The Three Factions That make Up The New Republican Party
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
177.8977
Summary
In this episode, Simone and I talk about what it means to be a conservative in the 21st century, and why it s so hard to understand the modern Republican Party. We also talk about why the modern conservative party is so different from the pre-Trump conservative coalition, and how it s changed since then.
Transcript
00:00:00.640
Hello, Simone! I am excited to be here with you today.
00:00:04.000
Some days I just have, like, this breakthrough in my perception of reality
00:00:13.680
Like, I wish, people are like, why can't you only record the good, you know, the good episodes?
00:00:18.300
Like, do it one time, because it's really good.
00:00:19.800
And I'm like, that's, like, not how my brain works.
00:00:23.200
But occasionally I'll have an idea, and I'll be like, oh, wow, this is earth-shattering for me.
00:00:26.900
And I wish I could make, like, a better, a premium.
00:00:31.160
But this is definitely going to go in the best episodes category,
00:00:33.060
because I think I now understand something that was really difficult for me to understand before.
00:00:40.280
And it gives me a better vision of what the Republican Party is and where it's going.
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So, the thing that I didn't understand is, I saw this at NatCon, but I've seen this more broadly.
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When I talk to conservatives that are in the old conservative intellectual elite,
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these are the conservatives from the pre-Trump era sort of staffers, intellectual elite.
00:01:08.060
When I say intellectual elite, I mean the type of people who are at the think tanks,
00:01:10.760
the type of people who are being paid to be career conservatives.
00:01:14.300
They often come off to me as incredibly socialist, bordering on Marxist.
00:01:20.500
And, like, Lyman Stone's a great example of this.
00:01:27.180
I didn't understand why they identified it with conservatism.
00:01:29.640
Now, they're Christian socialists, and so I could kind of get that.
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I was like, well, maybe it's that because they're Christian,
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they don't feel that they'll be accepted in the progressive circle,
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so they just try to push their socialism in conservatist circles.
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And I also feel like my understanding of the conservative party transition
00:01:52.140
was the introduction of Trump and post-Trump has been diluted,
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or, like, not as good as I would like it to be.
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Like, I kind of get it, and I can put together, like,
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but a really tight explanation that made it easy for me to understand,
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like, how the policy positions flipped in the way that they flipped.
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So, I had this realization to me, and I was like,
00:02:30.160
But it is in understanding the conservative party
00:02:34.940
So, first, you had what I'm going to call GOP, Inc.
00:02:52.300
But, like, who actually made up its elite class,
00:02:56.580
and the class that it used to staff administrations?
00:03:07.660
These are people who had a strong religious framework for reality
00:03:10.760
and believed that it should be represented in the government
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like, the laws should be designed to force people to act
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Now, people today, if you're, like, Gen Alpha or Gen Z,
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you'll be, like, the people who ran large companies,
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people thought they were conservative historically.
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They didn't think they were the people staffing the White House.
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That was, like, obviously Mr. Burns was a conservative
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But now it's inconceivable to think of a corporation not being,
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Actually, here I'm reminded a lot of a character like Jack Donaghy
00:04:18.680
But in the time period when 30 Rock was filmed,
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it made sense to film him as a very conservative person
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if you went to a company like McKinsey or something like that,
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because I have a lot of friends who work at companies
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like McKinsey and Bain and everything like that,
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these companies wouldn't even hire someone like me.
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how perfect an avatar of this old institution Mitt Romney was.
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The perfect big business plus theocrat candidate.
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And that's why the transition to a new system was necessary.
00:05:12.660
Well, it is also true for like the billionaires
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and a lot of the old money families went that way.
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because my family is a lot of intergenerational wealth.
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which gives me invites to these sorts of things.
00:06:35.760
like your first-generation brain wealth, right?
00:07:02.640
And I would say this is the angry disenfranchised.
00:07:32.640
well, often they're disenfranchised for a reason
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and they're really thinking with their emotions.