To the extent they ever existed, the days of the Republican Party's ideological coherence are over. It's now all about factions within the GOP, and whether the rebels will hold power.
This is where the nation’s democracy is supposed to collide with practicality. Committees should be empowered, and leaders shouldn’t assume they’ll get party-line votes.
The advantage of the term “faction” is that it’s inherently non-ideological. The founders anticipated that factional conflict would define our politics, and it has. But for most of our history, those factions often had less to do with clear ideological disputes than regional, economic or cultural conflicts.
The challenge with mothballing ideological language in describing today’s GOP is that it makes the comfortable right-left, us-versus-them verbiage that rules everything from fundraising to punditry obsolete. Some factions today do have ideological flavors like nationalism, populism or, relatedly, foreign policy non-interventionism. But what fuels — and funds — them is a cultivated radicalism and contrived hostility to an establishment that barely exists beyond the formal powers of leadership. If anyone in power amounts to “the establishment” then, sure, McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell , the Senate minority leader, are the establishment.
The question for Republican leaders is whether they will be able to forge a governing faction, particularly in a climate where Democrats have every incentive to let Republicans feast on each other, and the conservative base values opposition for its own sake. Thanks to the GOP’s tiny majority, last week’s rebels have learned the power of faction. Whether the majority can exert similar power remains to be seen.
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