Who Will Win the GOP Civil War?
Hint: Not the Neocons.
The Republican Party is being roiled by the public revelation of its Groyper problem. At the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Las Vegas (classy, right?), speakers inveighed against antisemitism in the party. Radio personality Mark Levin inveighed against Fuentes, Tucker, and Candace Owens. But if you watch the speech, it’s less bombastic than shrill. The fact is, Levin seems nervous. And he should be. The momentum is not on their side. Go on YouTube and look at the comments. They are all anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. The groypers control the internet, the youth, and, therefore, the future.
The RJC made signs that said “Tucker is not MAGA.” That’s their line now: they represent the truth of the movement while the groypers are interlopers. The problem is it’s just not true. Fuentes presents himself in his Tucker interview as an Alter Kämpfer, supporting Trump when Ben Shapiro wouldn’t. Levin was an anti-Trump guy. In 2016, the RJC cut off donations to Trump. There’s been a wave of collective amnesia. Why was it they didn’t like Trump in the first place? Why did Rubio and Cruz call him a racist and a potential dictator? Well, because everyone could see at the time who and what he represented. The far right—then, it was quaintly called the alt-right—was in total rapture. When the neocons realized they couldn’t beat him, they joined him. They decided not to go the NeverTrump route because they could see it was a political dead end. These were mostly neocon lowbrows, not dynasts like Bill Kristol or mandarins like David Frum, for whom Trump remained too coarse. The Boca Raton wing didn’t mind the demagogy and actually quite liked it when it was directed at Muslims and blacks. It seemed like they got a good deal, for a while: Trump was, as they say, “good for Israel.” Neocons love to quote Churchill and warn against the dangers of appeasement. Well, I have a Churchill quote for them: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”
The Heritage Foundation is part of the conservative movement's central nervous system. It hedged when it came to Tucker. Its President, Kevin T. Roberts, released one of the weirdest speeches I’ve ever seen—and these days, that’s saying something—on X, defending Carlson from the “venomous” elements trying to “cancel” him. It looked like something out of a dystopian sci-fi where an extreme right movement had captured the US government. Oh, wait… The leadership there knows where their people are going. The New York Post reports the words of a Heritage staffer: “Talking with some of the interns, I think that there are a growing number of them who actually agree.” Again, this comes as no surprise if you’ve been paying a modicum of attention for the past decade.
Meanwhile, Steve Bannon is trying to split the difference. First, he attacks Levin and the rump establishmentarians for their high party numbers:
Please spare me what you’re going to do, okay? Please spare me your definition of what MAGA is, okay? We’ve been in the trenches with MAGA from the beginning, when you guys hated Trump initially. You hate Trump all the time, except when he’s doing something for you.
Then he proposes to direct the hate outwards again:
Mark Levin—he does nothing but hot air. Mark Levin, instead of running your mouth, what are you doing in New York City? I’ll tell you what we’re doing: we’re going to denaturalize Mamdani, which I told people back then they had to do, right after Mamdani won the primary, which they didn’t think he was going to win.
In other words, he’s offering the same deal again: the fasces for them, but not for you—so long as you get in line. This has always been the formula offered to the neocons: If you are racist enough, if you go along with every extreme measure and piece of rhetoric, we will forget for the moment that you are Jews. You’ll get to be Honorary Whites. For now. And the neocons are dutifully getting into line once again, directing their vitriol at Mamdani and the fact that the Democrats are moving left on Israel in general. The Democrats are the real antisemites, see. Never mind the Nazis behind the curtain.
The question is now not whether the GOP will be fascist, the question is whether it will be merely fascist or national socialist.
This is seriously an awesome encapsulation of the state of play.
I just finished the outstanding Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, and this is where what Reagan began with his embrace of the then rising Religous Right. The path was paved for Trump, and the neocons, the new right, and the business interests felt they could control the beast they had leashed.
They were fooling themselves then, and are fooling themselves now.
The crass and vitriolic nature of social media anti-semitism (e.g. “It was promised to them 3000 years ago,” penny on sidewalk jokes etc) is both extremely disturbing and I think suggestive that this is not about Israel.