicans don’t want to talk about asylum policy. They want to continue to make noise about a crisis, blame Biden for it, and win elections. After that, their plans are hazy—actually governing, much less making compromises in order to pass a bill that would fund border security, is beyond the abilities of most politicians in either party. The only goal is to feed the discourse, day by day, week by week; elected officials have ostensible day jobs legislating or whatever but in practice they’re mainly content creators, generating posts for cable news and social media. It’s a sweet gig, but doesn’t someone have to run the country?

This is not a complaint that ordinary people don’t care about the nitty gritty of immigration policy—of course ordinary people don’t give a hoot about policy. They lead busy lives shopping for groceries and working and playing iPhone games while they drive and so on. This is also not a complaint about journalists writing about politics as a horse race while ignoring policy. Many skilled journalists cover immigration and the southern border and come out with really complex, well thought-through stuff, but I guarantee that stories about DeSantis’s plane got a lot more traffic than any policy-focused immigration piece ever has. The public is attracted by controversies and shiny objects, and journalism serves the public’s appetites along with the public good. 

Politicians, though, are supposed to attend to the boring details. I’m not naive enough to think that everyone gets into politics for pure-hearted reasons, but if you want to be famous or make a quick buck there are simpler career paths. The attraction of politics is that you can change the world in some way: make buses run on time, stop police misconduct, give more people health insurance, blah blah blah. We should expect elected officials (or really, their staff) to be knowledgeable about issues so we can mostly ignore them. Especially when crises arise, like a record-breaking number of migrants arriving at the southern border, we have to trust that politicians take them seriously and do whatever boring work needs to be done. It sounds tediously centrist, but don’t you want the suits in Washington to roll up their sleeves, find common ground, and put their constituents first? Don’t you want them to at least pretend to do those things? 

Past iterations of the Republican Party weren’t afraid of governing. Just before the 1994 midterms—a historic victory for conservatives—GOP leaders promoted their “Contract with America,” a document that laid out specific bills Republicans wanted to pass. Subsequent Republican leaders, like George W. Bush and Paul Ryan, made major efforts to privatize Social Security, to name one longstanding conservative policy priority. As late as 2013, many Republicans were willing to compromise with Democrats on a major immigration reform bill that would have achieved many of their stated policy goals.  

But the “actually, we shouldn’t do anything” caucus in the GOP killed immigration reform, and has now taken over the entire party. Today, most of conservatives’ leading issues involve “culture war” topics. Critical race theory in the schools! Leftists in the universities! Trans people in the bathrooms! It’s an endless treadmill of grist for cable news, talk radio, and social media—there was recently a little outrage cycle about Velma from Scooby-Doo coming out as a lesbian, I guess?—but these topics don’t often connect directly to policy, to put it mildly. Even if you put Trump in the White House, he can’t make Velma straight again. Anger at “wokeism” (which is sometimes basically “anger at the existence of trans people”) is ideological, it brings in eyeballs and ears for cable news and talk radio, but it’s not a policy platform.

What is the GOP’s policy platform? There literally isn’t one. Republicans didn’t update their party platform at their 2020 convention, which on one hand doesn’t really matter, since the only people who care about party platforms are journalists and party hacks. But on the other hand, it’s remarkable that Republican-aligned journalists and party hacks didn’t care about the platform. Last December, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that there would be no policy agenda for his party in the 2022 midterms. He’s stuck to his guns on this, lashing out at any of his colleagues who even hint that they’d like to pass some sort of legislation if possible. Senator Lindsey Graham proposed a bill banning abortions after the 15th week and got rebuked, as did Senator Rick Scott when he came out with a pretty bog standard economic conservative policy plan.

GOP candidates have railed against inflation, of course, but when asked about how they would rein it in, they don’t have specifics. (Probably because they don’t want to admit their preferred solution here is to cut Social Security.) They denounce Democrats for passing spending bills, but will take credit for individual items in those spending bills, even though Republicans voted against them. Republicans want to win elections but they won’t tell anyone what they’d do after that. 

Conservatives used to want to “reduce entitlement spending,” which is code for shredding the U.S.’s already frail social safety net, but after Trump won the 2016 presidential primary in part by promising not to cut Social Security and Medicare, that no longer seems to be a priority. Conservatives used to promise to repeal Obamacare, but have tossed aside that idea too. They used to be opposed to gay marriage, but now don’t seem to want to talk about it. They’re obsessed with border security, but also have abandoned any efforts to write legislation that could pass. If they retake the House this year, their big idea on their signature issue is… to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a plan that has no chance of actually removing him from office but will result in some made-for-TV hearings. 

There’s a certain logic to all this. You win elections by whipping up culture war issues, then use whatever power you have to get the media to talk more about culture war issues, then win more elections. The problem is that there’s no long-term vision that looks beyond the next news cycle, but who cares? If you can stay in office you can stay on TV, keep raising money from perpetually panicked conservative donors, and when that gets boring go work for Fox News or Newsmax or become a lobbyist. There’s no such thing as the conservative movement. There are individual men and women trying various grifts and seeing what sticks. Right now, the “sending migrants to blue cities” grift is a winner, at least in terms of getting noticed, so that’s where the Republican Party is going. Next month it’ll be something else. 

It’s a politics entirely divorced from material concerns. It’s a rhetoric that speaks only to people whose biggest problem is that a library somewhere is hosting “drag queen story hour.” Conservatives have long argued that a government can’t really improve the lives of its citizens, but now Republicans are going one step further and not even trying to do anything when they’re in government. Just make some posts, get yourself on TV, and the country will take care of itself. At some point, I imagine—maybe when more of the U.S. is on fire or flooded or hit by rolling blackouts—people will wonder, hey, maybe the politicians who are constantly trending on social media should pay attention to those things. But maybe that will never happen. 

Democrats, by the way, are guilty of some of the same behaviors. But it’s a different enough phenomenon that it deserves its own post. Next week! 

1. The Biden administration has in fact dragged its feet on changing a lot of Trump-related immigration policies, enraging immigration activists.