A derrocada do Partido Republicano rumo ao caos não foi obra de Donald Trump. Após conter com sucesso o movimento trabalhista, a classe capitalista tornou-se desorganizada demais para frear o monstro que ela mesma criou.
Entrevista com
Paul Heideman
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| As elites empresariais destruíram Joe McCarthy em dois anos. Elas tentaram fazer o mesmo com Trump após o 6 de janeiro, mas recuaram já em março. O que mudou? (Aaron Schwartz / AFP via Getty Images) |
Entrevista conduzida por
Micah Uetricht
Todos os dias, milhões de americanos levantam da cama, acompanham o noticiário e fazem a si mesmos uma pergunta simples: como diabos o Partido Republicano perdeu o juízo de forma tão espetacular? O partido saiu completamente dos trilhos, sem demonstrar qualquer preocupação com a estabilidade político-econômica básica, com a realidade empírica — aquilo que vemos com nossos próprios olhos — ou com os princípios fundamentais da decência humana. Na última década, Donald Trump remodelou o Partido Republicano à sua própria imagem, criando um tipo de governo personalista de "homem forte" sem precedentes exatos na história americana.
No entanto, Paul Heideman argumenta que o estado deplorável e assustador do atual Partido Republicano não pode ser atribuído apenas a um homem estranho e terrível. Trata-se, na verdade, do resultado de várias características do sistema político dos EUA, algumas antigas e outras mais recentes. O livro de Heideman, Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos, sustenta que o sistema partidário fraco dos Estados Unidos desempenhou um papel fundamental na criação das condições para a atual desordem e nas formas específicas que essa desordem assumiu.
Para o podcast The Dig, da Jacobin Radio, o apresentador convidado e editor da Jacobin, Micah Uetricht, conversou com Paul Heideman sobre temas como: por que o setor empresarial conseguiu destruir Joseph McCarthy, mas não Trump; o modelo de "partido de serviços" que transformou ambas as legendas em redes de arrecadação de fundos; a reformulação da Câmara dos Representantes por Newt Gingrich com foco no dinheiro; a influência da indústria do tabaco no processo de impeachment de Bill Clinton; a revolta do Tea Party contra o resgate financeiro; e por que é improvável que a futura disputa pela sucessão de Trump torne o partido menos caótico. Você pode ouvir o episódio aqui.
Micah Uetricht
Você começa este livro comparando o senador Joseph McCarthy — que, obviamente, dá nome ao macarthismo — com Donald Trump. E o ponto central dessa comparação é que ambas as figuras, dentro do Partido Republicano, praticam um tipo de política reacionária e desvairada que, em muitos aspectos, situa-se bem à direita, mas que é excessivamente errática e caótica para o grande empresariado — segmento que, tipicamente, consideramos a base de apoio fundamental do Partido Republicano.
Paul Heideman
Trump e McCarthy têm muito em comum, pois ambos — como você mencionou — praticaram esse estilo demagógico de política de extrema-direita. Ao fazerem isso, acabaram ameaçando alguns dos interesses fundamentais do capital americano. No caso de McCarthy, isso se manifestou principalmente de duas formas. Em primeiro lugar, entre os anticomunistas mais sofisticados e os planejadores estatais dos Estados Unidos, sempre houve receio quanto aos métodos de McCarthy e a sensação de que ele poderia ir longe demais, chegando a desacreditar a própria causa anticomunista.
Não é que eles considerassem o anticomunismo algo ruim; muito pelo contrário. O receio era de que McCarthy pudesse prejudicar o anticomunismo ao exagerar na dose. Essa preocupação se intensificou drasticamente quando McCarthy começou a atacar o Exército — afinal, estávamos no início da década de 1950. Era o período em que o grande império americano do pós-guerra estava sendo consolidado, logo após a Segunda Guerra Mundial e no início da Guerra da Coreia.
Assim, atacar o Exército naquele momento e mergulhá-lo em um caos burocrático — consequência direta dessas investidas — foi algo que ultrapassou todos os limites para grande parte da elite empresarial americana, levando-a a se organizar contra ele. A famosa frase de Joseph Welch [“O senhor não tem decência, afinal?”], é claro, gerou um grande momento dramático, mas grande parte da ação real ocorria nos bastidores, em grupos como o Comitê para o Desenvolvimento Econômico (Committee for Economic Development) e o Conselho Empresarial (Business Council). Essas organizações, compostas essencialmente por CEOs americanos, entraram em ação contra McCarthy e começaram a mobilizar outros líderes empresariais para se oporem a ele, pressionando a Casa Blanca a repudiar McCarthy de fato. Dwight D. Eisenhower e McCarthy nunca foram próximos, mas esses grupos pressionaram a Casa Branca a adotar uma postura muito mais ativa contra as ações de McCarthy e a organizar, no Senado, a moção de censura que acabaria selando seu destino, deixando-o politicamente isolado e sem influência após sua aprovação.
No caso de Trump, o setor empresarial sempre lhe foi, em grande parte, hostil. Nas três eleições que disputou, recursos do empresariado fluíram massivamente para os Democratas, justamente pela oposição a Trump. Isso atingiu o auge ao final de seu primeiro mandato, logo após os eventos de 6 de janeiro, quando empresas responsáveis por cerca de um quarto do PIB americano anunciaram um boicote ao Partido Republicano em resposta àquele episódio. Houve, portanto, essa tentativa de discipliná-lo, mas o que chama a atenção — especialmente em comparação com o caso McCarthy — é a rapidez com que tudo isso desmoronou. Já em março de 2021, o boicote estava perdendo força; empresas começaram a emitir comunicados dizendo: "Bem, não temos um boicote generalizado a quem nega o resultado das eleições", e assim por diante.
E, muito rapidamente, elas praticamente retomaram a normalidade nas relações com o Partido Republicano sob a presidência de Joe Biden. Trata-se, portanto, de uma comparação que levanta a questão sobre o que mudou entre essas duas épocas: o momento em que o setor empresarial conseguiu disciplinar com sucesso um demagogo de direita, na década de 1950, e aquele em que realmente fracassou ao tentar fazer o mesmo, setenta anos depois.
Micah Uetricht
Vamos entrar nos detalhes do que o setor empresarial fez durante o governo Trump e como isso mudou ao longo do tempo. Mas, ao ouvir sua explicação — de que, após os eventos de 6 de janeiro, uma parcela enorme do capital americano tentou se mobilizar contra Trump e acabou fracassando a longo prazo —, percebemos uma realidade que nos faz cair na real; é algo que, provavelmente, muitos socialistas nem sequer imaginariam ser possível. Se uma parcela tão grande do capital quisesse que algo acontecesse, presumiríamos que eles fariam isso acontecer. E, no entanto, neste caso — no caso dessas duas presidências —, não foi isso o que ocorreu.
Paul Heideman
Acredito que um dos principais argumentos do meu livro é que a relação entre capital e política é, muitas vezes, mais complexa do que imaginamos na esquerda. Frequentemente, operamos com um tipo de modelo mental derivado do Manifesto Comunista: "o Estado é o comitê executivo da burguesia". Mas, na realidade, o grau de consenso entre os membros da burguesia, a capacidade de agirem de forma coordenada e todos esses aspectos variam consideravelmente ao longo da história, tanto dentro de um mesmo país quanto entre diferentes nações. Acho que isso é fundamental para entender o que aconteceu com o Partido Republicano e para compreender algumas das mudanças no nível de organização do capital nos Estados Unidos.
Micah Uetricht
A abordagem que você traz tem uma ênfase diferente daquela encontrada em muitos livros publicados nos últimos anos sobre a trajetória da direita. Houve muitas publicações recentes sobre a história intelectual do Partido Republicano (GOP) e da direita: como as ideias de pensadores de direita cada vez mais radicais ganharam espaço na corrente principal do partido, a adesão aberta à supremacia branca, ao nacionalismo branco, ao nacionalismo cristão, à xenofobia, e tudo mais. E o seu livro, decididamente, não trata disso.
Paul Heideman
Parte da razão é, como você disse, que esse tema já foi bastante explorado. Há muita discussão sobre a história intelectual e cultural da direita americana, e grande parte desse material é muito interessante. Mas o que eu achava que realmente faltava era uma análise do Partido Republicano enquanto instituição. Como ela opera enquanto instituição — como entidade burocrática e organizacional — e como se relaciona com outras instituições da vida americana, a exemplo das principais organizações de grupos empresariais, como a Business Roundtable e a Câmara de Comércio?
Parecia-me haver uma lacuna real na nossa compreensão da evolução da direita. O Partido Republicano pode ser considerado a instituição mais importante da direita americana. E, enquanto partido, achei que ele ainda não era muito bem compreendido, pois essa ênfase nas ideias não revela, de fato, o que está acontecendo com o partido em si. Algumas das figuras mais importantes do partido não são relevantes necessariamente por suas ideias. Newt Gingrich, por exemplo, certamente se via como um intelectual, mas, se analisarmos seu impacto no Partido Republicano, veremos que ele não é de ordem intelectual, e sim organizacional.
A força do Partido Republicano escondida no caos
Miquéias Uetricht
Um dos principais paradoxos da situação atual do Partido Republicano parece ser — como indica o subtítulo do seu livro — a transição de "partido dos negócios" para "partido do caos". De fato, há muito caos dentro do Partido Republicano. Vemos isso diariamente, e frequentemente observamos uma reação de júbilo por parte de liberais e esquerdistas ao testemunharem esse caos — uma alegria em ver um partido que causou tantos horrores, tanto internamente quanto no exterior, sendo dilacerado por essas disputas internas, pois presumem que isso é um mau presságio para o futuro do partido. Mas, para dizer o óbvio, esse caos não afundou o Partido Republicano (GOP). Os republicanos estão no comando agora. Então, como devemos interpretar o fato de que esse partido é tão caótico e, ainda assim, permanece no poder?
Há alguns aspectos a considerar. As divisões internas do partido, creio eu, tiveram consequências significativas ao longo da última década e meia, digamos assim. Por exemplo, as insurreições do Tea Party em várias campanhas para o Senado certamente custaram ao Partido Republicano o controle da Casa em certos momentos durante o governo Obama, pois lançaram candidatos que eram verdadeiros lunáticos para diversos cargos, contrariando a vontade da maior parte da liderança e dos quadros do partido. Portanto, acredito que o caos teve seus custos em certos momentos.
É justamente porque o capital tem sido tão dominante na história americana que ele não precisou ser tão organizado quanto o capital em outros lugares.
O que considero extraordinário, desde mais ou menos 2018, é a medida em que a personalidade autoritária de Donald Trump conseguiu superar grande parte desse caos, mantendo-o contido e, pelo menos em certa medida, direcionado conforme a sua vontade. Ao transformar a legenda no "partido de Trump", ele o manteve vivo e o fortaleceu em vários momentos. Por exemplo, Trump certamente se beneficiou em 2024 — assim como em 2016 — de sua imagem de empresário bem-sucedido e tudo o mais; acredito que isso realmente ajudou o Partido Republicano como um todo nas eleições. Acredito, sim, que há aspectos do caos no partido que o enfraquecem; no entanto, penso que, especialmente na era Trump, eles conseguiram manter a coesão e controlar a confusão a ponto de tornar o partido muito, muito mais forte. Acredito que, assim que Trump sair de cena — o que, de uma forma ou de outra, acontecerá em breve —, veremos esse caos transbordar de maneiras muito mais destrutivas para as perspectivas eleitorais do partido. Acho que podemos ver um retorno à dinâmica do Tea Party, com a vitória em primárias de candidatos que simplesmente não têm a menor chance em uma eleição geral.
Então, os dois fatores principais que seu livro aborda ao traçar o colapso do Partido Republicano são o enfraquecimento do partido — num contexto de sistema partidário já fragilizado — e a desorganização do capital americano, sobre a qual você acabou de falar. O que partidos políticos mais fortes em outras partes do mundo conseguem fazer que os partidos dos EUA não conseguem?
Paul Heideman
Talvez a maneira mais concreta de pensar nisso seja considerar que, nos Estados Unidos, os partidos não controlam diretamente quem aparece na cédula eleitoral sob sua legenda. E essa é, talvez, a principal função dos partidos políticos: produzir candidatos para disputar cargos. O fato de esse processo ocorrer nos EUA por meio do sistema de primárias significa que algo como a vitória de Zohran Mamdani pode acontecer, mesmo que a maior parte da cúpula do Partido Democrata em Nova York não quisesse de jeito nenhum que isso ocorresse. Da mesma forma, com a vitória de Trump em 2016: o Partido Republicano não queria que Trump vencesse, mas, devido à estrutura institucional da política americana, eles não tinham poder real para impedir isso.
Essa é uma dimensão fundamental da fraqueza partidária nos Estados Unidos. Se compararmos com o Partido Trabalhista (Labour Party) no Reino Unido, vemos que o partido, como instituição, decide quem concorrerá em qual distrito eleitoral, quem disputará onde, certo? É impossível alguém concorrer pela legenda do Partido Trabalhista contra a vontade da liderança do partido. Existem eleições internas para a liderança, mas, uma vez definida a direção, ela acaba controlando quem concorre onde. O partido é quem decide.
Nos Estados Unidos, o partido não decide. Na verdade, a legislação estadual na maioria dos estados determina que, para cargos em nível estadual, os partidos devem realizar primárias. Isso significa que o partido, como instituição, não controla essa função básica de decidir quem o representará em uma eleição. Isso explica, em parte, por que os partidos são mais fracos e significa que eles são vulneráveis a insurgências de uma maneira muito mais acentuada do que os partidos em outras partes do mundo.
Para continuar com o exemplo do Partido Trabalhista: obviamente, houve a candidatura de Jeremy Corbyn a primeiro-ministro pelo partido. Mas, após o fracasso dessa tentativa, a nova liderança partidária assumiu o comando e, essencialmente, expurgou Corbyn e o "corbynismo" da legenda. Isso não aconteceu com Bernie Sanders. Na verdade, o movimento dele parece continuar crescendo de várias maneiras mesmo após as derrotas, e não há muito que a liderança do Partido Democrata possa fazer a esse respeito.
Paul Heideman
Exatamente. Mesmo que quisessem expurgar completamente os apoiadores de Sanders do partido, não teriam como fazê-lo, pois não podem impedir alguém de concorrer utilizando a legenda partidária. E, se essa pessoa fizer um bom trabalho de organização, pode acabar vencendo. Isso torna os partidos americanos mais "gelatinosos" — creio que se possa dizer assim — do que os partidos em outros lugares. As fronteiras não são rígidas. Eles estão sempre vulneráveis à entrada de pessoas que lançam diferentes tipos de campanhas; e acho que isso é fundamental para entender também o que ocorreu no Partido Republicano nas últimas décadas: o surgimento de insurgentes dentro do partido desafiando a liderança, sem que esta disponha de recursos organizacionais internos capazes de detê-los.
A estratégia insurgente na política americana
Micah Uetricht
Você é alguém que milita na esquerda há muito tempo e participou desses debates sobre o que a esquerda deveria fazer dentro do Partido Democrata. É sensato fazermos isso ou não? Esses debates parecem mais resolvidos neste momento. A esquerda agora optou por essa espécie de estratégia insurgente dentro do partido — que mantém sua independência em relação à legenda e à sua liderança, mas atua majoritariamente no interior da própria estrutura partidária. Fico pensando se essa porosidade, característica geral dos partidos políticos americanos à qual você se refere, é justamente a razão pela qual essa estratégia faz sentido neste momento.
Paul Heideman
Acho que você tem toda razão, e acredito que esses dois fatos estão profundamente interligados. O sistema de primárias nos Estados Unidos gera partidos fracos e, ao mesmo tempo, cria um sistema partidário robusto, no qual as duas legendas estão extraordinariamente consolidadas em suas posições. No Reino Unido, o sistema partidário está, de certa forma, em processo de desintegração. Isso não acontece de jeito nenhum nos Estados Unidos, apesar de muitas previsões de que algo assim ocorreria. Uma das razões para isso é simples: se você quer desafiar a liderança do Partido Democrata, tem uma escolha a fazer: atuar como um terceiro partido ou agir dentro do próprio partido? Qual dessas opções parece oferecer mais chances de sucesso? Na última década, a conclusão ficou bastante clara: é possível obter um sucesso enorme ao desafiar o partido a partir de dentro.
Os insurgentes do Partido Republicano enfrentaram a mesma escolha e chegaram a uma conclusão semelhante durante a maior parte do século passado: se você quer levar o Partido Republicano mais para a direita, o caminho é disputar as primárias republicanas. Se você deseja um novo polo de direita na política americana, a estratégia é concorrer nas primárias do Partido Republicano e tentar puxar a legenda para mais à direita. Outro fator nessa equação é que os Estados Unidos possuem uma série de leis que tornam quase impossível concorrer como um terceiro partido. Vejamos, por exemplo, as restrições de acesso à cédula eleitoral: nos Estados Unidos, para ter seu nome incluído na cédula, é preciso, em alguns lugares, coletar assinaturas equivalentes a cerca de 5% do eleitorado de uma região. Na maioria dos outros países democráticos, leis desse tipo são consideradas autoritárias. Elas são explicitamente proibidas pela União Europeia.
Além dessas leis de acesso à cédula, há o fato de que as eleições nos Estados Unidos são financiadas por recursos privados; isso significa que, se você quiser arrecadar fundos para concorrer a um cargo — e quiser fazê-lo como candidato de um terceiro partido —, boa sorte! Os recursos disponíveis para quem disputa as primárias do Partido Democrata — em termos de arrecadação de fundos e tudo o mais — são imensos; basta pensar em ferramentas como o ActBlue e no acesso a plataformas de arrecadação desse tipo.
Os mecanismos que permitem a candidatos insurgentes superar as vantagens do grande capital estão, eles próprios, parcialmente vinculados à disputa das primárias do Partido Democrata. Acredito, de fato, que a fragilidade dos partidos americanos — e a força correspondente do sistema partidário americano — exerce uma influência decisiva no que levou a esquerda americana, na última década, a optar majoritariamente (como você mencionou) pelo caminho de realizar campanhas insurgentes dentro do Partido Democrata.
A ascensão do sistema partidário moderno
Micah Uetricht
Outro elemento desse sistema partidário fraco — e da crescente fragilidade de ambos os partidos — é, na verdade, o próprio processo pelo qual os partidos passaram a ter coerência ideológica; algo que não ocorria durante a maior parte da história política americana. Isso está relacionado ao realinhamento partidário, que ganha força real na era do New Deal. Você poderia falar sobre o desenvolvimento da coerência ideológica nos partidos Republicano e Democrata e por que isso é importante para entender o Partido Republicano de hoje?
Paul Heideman
Durante a maior parte da história americana, os partidos políticos não foram, de fato, organizações coesas que promoviam uma visão de mundo ideológica específica. Em vez disso, eram coalizões de diferentes elites regionais que se uniam por interesses comuns e na tentativa de encontrar um programa compartilhado, mas sem estarem vinculadas a qualquer visão de mundo mais abrangente.
Uma grande exceção a isso é, naturalmente, o Partido Republicano da época da Guerra Civil, unido por uma visão ideológica antiescravagista e de defesa do trabalho livre. No entanto, após o partido abandonar a Reconstrução, ele se afasta dessa postura, e observa-se um retorno a uma política mais desprovida de ideologia. Por volta de 1900, muitos observadores da política americana comentavam: "Os partidos não acreditam realmente em nada". Max Weber, o cientista social prussiano, observava do outro lado do Atlântico e dizia: "Nos Estados Unidos, os partidos são apenas bandos de caçadores de cargos. São apenas gangues rivais. Não é como se estivessem unidos por diferentes interpretações da Constituição, grandes visões ideológicas ou algo do gênero". Esse padrão perdurou até o New Deal. Ao mesmo tempo, os partidos eram incrivelmente fortes do ponto de vista organizacional durante a maior parte do século XIX e início do século XX.
Votar, no final do século XIX, era uma espécie de mistura entre o Carnaval (Mardi Gras) e uma briga de gangues: os partidos organizavam desfiles gigantescos para levar as pessoas às urnas. As taxas de participação nas eleições desses anos ultrapassavam 70% ou 80%. Portanto, os partidos eram extremamente fortes organizacionalmente, embora ideologicamente indistintos. O New Deal inicia um processo de transformação desse cenário, com a criação de um polo social-democrata na política americana. Ao mesmo tempo, essa configuração já nasceu com uma deformação congênita, pois, embora os Democratas representassem a social-democracia nos Estados Unidos — sendo vistos pelos socialistas europeus como um modelo a seguir, com o New Deal —, o partido era também o partido das leis de segregação racial conhecidas como Jim Crow. Assim, ao longo da década de 1930, ficou cada vez mais claro que o Partido Democrata havia se tornado uma amálgama instável que unia os setores mais progressistas do país — os liberais do Norte, ou seja, a ala mais à esquerda da política convencional — aos mais reacionários: os Dixiecrats do Sul segregacionista.
Dessa forma, os trinta anos seguintes foram marcados, dentro do Partido Democrata, por tentativas de resolver essa contradição inerente à coalizão, ou de preservá-la e estabilizá-la. Esse ciclo chega ao fim, basicamente, na década de 1960, com a aprovação da Lei de Direitos de Voto (Voting Rights Act), que derrubou o sistema Jim Crow no Sul e, simultaneamente, desencadeou o processo de realinhamento do eleitorado branco sulista.
Um processo paralelo também ocorria no Partido Republicano naquela época. Havia uma ala significativa do partido que era, de fato, bastante liberal em certos aspectos — uma tradição que remontava a Theodore Roosevelt e aos progressistas do movimento Bull Moose. Assim, republicanos do Oeste, nas décadas de 1910 e 1920, frequentemente defendiam pautas bastante progressistas. Mais tarde, surgiram figuras como Earl Warren — governador da Califórnia e, posteriormente, presidente da Suprema Corte (a "Corte Warren") — e Thomas Dewey, governador de Nova York. Eram republicanos liberais que apoiavam as instituições criadas pelo New Deal, defendendo a posição de que, embora não desejassem uma grande expansão daquelas políticas, também não queriam revertê-las.
Depois de 1994, de repente, nada mais favorece os Democratas e tudo favorece os Republicanos.
E, da década de 1930 à de 1960, essa é a disputa que ocorre dentro do Partido Republicano: "Somos o partido que busca reverter o New Deal?" ou "Somos o partido que apenas quer impedir que ele cresça ainda mais?". De certa forma, a vitória de Barry Goldwater nos anos 1960 marca o triunfo da ala que defendia a reversão. Richard Nixon representa uma espécie de interregno nesse processo, mas essa ala acaba vencendo de fato — e essa vitória é, naturalmente, consolidada quando Ronald Reagan conquista a presidência na década de 1980.
Em 1932, cerca de 70% dos negros americanos votaram em Herbert Hoover. Por quê? Porque ele era republicano. Era o partido de Abraham Lincoln. Era em quem os negros americanos do Norte — onde podiam votar — vinham depositando seus votos desde a Guerra Civil. Em 1936, dois terços dos negros americanos votaram em Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Essa é uma das maiores mudanças de voto na história dos Estados Unidos. E acontece em quatro anos, com uma rapidez extraordinária. Por quê? Porque o New Deal trouxe enormes benefícios para os negros americanos.
A consolidação dos dois partidos
Micah Uetricht
Como se desenrola essa consolidação da coerência dos dois partidos após a conclusão do processo de realinhamento, no final da década de 1960? E qual é a relação disso com a fragilidade partidária — tema recorrente em seu livro — da qual a década de 1970 é um período-chave?
Paul Heideman
Bem, em ambos os partidos existem pessoas que o cientista político Sam Rosenfeld chama de "polarizadores": aqueles que dizem "Não, não, não, queremos que os partidos sejam coerentes. Essa é a luta que estamos travando". E isso ocorre nos dois partidos, embora de maneiras diferentes. No Partido Democrata, uma grande batalha é travada contra o critério de antiguidade no Congresso, pois esses democratas do Sul governam verdadeiras ditaduras de partido único; consequentemente, eles acumulam a maior antiguidade, já que praticamente nunca perdem uma eleição. Os liberais do Norte que desejavam aprovar legislação sobre direitos civis perceberam que, para isso, precisavam remover os Dixiecrats (democratas conservadores do Sul) dos cargos de liderança. E, para tanto, tinham de acabar com o critério de antiguidade.
A luta para eliminar o princípio da antiguidade foi intensa nas décadas de 1950 e 1960, resultando na sua substituição por uma liderança parlamentar mais forte. Hoje, a composição das comissões depende das decisões da liderança do Congresso — ou seja, do que o líder da maioria ou o líder da minoria realmente deseja. Pode-se dizer que isso fortalece a liderança partidária, e foi exatamente assim que a mudança foi percebida na época. No entanto, na década de 1970, esse processo coincidiu com um aumento vertiginoso nos custos das campanhas, à medida que estas passaram a adotar a publicidade em rádio e televisão como principal meio de divulgação.
Antes da década de 1970, o elemento mais importante das campanhas era o capital humano: voluntários e militantes partidários. Eram eles que garantiam as vitórias eleitorais. A partir da década de 1970, o foco mudou para a publicidade, acarretando um aumento colossal nos custos. O dinheiro passou a ser o recurso mais importante. Essa mudança, somada à abordagem mais aberta na escolha das lideranças partidárias, criou um cenário que se consolidou plenamente na década de 1990. Gingrich foi o pioneiro nessa transformação, estabelecendo que quem arrecadasse mais recursos se tornaria, na prática, o líder do partido.
A liderança de Nancy Pelosi à frente dos democratas na Câmara baseou-se, em grande parte, em seu sucesso extraordinário na arrecadação de fundos. Ela angariou e redistribuiu quantias vultosas de dinheiro por todo o partido. Assim, o esforço para criar um partido mais coeso — eliminando o critério de antiguidade e afastando os Dixiecrats — interagiu com as novas dinâmicas de financiamento de campanha, resultando em uma situação em que o dinheiro passou a ditar as regras dentro do partido.
Na verdade, o partido como instituição autônoma, capaz de tomar suas próprias decisões, acabou enfraquecido. Isso porque, agora, o que acontece é simplesmente o que os financiadores decidem. Aquele que recebe o dinheiro deles é quem se torna o líder. No Partido Republicano, observa-se uma dinâmica muito diferente, porém análoga: após a derrota de Goldwater, houve uma grande disputa interna sobre qual rumo o partido deveria tomar.
Parte dessa disputa girou em torno de quem assumiria a presidência do Comitê Nacional Republicano. Acabaram indicando um candidato de consenso cuja visão era: "Olha, a função do partido não é tomar partido em disputas ideológicas internas". A função é prestar serviços a quem quer que fosse o candidato escolhido ao final. Esse modelo ficou conhecido como "modelo de serviço" na política.
Essa indicação surgiu, portanto, de um impasse no partido. Goldwater havia sido derrotado. Havia muitos republicanos liberais e moderados que queriam se livrar de Goldwater, mas não tinham força suficiente para expulsar a ala de direita do partido. Assim, surgiu essa concepção de partido voltado à prestação de serviços, o que, novamente, enfraqueceu a legenda. O partido deixou de decidir questões de políticas públicas, de estratégia política ou algo do gênero; passou a apenas prestar serviços aos candidatos. Os Democratas acabaram copiando esse modelo dos Republicanos, e ambos os partidos adotaram esse formato de "partido de serviços" — modelo que prevalece até hoje, no qual os partidos funcionam como redes de prestadores de serviços de campanha e canais por onde flui o dinheiro.
É isso que o partido, enquanto instituição, realmente é hoje. Ele não toma decisões sobre políticas públicas ou estratégia política.
Micah Uetricht
You have a subheading in one of your chapters called “Parties as Bit Players,” which is a sort of astonishing phrase to think about. The idea that parties themselves matter less and less at this moment is probably counterintuitive for many people.
But this is in many ways a result of the flood of big money into politics, right? Most people listening to this podcast understand the distorting effect of big money in politics at the most basic level, that big money and special interests can throw their money around at will to get their will enacted through legislation and enforcement, or lack thereof, instead of what benefits the common good.
And that’s true, but also the story you’re telling here is one in which big-money institutions like super PACs essentially come to supplant the party itself. Then the party leaderships are increasingly those who can wrangle the most money, and those who are able to fundraise significant amounts are those who get leadership positions in the parties.
And even disruptive candidates like Trump, who are able to raise large amounts of money, can essentially flip the bird to party elites. Is that correct?
Paul Heideman
Yes, and the 2024 election is actually a perfect example of this. The 2024 election was the first time a major party’s campaign has been primarily funded by super PACs rather than through the candidate committee that is registered with the Federal Election Commission and associated with the party.
Most of Trump’s money didn’t flow through his official candidate committee. It flowed through super PACs like Elon Musk’s super PAC or various other groups. And so most of the money isn’t even going through the party now. Now most of the money is going outside of the party as well.
And so on questions about campaign strategy, the party increasingly doesn’t have a major say over it. Elon Musk spends $250 million; he can decide what the main public-relations, advertising, and geographic focus of the campaign is going to be.
So yeah, I wrote that section before the election, but parties are increasingly becoming bit players.
Why American Capital Never Had to Organize
Micah Uetricht
Let’s talk about the disorganization of big business. Given the power of the American capitalist class as a whole, the record levels of economic inequality, the desiccation of the American welfare state, the attacks on the labor movement that have basically left it on life support, all the things that we know about the state of corporate power and working-class weakness in the United States today, I always assumed that it was a given that capital would be able to organize and advocate on its own behalf.
But this is actually, in your telling, not the case throughout postwar American history up to the present. In fact, there are only a few moments in that period, most notably in the 1970s, in which capital does actually organize to defend and advocate for itself as a class, and you say that that has always been in response to worker organizing.
So lay out this seemingly paradoxical situation of unprecedented corporate power and economic inequality with weak capitalist organizing.
Paul Heideman
I think the way to think about it is that it is precisely because capital has been so dominant in American history that it hasn’t needed to be as organized as capital elsewhere.
In the United States, as listeners will know, movements of the Left have generally been weaker, unions have been weaker and smaller than elsewhere. The United States has never produced an electorally viable socialist party, unlike most of the rest of Western Europe. All of that has meant that capital in the United States has not faced the same scale of challenges as elsewhere, and, because of that, capital hasn’t really needed to organize on the same scale as elsewhere.
They’ve —
Micah Uetricht
Had it too easy.
Paul Heideman
They’ve had it too easy. Exactly. They haven’t been disciplined. It’s a little bit like a monopolist in the market. Monopolists don’t face the discipline of competition, and so they can afford to be wasteful in various ways and slothful.
American capital is much the same. They don’t face the political competition of a highly organized and combative working class outside of a few really specific moments. And so going back to the early twentieth century, the weakness of American labor has meant that capital can get what it wants for the most part without really needing to be highly organized.
They can defeat their workers, they can get the policy they want without these big class-wide organizations of the kind that you really see emerging in force in Western Europe after World War II, when you have socialist parties or labor parties at least on the verge of power in much of Western Europe.
You have these labor movements that are much, much bigger than in the United States. In those countries, capital needed to figure out what its class-wide demands for contesting with labor as a class were going to be. Not what individual businesses might want here or there, but how they can organize the class as a whole to make sure that they win what were almost existential battles at the time.
In the United States, capital has really not faced those kinds of stakes most of the time, and so the organization of capital has correspondingly been more sectional and partial. Businesses has often been more focused on their narrow interests as individual firms or industries rather than as a class. They’ve been focused on what they can get for themselves, not what they can all agree is needed vis-à-vis labor.
Micah Uetricht
You know, in publishing, in Jacobin, I’m often left feeling like a particularly vulgar Marxist most of the time, because the conclusion to many things is like, “Yeah, because we don’t have an organized working class, this is why XYZ bad thing is happening.” And so when I got to this part of the book, I was like, oh, yet again . . .
Actually, because of the weakness of American organized labor, it’s produced the weakness of the American capitalist class in a way, in its ability to mobilize and advocate for itself as an entire class. We actually can blame that weakness on the weakness of organized labor. Just chalk another thing up to the weakness of organized labor.
Paul Heideman
If you wanted to boil the book down to the essence, it would be that American exceptionalism and a weak American working class are ultimately responsible for the insanity of the Republican Party today.
Micah Uetricht
Right. What does this lack of capitalist organizing as a class mean for American capitalism in the longer term?
Surely this must have some negative effect for capitalist profit-making, for the shape of the economy as a whole. If other countries have more coherent business-class mobilization in defense of their interests, what are they getting for their capitalists that American capitalists are not getting because they’re not mobilizing in that same way?
Paul Heideman
I think it’s helpful to think about the post–World War II United States to understand this. In the postwar United States, there were a number of prominent organizations of American business. There was the Committee for Economic Development, which I mentioned earlier. There was the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce.
And essentially, the Committee for Economic Development was an organization of some of the CEOs of a lot of the biggest, most profitable corporations in the United States, the really big multinational companies that were emerging or reaching new heights after World War II.
And these were companies that thought, “Okay, the New Deal has been established. We don’t want it to go further, but we also don’t think it’s worth the fight of trying to roll it back. We think that could be chaotic, messy, and really could cost us more than it’s worth. So we really don’t want that.”
Agora, com Trump, é cada um por si. Todas as empresas estão tentando fechar seus próprios acordos, em vez de organizar qualquer tipo de agenda comum.
So they represented the moderate wing of capital. The Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers were interlinked with the John Birch Society in these years, and they were the ones who were like, “No, the New Deal is communism. We need to roll it back. And in fact, Committee for Economic Development, you guys are probably communists too if you don’t want to roll it back.”
And the Committee for Economic Development was very politically powerful in these years. So again, it’s not that capital lacked influence. It’s just that that influence was not representing capital as a class, but was mostly representing the biggest firms, the most powerful firms, and what they wanted.
In Europe, capital is organized, but their power is more constrained, because they’re contending with a very powerful labor movement, with very powerful electoral socialist movements. And so they have to be organized to kind of tread water, in some sense.
In the United States, they’re so completely dominant that they’re able to get along quite well without any kind of class-wide perspective, and sometimes that means that some small capitalists are losers. So in the post–World War II era, when free trade is really in the ascendance in the United States and big capital loves free trade, well, a lot of small and medium-sized capital loses out from that.
And that was actually a major force in the Goldwater campaign. The Goldwater campaign represented an eruption of protectionism from small and medium-sized businesses who were defecting from the free trade consensus. So in that sense, the fact that there’s not a class-wide perspective within capital means that the less powerful bits of capital might get the shaft a little harder here than elsewhere, because there’s not a class-wide movement trying to create a consensual political agenda.
Instead the big capitalists are often able to set the agenda.
Gingrich Builds the Money Machine
Micah Uetricht
You say in the book that Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution was in many ways actually more important than the party’s transformation under Ronald Reagan. And in fact, Gingrich waged a kind of war against Reagan.
He insisted that Reagan was nowhere near conservative enough. Gingrich is a figure who often comes up in recent accounts of the party and its trajectory, but more often to recount how he helped bring about a more bellicose GOP, one that was rhetorically more reactionary and more openly obstructionist.
And all of that is true, and you write about that a little in the book. But you also write that
[t]he late 1990s were a crucial moment during which the Republican Party broke violently with the preferences of most of big business in the waging of its long-running war against Bill Clinton. At this moment, the party was not merely becoming more conservative. Rather, its pursuit of conservative partisan warfare against a president who had cannily built a massive corporate coalition behind his administration pointed towards a new relationship between the GOP and many of the boardrooms of corporate America.
So central to this kind of transformation is the role of big money, and Newt Gingrich played a really key role in changing how big money affected politics within the Republican Party.
Can you talk about what he rolled out in his position as speaker in the 1990s?
Paul Heideman
As you said, Gingrich comes into Congress, he’s very ambitious. He wants to distinguish himself, and there are two avenues for him. First, he launches this campaign against the Democrats, constantly accusing them of ethics violations and things like that, not really directly challenging them on policy so much, but this warfare of being like “They’re cheating, they’re not doing things right,” all of that kind of stuff.
And his star rises with that. At the same time, he’s really going after the Reagan administration quite a bit for not being right-wing enough, not being confrontational enough with the USSR, not cutting the welfare state enough. So really, from Gingrich’s perspective, the whole problem with Reagan is that there never was a Reagan revolution, right?
Gingrich would say there wasn’t a revolution. We actually still need that revolution to happen. But the thing that’s really decisive for him is that he grasps the new importance of money in politics in a way that almost no one else did. And so, in the mid and late 1980s, Gingrich builds this fundraising network inside of the GOP that is separate from the official party.
He uses a PAC that he controls to do this, that is basically about hooking Republican politicians up with potential funders all over the country. This apparatus becomes really central to the Republicans who are elected into Congress in 1988, 1990, and 1992. All of them come to really depend on this redistribution of money that is all going through Gingrich and happening through his PAC in various ways.
Some political scientists call it a shadow National Republican Congressional Committee. That’s the scale that it was operating at. And what Gingrich figured out is that if he can be the man that the money flows through, then he can win leadership. And this is what propels him to leadership within the House Republicans.
And really, Gingrich was very much an insurgent in this respect, in that the Democrats had controlled the House for fifty years. Republicans in the House were used to being in the minority. They were not used to fighting hard, because what on earth was the point? And so Gingrich’s ascent was really a contested one, and it was powered by money the whole way.
Then when Gingrich wins the House majority in 1994 in the Republican revolution, he institutionalizes this fundraising model throughout the party. Now all Republican House members are required to fundraise. They have quotas that they need to meet. And leadership of House committees, membership of House committees now come with fundraising requirements.
So by the end of the 1990s, there are posted prices for membership on various committees. If you want to get a plum House committee assignment, you have to raise so many hundreds of thousands of dollars and redistribute them throughout the party. Gingrich really restructures the entire House Republican Party around fundraising.
It propels his leadership and totally transforms the party. It’s very quickly copied by the Democrats, and then Republicans and Democrats in the Senate as well. And it really amounts to a profound transformation of how the party operated.
Micah Uetricht
You describe the cycle within the Republican Party throughout recent history of a group of radicals with a kind of burn-it-all-down reactionary attitude rising to prominence in the party, successfully waging war on the existing party elites, becoming the new party leaders themselves only to then be subject to a new group of radicals who enter the scene and then start the cycle all over again.
Obviously, Gingrich wasn’t the first right-wing radical on the American political scene, but he was wildly successful in winning his leadership position and really changing the party in many key ways. So can we credit him with kicking off these cycles of challenges to party leadership from the right that have produced the party of chaos that we have today?
Paul Heideman
Yeah, I think so. I think he is, more than anyone else, the kind of person who inaugurates this dynamic. And the representatives in the House that were really close to Gingrich, there’s a reputation, like the class of 1994. The freshmen of 1994, as they were called, the people who come in on the back of the Gingrich revolution, are known as being out of control in the House.
There’s a great book about them that goes into all the craziness, and how many of them really turned on Gingrich himself quite quickly and were willing to give him the shiv. So I do think Gingrich is the one who sets this kind of pattern in motion, and I think that the whole fundraising model that he puts in enables his own displacement.
Because it means, okay, now Gingrich is the speaker of the House. Well, if you can raise money, you can challenge Newt Gingrich. And in some ways, that’s what Tom DeLay does. Now, Tom DeLay eventually works with Gingrich, but he was not one of Gingrich’s guys. He was not who Gingrich wanted.
He rises in the House by being a great fundraiser and forces Gingrich to accept him as part of his leadership team.
Micah Uetricht
You have a very interesting section in the book on the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Before we get to that, from Gingrich assuming his leadership role in the House up to the impeachment, how would you characterize what Gingrich had achieved in the party, with relation to big money and the need for this kind of fundraising but also to the party’s relationship to capital as a class?
Paul Heideman
I think Gingrich accomplished quite a bit in that regard. Just in winning the House, he made it so that business was now free to donate way more money to Republicans. When Democrats always had the House, business needed to donate a good amount to Democrats because they’ were going to be the incumbents, and they’re who you want access to.
Now that Republicans ruled the roost, the money could really start flowing to Republicans in a huge way. And Gingrich’s agenda in the House was one that had a huge amount of support from business. Things like welfare reform, which low-wage employers across the country absolutely loved, because it basically pushed a lot of poor women into the labor market whom welfare had allowed to stay out of it to varying degrees.
That was loved by business. The war against Bill Clinton’s health care reform, which is not really remembered that much today, but was really much more radical than Obamacare, actually — the war against that, business really supported very, very strongly. And Gingrich was an important leader of that.
In fact, even Gingrich’s government shutdowns to try and force budget cuts and austerity in 1995 and early 1996, even that business was supporting, even as government shutdowns can be quite chaotic and costly for business. But if you read the Chamber of Commerce’s magazine during and after the shutdowns, they’re like, “The Republicans fought a great fight on this. It’s really important that they took this stand even if they lost.”
Uma lição da primeira administração Trump é que Trump é o único que sai vivo. A carreira de todos os outros é destruída por isso.
So business was really behind the Gingrich agenda. Now, the fact that Gingrich loses the government shutdown fight and Clinton wins, that tarnishes his star quite a bit. And his reputation in the country as a whole really goes down as he’s kind of tarred as someone who wants to slash the social safety net and throw old people and children to the wolves.
So Gingrich is hurt by that. At the same time, Clinton, going into 1996 and his second term, moves quite sharply to the right and embraces a whole host of policies that are extraordinarily friendly to business, from telecommunications reform, which loosens ownership regulations — and is why we have things like Fox News today — to really wholehearted support for free trade and globalization.
Even as Gingrich has done quite a bit that business loves, he’s lost this really central fight, and at the same time, Clinton is moving to the right and winning huge support from business in doing so. And so the fight over Clinton’s second-term impeachment happens at a time when business was actually really happy with the Clinton administration and saw the Clinton administration as a really reliable friend of their agenda.
Clinton in his second term is talking about privatizing Social Security, which is a huge giveaway to the financial services industry, because now they would manage all of these accounts and charge fees for them, etc. So yeah, business loved Bill Clinton in his second term, and that’s why they looked with some trepidation at the Republican effort to impeach him.
Impeachment had kind of started for Richard Nixon. Andrew Johnson had been impeached. The effort to impeach Bill Clinton did not seem on the same scale, and business was really not convinced that it was worth it. If you read the business press at the time, they say, “Look, this is going to crowd out other things we want. We’re not going to be able to get our agenda passed. This is going to slow everything down, muck everything up.”
And that’s exactly what happened. When Clinton starts to be impeached, his support for Social Security privatization disappears, because he needs the liberal Democrats to defend him and knows they’re not going to be on board for that in the slightest.
So business was absolutely right about the effect of impeachment on their agenda.
Micah Uetricht
This is the source of the meme that floats around on the Left sometimes that Monica Lewinsky saved the country from Social Security privatization.
Paul Heideman
Exactly.
Big Tobacco and the Clinton Impeachment
Micah Uetricht
You make an argument in your section on impeachment that I’ve never heard before but that fits perfectly into your larger thesis about capital’s inability to get its will carried out in politics as a class, but individual industries or even sometimes individual corporations within the capitalist class being able to push their agendas and get them through.
You make this case about the tobacco industry’s centrality to the impeachment process. So explain the case. What did Big Tobacco have to do with Clinton’s impeachment?
Paul Heideman
Tobacco prior to the 1990s was a bipartisan industry that donated to both Democrats and Republicans.
There are plenty of Southern Democrats who represented tobacco districts. It was not a super political industry. At the same time, it’s important to remember it was a massive industry. Some of the biggest companies in the country were the tobacco companies.
So it was really a huge, huge industry in the 1990s. What Clinton did to piss them off was that he allowed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to classify nicotine as a drug that needed regulation under their auspices. Prior to that, nicotine was not regulated as a drug. And Clinton’s surgeon general, who actually had been appointed by George H. W. Bush, really made this push, showing Clinton all of these papers and all of this research demonstrating what the tobacco industry knew about the addictiveness of nicotine as well as their efforts to market it to children, things like that. And when Clinton read this stuff, he said, “I wanted to kill them. I just wanted to kill the tobacco companies.”
After he gave the FDA the go-ahead to classify nicotine as an addictive chemical, they wanted to kill him too. And if you look at donations from the tobacco industry after 1994, suddenly nothing is going to Democrats and everything is going to Republicans.
There’s this massive shift. So in Bill Clinton’s second term, if the question is who in the business community was really unhappy with Bill Clinton’s performance, the answer is the tobacco industry. Then if you actually look a little more closely at the impeachment proceedings, suddenly you see tobacco’s footprint and fingerprints absolutely everywhere.
Kenneth Starr, who was the special counsel who investigated Clinton, is working representing tobacco companies as an attorney at the same time that he is special counsel. He’s actively representing tobacco companies in lawsuits. A number of the other attorneys who worked investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair were also actively representing tobacco clients at the time.
The person who pushed it in the House most strenuously was Tom DeLay, representative from Texas. DeLay was one of the biggest recipients of tobacco money in Congress at the time. And perhaps most importantly, the decision to appoint Ken Starr was taken by judges who were appointed to a panel by senators from North Carolina.
There’s a lunch with the Republican senators from North Carolina the day before this crucial panel to appoint the independent counsel convenes, in which it sure seems like they’re saying, “We want to appoint someone who’s going to go get Clinton.”
So you see the tobacco industry just absolutely everywhere in the impeachment proceedings. They’re funding the people who are really going after Clinton, and they’re also the part of American capital that, in the late 1990s at least, had the most reason to want to see Clinton removed from office.
Micah Uetricht
I hear what you’re saying about tobacco being one of the largest industries in the United States, but it’s not like tobacco was like Wall Street.
It’s not like tobacco is at the heart of the functioning of the entire American financial system. If you are a Wall Streeter who’s very happy with what Bill Clinton is doing for you and the rest of the finance industry, you must have been tearing your hair out to watch this sort of rump, declining capitalist industry setting on fire the good thing that you had going for your industry and for so much of the rest of the capitalist class.
You’re just like, “Why is this happening? And why are we not able to stop this from happening?”
Paul Heideman
Yeah, I think that’s exactly the sentiment from them. And yes, in the business press, some of them are like, “Well, this really sucks for us” and “This circus is totally a distraction from the important work we want to get done, like privatizing Social Security and making sure we have free trade with China.”
But since the 1970s, the ability of capital to act as a class and produce this kind of class-wide understanding and class-wide action in defense of their interests had really gone down. And so you have this situation where you have a lot of firms that have a diffuse interest in impeachment not happening, and then you have this group of firms that have a very intense, concentrated interest in impeachment happening.
And when you don’t have well-developed institutions that build collective action, that concentrated, intense interest will beat the diffuse kind of widespread interest every time.
Micah Uetricht
It’s an example of what can happen when you take on an industry like tobacco and do not liquidate it but really severely hurt it.
And as I’m saying this, I’m thinking of what other industries there are that would be top of the line for us to similarly try to liquidate today, like the fossil fuel industry. Or —
Paul Heideman
Crypto.
Micah Uetricht
Or crypto. Especially in the context of this weak system in which capital can’t act as a class, you’re essentially vulnerable to any kind of industry that is angered at the attacks on it and is able to inflict a significant amount of damage to whomever has done the damage to the industry.
And this doesn’t seem sustainable. You can just do this ad infinitum across the political system, across the economy. This truly is chaotic stuff here.
Paul Heideman
There’s unfortunately a long history in the United States of individual firms or individual industries being able to really shape American politics in decisive ways, going back to the way that the silver mines took over the Populist Party in the 1890s and reduced a radical-populist economic program to nothing but free silver coinage, which would of course be a huge boon to the silver miners.
So yeah, it’s dispiriting just how dominant capital has often been in American history and how that’s allowed even small pieces of it to exert their agenda in massive ways.
George W. Bush, Party Builder
Micah Uetricht
You make an argument about our first Republican president of the twenty-first century that is not heard often on this podcast, and that is George W. Bush is underrated, at least as a party builder.
You make the case that we think of W as this bumbling guy whose puppet masters like Dick Cheney are the ones who were really pulling the strings, but actually he’s underrated in terms of what he was able to accomplish within the Republican Party, at least at the beginning of his administration; how he was able to bring some of these forces, the Gingrichian type forces, into the coalition with him while also not letting the yahoos fully take over, and also to reach a kind of a real modus vivendi with capital in a way that, certainly in the period that we were just talking about, during the Clinton administration, was not happening within the Republican Party.
So lay out that case for George W. Bush, the effective Republican party builder.
Paul Heideman
To appreciate this, I think it’s helpful to think about what was going on with the Republican Party in the 1990s. On the one hand, you have the real failure of Gingrichism. Gingrich ends up being quite bad for the Republican Party. Bob Dole adopts much of Gingrich’s agenda in 1996 and loses.
After the debacle of impeachment, the Republican Party had this image of being kind of fanatical, priggish, and not very oriented on what most Americans thought were the most important problems. And George W. Bush comes to be seen as an alternative to all of this. The slogan that he runs on, “Compassionate Conservatism,” was crafted to signify that this is not Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party anymore.
He had been a successful governor of Texas, often working in a very bipartisan manner with Democrats. He had really spurned the xenophobia that was surfacing in the Republican Party at the time. And actually when he was reelected in Texas, I think in 1998, he won a majority of Latino votes in Texas.
So a lot of Republican Party leaders are looking at this and being like, “This guy can be the future of the party. He’s allowing us to rebrand, and he can win with Latinos,” after this rise in Republican xenophobia had really driven them away. At the same time, however, Bush is an evangelical Christian who speaks the language of the Republican right; he’s very, very comfortable talking with them about abortion, things like that.
And so Bush manages to achieve this kind of unity between two wings of the party, his father’s corporate-moderate wing and the Gingrich wing with which it had really been at war for much of the 1990s. He’s able to bring them together in a way that seems successful and durable. During his first term, people like Karl Rove were talking about a permanent Republican majority under the Bush model, that we’re going to get thirty years of Republican dominance, with George W. Bush’s politics as the foundation of it. So I do think that Bush manages to create this unity in the party, and then, after 9/11, the project of American imperialism cements that even further, because both wings of the party were in complete agreement on the need to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
Bush really does achieve something impressive in the early 2000s in hammering out this kind of peace accord in the party. And at the same time, what he’s doing is bringing business back to the Republicans, despite the alienation of the late 1990s, with an agenda of tax cuts, deregulations, attacks on workplace organization, etc, and assembles this absolutely massive corporate coalition behind him in 2000 and 2004.
And the Democrats are really reduced to begging for scraps from groups like trial lawyers, who are the only source of big money for Democrats in much of this period.
Micah Uetricht
And he and the party are effectively acting more like the coherers of the capitalist class as a class throughout, at least through the first term, and into the second term, too.
But there’s not that kind of dynamic of allowing rogue sections of the capitalist class to dominate things in the way that you’re arguing the tobacco industry did during the Clinton impeachment. They’re playing that more grown-up role of acting as referee for the capitalist class as a whole.
Paul Heideman
Yeah, and there are two places where you really see this dynamic. The first is Bush’s big tax cut. He had campaigned on a massive tax cut. There was a government surplus, a budget surplus at the time, and Bush’s line was that “We should have a huge tax cut.” And at the start of his administration, he gathers all of these CEOs in a room and says, “You guys actually aren’t getting anything from this tax cut. All of it is going to personal tax cuts. None of it is going to corporate tax cuts.” And he says, “This will kind of produce a base of popular support for me, and then I’ll be able to take care of your agenda.” And they say, “Okay, sounds good.” He coheres them around this, and it’s exactly what he does.
The Bush tax cuts are these massive cuts to personal income taxes, and they’re followed up over the next few years by a series of cuts to corporate taxes that take care of the corporations. And the second area where you really see this is in the invasion of Iraq, which has often been talked about as done at the behest of the oil companies.
They’re the ones who really pushed the administration into it. But when you really look into the decision-making process, you see something very similar. It’s true that they gather all the oil companies together and say, “Okay, here’s our line of march. What do you guys need from that?”
They want to solicit the interests and the support of the oil companies. But at the same time, the policy is very clearly not being made by the oil companies. And you see this because, if you look in the broader foreign policy think tank world at the time, you really see a consensus on the need to invade Iraq, the need to remove Saddam Hussein.
So it seems very unlikely that the Bush administration was simply taking orders from the oil companies when there’s a much broader consensus at the time, even among the liberal sections of the foreign policy think tanks, on the need to remove Saddam Hussein. Instead, there was certainly kind of a . . .
They solicited the advice and the needs of the oil companies, but they were not acting at their behest.
Micah Uetricht
Why was Bush able to bring the party back to this more traditional form of Republican politics?
Paul Heideman
I think part of it is just that Gingrichism, and DeLayism had really crashed and burned by the end of the 1990s.
Like I said, the impeachment process was just a massive failure for the Republicans. Their gains in the 1998 midterms, right in the thick of impeachment, were minimal. And actually, Gingrich ends up getting forced out of office over ethics concerns, and the person who was going to replace him ended up having to resign because Hustler Magazine exposed that he had affairs as well.
The Republican Party is weakened by this. And so on one level, I think that that had really discredited much of the Republican right. And at the same time, the Republican right was never very good at producing presidential candidates. They never produced presidential candidates who’d been in the top tier in the Republican primaries.
And so Bush is able to move forward with that. But I do think the fact that he was a genuine evangelical, really connected to the evangelical churches, that allowed him to bring that section of the party with him. And then, like I said, I do think that September 11 and the subsequent imperial reaction also played a big role in Bush’s success in holding the party together during his first term.
And it’s when that project begins to unravel, really in 2005–2006, that you see that unity start to splinter.
The Tea Party Insurgency
Micah Uetricht
So Bush has this success over the course of two terms that then in the second term starts to disintegrate, especially as the United States is losing the war in Iraq. But then the financial crisis of 2007–2008 comes along, and the combination of those two things in particular seems to have discredited the Republican Party.
Significantly, you also have this generational political talent in Barack Obama getting elected in 2008. But from the perspective of the GOP, that brings us into the era of the Tea Party. So talk about the revival of chaos in the GOP during these years.
Paul Heideman
The first step of that is the debate over immigration reform in the Republican Party.
George W. Bush wants to push a very kind of pro-corporate expansion of guest worker programs, combined with some kind of path to citizenship for undocumented people living in the United States. And this sets off a furious reaction from the Republican right, who absolutely refuse any kind of accommodation on immigration reform and just want a totally draconian enforcement-only agenda.
The party really splits over this, and Bush is ultimately unable to pass immigration reform. He had come to power in the Republican Party as the kind of antidote to Republican xenophobia, but he proves unable to subdue it. In fact, I think there’s a strong case that September 11, and the militarization and securitization of immigration as an issue played a role in the revival of Republican xenophobia.
If you look at the House Immigration Reform Caucus that Tom Tancredo, the real chieftain of anti-immigrant politics in the party at this time, starts in the late 1990s, and before September 11, I think it has around twelve members, and then, two years later, it has around sixty.
So I think, in some ways, Bush’s success in militarism and that kind of thing undermined his agenda with immigration. But you see a big split in the party at that point, and that split becomes even wider when the financial crisis hits. And when the financial crisis hits, when it really explodes in the fall of 2008 and the bailout is needed, that’s when all of a sudden Republicans are voting down George W. Bush’s bank bailout. In the wake of them voting that down, the stock market crashes, just a massive stock market crash. There’s a huge push from corporate America to push the bailout, to get it passed. George W. Bush personally calls every member of the Texas delegation to the House and asks them to vote for the bill, and not one of them changes their vote as a result.
It is kind of the ultimate illustration of a lame-duck president. And so eventually they’re able to pass the bill. It limps across the finish line mostly relying on Democratic votes. A majority of Republicans still vote against it, and this is a sign that that kind of corporate-consensus Republicanism that Bush had achieved in his first term is dead.
Now you have a majority of the Republican Party voting to tank Wall Street in the most savage way, in its greatest moment of crisis.
Micah Uetricht
This is the moment when the Koch brothers [Charles and David] really step in with huge amounts of money that they are willing to spend against George W. Bush–style conservatism and to stoke anger at the bailout and aid to homeowners in 2008. This is a key moment. They’ve been involved in politics for many years by this point, but that’s the time when the Kochs really stepped in and helped fund a Tea Party that, I’ve heard you argue before, had this element of astroturfing, in the sense that there was Koch brothers money behind it.
But there was a genuine grassroots character to what was going on as well. They’re able to capitalize on that and really bring the Tea Party into existence right near the beginning of Obama’s presidency.
Paul Heideman
Yeah. So the Koch brothers had been involved really in Libertarian Party politics and think tanks prior to this moment.
In the 2000s, during the George W. Bush presidency, they had started to play footsie with the Republican Party, to get involved with some Republican funding. And in the immediate aftermath of 2008, they emerge as the locus of this network of funders, various kind of billionaires and sectors of the ultrarich who are all pushing for a much more combative Republican politics that will not compromise with the Democrats, that will go back to a kind of Gingrich, burn-it-all-down style of politics.
They establish themselves very quickly on the scale of the Chamber of Commerce and the National Republican Congressional Committee in terms of fundraising. They’re raising absolutely huge amounts of money, and, of course, they’re enabled in all of this by the Citizens United v. FEC and SpeechNow v. FEC decisions by the Supreme Court that established super PACs, so that now all of this money can remain under their control rather than just being given to the party, which may or may not do what they want with it.
And this becomes the foundation for this insurgency within the Republican Party. The year 2010 sees a record number of primary challenges in the Republican Party as all of these Tea Party candidates are challenging Republicans in the House and Senate, often backed up by aspects of the Koch network.
And at the same time that this is happening, establishment Republicans are responding with a super PAC network of their own anchored by Karl Rove and his group, American Crossroads, which seeks to raise huge amounts of money and spend it on behalf of continuing the George W. Bush Republican agenda. So from 2010 up until 2016, the Republican Party is basically consumed by a civil war between these two groups, as the Tea Party wing and the Karl Rove wing are both contending. What’s kind of extraordinary about it is that both of them are operating mainly through these super PACs that are institutionally separate from the party itself.
So the battle over the future of the party is largely happening outside of the party rather than within it.
Micah Uetricht
We talked earlier about how Gingrich helps set off these cycles of radicals entering the party and declaring war on the party leadership and displacing them, and then the cycle repeating itself over and over.
That was a really central element to what was going on in the Republican Party during these years. And I lived through this, so I remember it. But in reading your book, I’d forgotten about all the battles over who the House speaker was, these incredible insurgent challenges from the right that were shocking to so many people.
But both the incredible amount of money that was behind these right-wing challenges and also the genuine grassroots right-wing energy really remade the landscape of the Republican Party during these years and seemingly helps set the table for what comes after the Obama years, in the form of Donald Trump.
Paul Heideman
During these years, John Boehner is the leader of the House Republicans, for example. He was a Gingrich guy. He was one of Gingrich’s insurgents in the 1990s. Now he’s the establishment, and he’s the piñata for all of the Tea Party insurgents who see him as the ultimate sellout, do-nothing Republican who doesn’t really want to fight the Democrats.
And so they’re pushing for these government shutdowns, these fiscal-cliff fights. They’re contesting his speaker nomination when the Republicans win back the House, all of this kind of stuff. So yeah, this moment is really when that first generation of insurgents now find themselves really out-positioned to the right by a new generation who see them as the new establishment that needs to be taken down.
And the way that this plays out is not just in the politics of the House itself, it’s in all of these primaries that, in many cases, lead to Republican candidates winning the primary who have no hope of winning the general. And the Tea Party probably cost the Republicans control of the Senate, at least early in the Obama administration, because they’re nominating people like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, who’s the woman who runs a campaign ad that starts off explaining why she’s not a witch.
Micah Uetricht
“I’m not a witch. I’m you.”
Paul Heideman
Yeah.
Micah Uetricht
I’ll never forget that ad.
Paul Heideman
It’s a great one.
What the Democrats Couldn’t See
Micah Uetricht
In hindsight, how do you look back at how the Democratic Party was understanding what was going on during this period? It just seems so clear that there was no willingness to engage with what was clearly a qualitatively new reality in right-wing politics that they were up against.
And rather than try to do something new to effectively counter it, they essentially doubled down on old strategies. You could say that, of course, this remains the strategy of the Democratic Party today. But your book is about the GOP, so how were the Democrats understanding this as it was happening at the time?
Paul Heideman
I think one thing you could say has changed in the Democratic Party from then to today is that then, people like Obama really believed that they could find ground for cooperation with the Republican Party and that the Republicans could be brought around in some sense. I always think of Obama going to the House Republican retreat in like 2009, maybe early 2010, when the House Republicans have their retreat to talk strategy.
And Obama goes and addresses them, and then spends an hour taking unscripted questions from them. And if you watch it — you can watch it on YouTube — it’s incredible, because he’s so smooth and so good, and they’re taking swings at him, and they just have nothing. They don’t land a single blow on him.
It’s like watching Muhammad Ali. They don’t land a single hit. It’s one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen a politician do. Personally impressive. But politically, it represented this belief that if he went and talked to them and made a reasonable case and showed them how . . . Part of what he says is, “Look, you’re voting down all these bills. If you can work with me on this stuff, I’ll give stuff for your districts in these bills. We can give you things. We can find ground for compromise. We can work together.” And none of them go for it. So, for example, Obama’s stimulus bill, which they pack full of tax cuts.
Se você observar o caso das tarifas na Suprema Corte, verá que são todas empresas das quais nunca ouviu falar, pois são elas que não têm força para conseguir um acordo individual com Trump.
So Gingrich is hurt by that. At the same time, Clinton, going into 1996 and his second term, moves quite sharply to the right and embraces a whole host of policies that are extraordinarily friendly to business, from telecommunications reform, which loosens ownership regulations — and is why we have things like Fox News today — to really wholehearted support for free trade and globalization.
Even as Gingrich has done quite a bit that business loves, he’s lost this really central fight, and at the same time, Clinton is moving to the right and winning huge support from business in doing so. And so the fight over Clinton’s second-term impeachment happens at a time when business was actually really happy with the Clinton administration and saw the Clinton administration as a really reliable friend of their agenda.
Clinton in his second term is talking about privatizing Social Security, which is a huge giveaway to the financial services industry, because now they would manage all of these accounts and charge fees for them, etc. So yeah, business loved Bill Clinton in his second term, and that’s why they looked with some trepidation at the Republican effort to impeach him.
Impeachment had kind of started for Richard Nixon. Andrew Johnson had been impeached. The effort to impeach Bill Clinton did not seem on the same scale, and business was really not convinced that it was worth it. If you read the business press at the time, they say, “Look, this is going to crowd out other things we want. We’re not going to be able to get our agenda passed. This is going to slow everything down, muck everything up.”
And that’s exactly what happened. When Clinton starts to be impeached, his support for Social Security privatization disappears, because he needs the liberal Democrats to defend him and knows they’re not going to be on board for that in the slightest.
So business was absolutely right about the effect of impeachment on their agenda.
Micah Uetricht
This is the source of the meme that floats around on the Left sometimes that Monica Lewinsky saved the country from Social Security privatization.
Paul Heideman
Exactly.
Big Tobacco and the Clinton Impeachment
Micah Uetricht
You make an argument in your section on impeachment that I’ve never heard before but that fits perfectly into your larger thesis about capital’s inability to get its will carried out in politics as a class, but individual industries or even sometimes individual corporations within the capitalist class being able to push their agendas and get them through.
You make this case about the tobacco industry’s centrality to the impeachment process. So explain the case. What did Big Tobacco have to do with Clinton’s impeachment?
Paul Heideman
Tobacco prior to the 1990s was a bipartisan industry that donated to both Democrats and Republicans.
There are plenty of Southern Democrats who represented tobacco districts. It was not a super political industry. At the same time, it’s important to remember it was a massive industry. Some of the biggest companies in the country were the tobacco companies.
So it was really a huge, huge industry in the 1990s. What Clinton did to piss them off was that he allowed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to classify nicotine as a drug that needed regulation under their auspices. Prior to that, nicotine was not regulated as a drug. And Clinton’s surgeon general, who actually had been appointed by George H. W. Bush, really made this push, showing Clinton all of these papers and all of this research demonstrating what the tobacco industry knew about the addictiveness of nicotine as well as their efforts to market it to children, things like that. And when Clinton read this stuff, he said, “I wanted to kill them. I just wanted to kill the tobacco companies.”
After he gave the FDA the go-ahead to classify nicotine as an addictive chemical, they wanted to kill him too. And if you look at donations from the tobacco industry after 1994, suddenly nothing is going to Democrats and everything is going to Republicans.
There’s this massive shift. So in Bill Clinton’s second term, if the question is who in the business community was really unhappy with Bill Clinton’s performance, the answer is the tobacco industry. Then if you actually look a little more closely at the impeachment proceedings, suddenly you see tobacco’s footprint and fingerprints absolutely everywhere.
Kenneth Starr, who was the special counsel who investigated Clinton, is working representing tobacco companies as an attorney at the same time that he is special counsel. He’s actively representing tobacco companies in lawsuits. A number of the other attorneys who worked investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair were also actively representing tobacco clients at the time.
The person who pushed it in the House most strenuously was Tom DeLay, representative from Texas. DeLay was one of the biggest recipients of tobacco money in Congress at the time. And perhaps most importantly, the decision to appoint Ken Starr was taken by judges who were appointed to a panel by senators from North Carolina.
There’s a lunch with the Republican senators from North Carolina the day before this crucial panel to appoint the independent counsel convenes, in which it sure seems like they’re saying, “We want to appoint someone who’s going to go get Clinton.”
So you see the tobacco industry just absolutely everywhere in the impeachment proceedings. They’re funding the people who are really going after Clinton, and they’re also the part of American capital that, in the late 1990s at least, had the most reason to want to see Clinton removed from office.
Micah Uetricht
I hear what you’re saying about tobacco being one of the largest industries in the United States, but it’s not like tobacco was like Wall Street.
It’s not like tobacco is at the heart of the functioning of the entire American financial system. If you are a Wall Streeter who’s very happy with what Bill Clinton is doing for you and the rest of the finance industry, you must have been tearing your hair out to watch this sort of rump, declining capitalist industry setting on fire the good thing that you had going for your industry and for so much of the rest of the capitalist class.
You’re just like, “Why is this happening? And why are we not able to stop this from happening?”
Paul Heideman
Yeah, I think that’s exactly the sentiment from them. And yes, in the business press, some of them are like, “Well, this really sucks for us” and “This circus is totally a distraction from the important work we want to get done, like privatizing Social Security and making sure we have free trade with China.”
But since the 1970s, the ability of capital to act as a class and produce this kind of class-wide understanding and class-wide action in defense of their interests had really gone down. And so you have this situation where you have a lot of firms that have a diffuse interest in impeachment not happening, and then you have this group of firms that have a very intense, concentrated interest in impeachment happening.
And when you don’t have well-developed institutions that build collective action, that concentrated, intense interest will beat the diffuse kind of widespread interest every time.
Micah Uetricht
It’s an example of what can happen when you take on an industry like tobacco and do not liquidate it but really severely hurt it.
And as I’m saying this, I’m thinking of what other industries there are that would be top of the line for us to similarly try to liquidate today, like the fossil fuel industry. Or —
Paul Heideman
Crypto.
Micah Uetricht
Or crypto. Especially in the context of this weak system in which capital can’t act as a class, you’re essentially vulnerable to any kind of industry that is angered at the attacks on it and is able to inflict a significant amount of damage to whomever has done the damage to the industry.
And this doesn’t seem sustainable. You can just do this ad infinitum across the political system, across the economy. This truly is chaotic stuff here.
Paul Heideman
There’s unfortunately a long history in the United States of individual firms or individual industries being able to really shape American politics in decisive ways, going back to the way that the silver mines took over the Populist Party in the 1890s and reduced a radical-populist economic program to nothing but free silver coinage, which would of course be a huge boon to the silver miners.
So yeah, it’s dispiriting just how dominant capital has often been in American history and how that’s allowed even small pieces of it to exert their agenda in massive ways.
George W. Bush, Party Builder
Micah Uetricht
You make an argument about our first Republican president of the twenty-first century that is not heard often on this podcast, and that is George W. Bush is underrated, at least as a party builder.
You make the case that we think of W as this bumbling guy whose puppet masters like Dick Cheney are the ones who were really pulling the strings, but actually he’s underrated in terms of what he was able to accomplish within the Republican Party, at least at the beginning of his administration; how he was able to bring some of these forces, the Gingrichian type forces, into the coalition with him while also not letting the yahoos fully take over, and also to reach a kind of a real modus vivendi with capital in a way that, certainly in the period that we were just talking about, during the Clinton administration, was not happening within the Republican Party.
So lay out that case for George W. Bush, the effective Republican party builder.
Paul Heideman
To appreciate this, I think it’s helpful to think about what was going on with the Republican Party in the 1990s. On the one hand, you have the real failure of Gingrichism. Gingrich ends up being quite bad for the Republican Party. Bob Dole adopts much of Gingrich’s agenda in 1996 and loses.
After the debacle of impeachment, the Republican Party had this image of being kind of fanatical, priggish, and not very oriented on what most Americans thought were the most important problems. And George W. Bush comes to be seen as an alternative to all of this. The slogan that he runs on, “Compassionate Conservatism,” was crafted to signify that this is not Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party anymore.
He had been a successful governor of Texas, often working in a very bipartisan manner with Democrats. He had really spurned the xenophobia that was surfacing in the Republican Party at the time. And actually when he was reelected in Texas, I think in 1998, he won a majority of Latino votes in Texas.
So a lot of Republican Party leaders are looking at this and being like, “This guy can be the future of the party. He’s allowing us to rebrand, and he can win with Latinos,” after this rise in Republican xenophobia had really driven them away. At the same time, however, Bush is an evangelical Christian who speaks the language of the Republican right; he’s very, very comfortable talking with them about abortion, things like that.
And so Bush manages to achieve this kind of unity between two wings of the party, his father’s corporate-moderate wing and the Gingrich wing with which it had really been at war for much of the 1990s. He’s able to bring them together in a way that seems successful and durable. During his first term, people like Karl Rove were talking about a permanent Republican majority under the Bush model, that we’re going to get thirty years of Republican dominance, with George W. Bush’s politics as the foundation of it. So I do think that Bush manages to create this unity in the party, and then, after 9/11, the project of American imperialism cements that even further, because both wings of the party were in complete agreement on the need to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
Bush really does achieve something impressive in the early 2000s in hammering out this kind of peace accord in the party. And at the same time, what he’s doing is bringing business back to the Republicans, despite the alienation of the late 1990s, with an agenda of tax cuts, deregulations, attacks on workplace organization, etc, and assembles this absolutely massive corporate coalition behind him in 2000 and 2004.
And the Democrats are really reduced to begging for scraps from groups like trial lawyers, who are the only source of big money for Democrats in much of this period.
Micah Uetricht
And he and the party are effectively acting more like the coherers of the capitalist class as a class throughout, at least through the first term, and into the second term, too.
But there’s not that kind of dynamic of allowing rogue sections of the capitalist class to dominate things in the way that you’re arguing the tobacco industry did during the Clinton impeachment. They’re playing that more grown-up role of acting as referee for the capitalist class as a whole.
Paul Heideman
Yeah, and there are two places where you really see this dynamic. The first is Bush’s big tax cut. He had campaigned on a massive tax cut. There was a government surplus, a budget surplus at the time, and Bush’s line was that “We should have a huge tax cut.” And at the start of his administration, he gathers all of these CEOs in a room and says, “You guys actually aren’t getting anything from this tax cut. All of it is going to personal tax cuts. None of it is going to corporate tax cuts.” And he says, “This will kind of produce a base of popular support for me, and then I’ll be able to take care of your agenda.” And they say, “Okay, sounds good.” He coheres them around this, and it’s exactly what he does.
The Bush tax cuts are these massive cuts to personal income taxes, and they’re followed up over the next few years by a series of cuts to corporate taxes that take care of the corporations. And the second area where you really see this is in the invasion of Iraq, which has often been talked about as done at the behest of the oil companies.
They’re the ones who really pushed the administration into it. But when you really look into the decision-making process, you see something very similar. It’s true that they gather all the oil companies together and say, “Okay, here’s our line of march. What do you guys need from that?”
They want to solicit the interests and the support of the oil companies. But at the same time, the policy is very clearly not being made by the oil companies. And you see this because, if you look in the broader foreign policy think tank world at the time, you really see a consensus on the need to invade Iraq, the need to remove Saddam Hussein.
So it seems very unlikely that the Bush administration was simply taking orders from the oil companies when there’s a much broader consensus at the time, even among the liberal sections of the foreign policy think tanks, on the need to remove Saddam Hussein. Instead, there was certainly kind of a . . .
They solicited the advice and the needs of the oil companies, but they were not acting at their behest.
Micah Uetricht
Why was Bush able to bring the party back to this more traditional form of Republican politics?
Paul Heideman
I think part of it is just that Gingrichism, and DeLayism had really crashed and burned by the end of the 1990s.
Like I said, the impeachment process was just a massive failure for the Republicans. Their gains in the 1998 midterms, right in the thick of impeachment, were minimal. And actually, Gingrich ends up getting forced out of office over ethics concerns, and the person who was going to replace him ended up having to resign because Hustler Magazine exposed that he had affairs as well.
The Republican Party is weakened by this. And so on one level, I think that that had really discredited much of the Republican right. And at the same time, the Republican right was never very good at producing presidential candidates. They never produced presidential candidates who’d been in the top tier in the Republican primaries.
And so Bush is able to move forward with that. But I do think the fact that he was a genuine evangelical, really connected to the evangelical churches, that allowed him to bring that section of the party with him. And then, like I said, I do think that September 11 and the subsequent imperial reaction also played a big role in Bush’s success in holding the party together during his first term.
And it’s when that project begins to unravel, really in 2005–2006, that you see that unity start to splinter.
The Tea Party Insurgency
Micah Uetricht
So Bush has this success over the course of two terms that then in the second term starts to disintegrate, especially as the United States is losing the war in Iraq. But then the financial crisis of 2007–2008 comes along, and the combination of those two things in particular seems to have discredited the Republican Party.
Significantly, you also have this generational political talent in Barack Obama getting elected in 2008. But from the perspective of the GOP, that brings us into the era of the Tea Party. So talk about the revival of chaos in the GOP during these years.
Paul Heideman
The first step of that is the debate over immigration reform in the Republican Party.
George W. Bush wants to push a very kind of pro-corporate expansion of guest worker programs, combined with some kind of path to citizenship for undocumented people living in the United States. And this sets off a furious reaction from the Republican right, who absolutely refuse any kind of accommodation on immigration reform and just want a totally draconian enforcement-only agenda.
The party really splits over this, and Bush is ultimately unable to pass immigration reform. He had come to power in the Republican Party as the kind of antidote to Republican xenophobia, but he proves unable to subdue it. In fact, I think there’s a strong case that September 11, and the militarization and securitization of immigration as an issue played a role in the revival of Republican xenophobia.
If you look at the House Immigration Reform Caucus that Tom Tancredo, the real chieftain of anti-immigrant politics in the party at this time, starts in the late 1990s, and before September 11, I think it has around twelve members, and then, two years later, it has around sixty.
So I think, in some ways, Bush’s success in militarism and that kind of thing undermined his agenda with immigration. But you see a big split in the party at that point, and that split becomes even wider when the financial crisis hits. And when the financial crisis hits, when it really explodes in the fall of 2008 and the bailout is needed, that’s when all of a sudden Republicans are voting down George W. Bush’s bank bailout. In the wake of them voting that down, the stock market crashes, just a massive stock market crash. There’s a huge push from corporate America to push the bailout, to get it passed. George W. Bush personally calls every member of the Texas delegation to the House and asks them to vote for the bill, and not one of them changes their vote as a result.
It is kind of the ultimate illustration of a lame-duck president. And so eventually they’re able to pass the bill. It limps across the finish line mostly relying on Democratic votes. A majority of Republicans still vote against it, and this is a sign that that kind of corporate-consensus Republicanism that Bush had achieved in his first term is dead.
Now you have a majority of the Republican Party voting to tank Wall Street in the most savage way, in its greatest moment of crisis.
Micah Uetricht
This is the moment when the Koch brothers [Charles and David] really step in with huge amounts of money that they are willing to spend against George W. Bush–style conservatism and to stoke anger at the bailout and aid to homeowners in 2008. This is a key moment. They’ve been involved in politics for many years by this point, but that’s the time when the Kochs really stepped in and helped fund a Tea Party that, I’ve heard you argue before, had this element of astroturfing, in the sense that there was Koch brothers money behind it.
But there was a genuine grassroots character to what was going on as well. They’re able to capitalize on that and really bring the Tea Party into existence right near the beginning of Obama’s presidency.
Paul Heideman
Yeah. So the Koch brothers had been involved really in Libertarian Party politics and think tanks prior to this moment.
In the 2000s, during the George W. Bush presidency, they had started to play footsie with the Republican Party, to get involved with some Republican funding. And in the immediate aftermath of 2008, they emerge as the locus of this network of funders, various kind of billionaires and sectors of the ultrarich who are all pushing for a much more combative Republican politics that will not compromise with the Democrats, that will go back to a kind of Gingrich, burn-it-all-down style of politics.
They establish themselves very quickly on the scale of the Chamber of Commerce and the National Republican Congressional Committee in terms of fundraising. They’re raising absolutely huge amounts of money, and, of course, they’re enabled in all of this by the Citizens United v. FEC and SpeechNow v. FEC decisions by the Supreme Court that established super PACs, so that now all of this money can remain under their control rather than just being given to the party, which may or may not do what they want with it.
And this becomes the foundation for this insurgency within the Republican Party. The year 2010 sees a record number of primary challenges in the Republican Party as all of these Tea Party candidates are challenging Republicans in the House and Senate, often backed up by aspects of the Koch network.
And at the same time that this is happening, establishment Republicans are responding with a super PAC network of their own anchored by Karl Rove and his group, American Crossroads, which seeks to raise huge amounts of money and spend it on behalf of continuing the George W. Bush Republican agenda. So from 2010 up until 2016, the Republican Party is basically consumed by a civil war between these two groups, as the Tea Party wing and the Karl Rove wing are both contending. What’s kind of extraordinary about it is that both of them are operating mainly through these super PACs that are institutionally separate from the party itself.
So the battle over the future of the party is largely happening outside of the party rather than within it.
Micah Uetricht
We talked earlier about how Gingrich helps set off these cycles of radicals entering the party and declaring war on the party leadership and displacing them, and then the cycle repeating itself over and over.
That was a really central element to what was going on in the Republican Party during these years. And I lived through this, so I remember it. But in reading your book, I’d forgotten about all the battles over who the House speaker was, these incredible insurgent challenges from the right that were shocking to so many people.
But both the incredible amount of money that was behind these right-wing challenges and also the genuine grassroots right-wing energy really remade the landscape of the Republican Party during these years and seemingly helps set the table for what comes after the Obama years, in the form of Donald Trump.
Paul Heideman
During these years, John Boehner is the leader of the House Republicans, for example. He was a Gingrich guy. He was one of Gingrich’s insurgents in the 1990s. Now he’s the establishment, and he’s the piñata for all of the Tea Party insurgents who see him as the ultimate sellout, do-nothing Republican who doesn’t really want to fight the Democrats.
And so they’re pushing for these government shutdowns, these fiscal-cliff fights. They’re contesting his speaker nomination when the Republicans win back the House, all of this kind of stuff. So yeah, this moment is really when that first generation of insurgents now find themselves really out-positioned to the right by a new generation who see them as the new establishment that needs to be taken down.
And the way that this plays out is not just in the politics of the House itself, it’s in all of these primaries that, in many cases, lead to Republican candidates winning the primary who have no hope of winning the general. And the Tea Party probably cost the Republicans control of the Senate, at least early in the Obama administration, because they’re nominating people like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, who’s the woman who runs a campaign ad that starts off explaining why she’s not a witch.
Micah Uetricht
“I’m not a witch. I’m you.”
Paul Heideman
Yeah.
Micah Uetricht
I’ll never forget that ad.
Paul Heideman
It’s a great one.
What the Democrats Couldn’t See
Micah Uetricht
In hindsight, how do you look back at how the Democratic Party was understanding what was going on during this period? It just seems so clear that there was no willingness to engage with what was clearly a qualitatively new reality in right-wing politics that they were up against.
And rather than try to do something new to effectively counter it, they essentially doubled down on old strategies. You could say that, of course, this remains the strategy of the Democratic Party today. But your book is about the GOP, so how were the Democrats understanding this as it was happening at the time?
Paul Heideman
I think one thing you could say has changed in the Democratic Party from then to today is that then, people like Obama really believed that they could find ground for cooperation with the Republican Party and that the Republicans could be brought around in some sense. I always think of Obama going to the House Republican retreat in like 2009, maybe early 2010, when the House Republicans have their retreat to talk strategy.
And Obama goes and addresses them, and then spends an hour taking unscripted questions from them. And if you watch it — you can watch it on YouTube — it’s incredible, because he’s so smooth and so good, and they’re taking swings at him, and they just have nothing. They don’t land a single blow on him.
It’s like watching Muhammad Ali. They don’t land a single hit. It’s one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen a politician do. Personally impressive. But politically, it represented this belief that if he went and talked to them and made a reasonable case and showed them how . . . Part of what he says is, “Look, you’re voting down all these bills. If you can work with me on this stuff, I’ll give stuff for your districts in these bills. We can give you things. We can find ground for compromise. We can work together.” And none of them go for it. So, for example, Obama’s stimulus bill, which they pack full of tax cuts.
Se você observar o caso das tarifas na Suprema Corte, verá que são todas empresas das quais nunca ouviu falar, pois são elas que não têm força para conseguir um acordo individual com Trump.
A third of the bill is tax cuts, which most economists at the time were like, “This is really not a very efficient way to spend this money in terms of the amount of economic stimulus you’ll get from it.” But he loads it with tax cuts in order to get Republican votes. He doesn’t get a single Republican vote for it.
Similarly, with Obamacare, there are all these compromises that are made in the hopes that you can get some Republican support for it. It’s based on Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts. It’s very far from Medicare for All. Republicans don’t vote for it. So I think the Democrats couldn’t see what was happening in Republican politics, and couldn’t appreciate the fact that there was just no chance of winning any Republican support for anything Obama was going to do.
And I do think the Democratic Party has at least learned that today. Hakeem Jeffries may not be a very good leader, but I don’t think he expects to get Republican support for anything Democrats do when they’re in a majority.
Micah Uetricht
Thinking about the bailout in the wake of the financial crisis and Obama’s stimulus, these are measures that were really essential to the functioning of American capitalism and its place in the global financial system.
And the right-wing response to it kind of proves the central thesis of your book, right? That these measures taken on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole get this absolutely vitriolic response from the Tea Party and from their elected representatives in Congress, that this is not something that they are going to stand for despite how essential it is for the functioning of American capitalism.
Paul Heideman
Here you really start to see the split in business as well. So the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, the big organizations of business, they’re all completely behind the stimulus bill. They’re like, “This is really needed. We really need to pass this.” The Koch network is totally against it. And so that’s part of what’s happening in the Republican Party, this kind of splintering of business.
But if you look at the rest of Obama’s agenda, you also see something kind of similar. So Obamacare, for example, is supported by, again, the Business Roundtable. The Chamber of Commerce really opposes it. And in order to understand that, you have to understand some of the transformation of the Chamber of Commerce over the previous decades.
In the 1990s, the Chamber of Commerce really adopts a new business model where instead of trying to find consensus among their members, instead of trying to produce this agenda that all of the companies could get behind, they start renting out their services to various companies, where the companies might risk a PR hit if they themselves were lobbying for a given bill or a given position.
But the Chamber of Commerce itself would do that for them and provide some reputational cover for them. And that’s basically what happens under Obamacare: the Chamber of Commerce goes to war against the policy, and it comes out that they’ve just gotten massive donations from some of the health insurance companies that opposed Obamacare to carry this out.
Trump quer que a presidência seja como o programa O Aprendiz, onde as pessoas precisam vir e competir para conquistar o seu favor.
They weren’t in any sense representing a consensus position among American business. The Business Roundtable was something similar. What happens then with Obama’s financial reform with the Dodd-Frank Bill is that Wall Street is totally against this bill, and this brings the Republicans back a little bit closer to more of a mainstream business position.
In their campaign against Dodd-Frank, they’re able to reunite with some of the sectors of big business that they had really alienated along the bailout in particular. So the Republican war on Obama’s policy agenda reflects some of the splits among business and the way that manifests in the Republican Party, but also is an opportunity for the Republicans to rebuild some bridges at various points.
The Establishment’s Last Stand
Micah Uetricht
In hindsight, especially given everything that we’ve talked about so far, the 2012 presidential campaign and the party’s decision to run Mitt Romney as its presidential candidate look absurdly idiotic. Just clearly a candidate from a bygone era of Republican politics who was not going to be up to the challenge of dealing with where so much of the base of the party was at.
And he was a candidate of capital in a party that was no longer acting at the behest of capital as a class, basically.
Paul Heideman
Romney’s nomination reflects part of what I alluded to earlier, in that the right wing of the GOP was never very good at producing presidential candidates.
In 2012, they didn’t really have a strong candidate. There wasn’t a good Tea Party candidate for the presidency. So you get Romney, who had massive support from business, and, in the general election, business just goes massively for Romney. They really don’t support Obama in big numbers at all.
Except for some firms, some industries like tech, really stay with Obama. But on the whole, the business class goes for Romney. They lose partially because Obama had built such an incredible fundraising machine that was able to harness all these small donors in 2012. And so Romney’s support from business doesn’t translate into electoral victory.
At the same time, his defeat really opens the floodgates for the Republican right, in that it’s a really decisive discrediting of the Republican establishment. They had really expected to win that election. Paul Ryan famously had to explain to his crying children that they weren’t going to be moving to Washington, DC, after all.
The Republicans really thought they had 2012 in the bag. And when they lose it, it’s kind of the Republican establishment’s last stand.
Trump Walks Through the Open Door
Micah Uetricht
Given everything that we’ve talked about, now that we’ve arrived at 2016, Trump and his victory in 2016 don’t seem quite so odd anymore.
It seems like the culmination of everything that we’ve been discussing thus far. How does Donald Trump relate to this kind of factional warfare within the party and capitalize on much of it?
Paul Heideman
Trump comes in as a creature of neither side. He’s not a Tea Party guy at all.
In fact, he’s famously against cutting Social Security and Medicare. He runs as really an economic moderate who’s not going to be a budget cutter. At the same time, he’s very much not one of the establishment. He runs on this insane xenophobia and anti-immigrant politics that the establishment, particularly after 2012, had really been trying to jettison.
They saw that xenophobia as a weakness for the Republican Party and said, “We have to go back to George W. Bush and try to be more pro-Latino.” So he wrong-foots both sides, because he’s not from either of them. And at the same time, it turns out that the audience among the Republican primary electorate for this combination of economic moderation with really intense culture-war politics was quite large.
There was a large audience for that sort of politics. And because the Republicans had been locked into trench warfare within the party, the party’s electoral base was not really listening to the cues that were coming from elite Republicans anymore, because the party had been so divided.
There wasn’t any kind of consensus within the party anymore. So when Trump comes in, he’s able to sidestep this battle, and both sides thought Trump would be to their advantage. Jeb Bush is like, “He’s going to split the far-right vote with Ted Cruz, and that’s going to be great for me. That’s going to make it easier for me to win the primary.”
Ted Cruz says, “Trump is going to rile up all these voters and make these kind of culture-war issues more salient in this election, but ultimately those voters will come to me, because I’m the person who can present those most effectively. I can do it better than Trump, so actually it’s good for me that Trump is in the race.”
So both camps also were like, “We don’t really want to spend that much time attacking Trump, because we think his presence in the race will be to our advantage.” So that’s what enables Trump to win. Without the kind of division of the party in the 2010s and the factional warfare that had developed, I don’t think there would’ve been an opportunity for Trump to come in and win in the same way that he was ultimately able to do.
So I think Trump is very much a creature of the divisions in the party even as he’s not associated with either side of them.
Micah Uetricht
Can you talk about your thesis about a weak Republican Party and a lack of real organizing by capital, and how these play out during his candidacy and then his two terms as president?
Paul Heideman
Trump has the ability to finance his own campaign in the primaries. And so even though basically all of business is against Trump in the primaries, he’s able to raise so much money just from himself that it doesn’t hurt him that much. And then once he wins, business really deserts the Republican Party.
A lot of traditional Republican funders, some of the party’s biggest donors, refuse to open their wallets to Trump. And by August of 2016, Trump is having to lay off campaign staff. His campaign is on the verge of disintegrating. And he’s finally able then to convince a couple of key Republican billionaires, like the Mercers, a very rich finance family from Long Island, to fund his campaign in a major way.
And they are able to allow his campaign to limp through the rest of the fall. But basically everybody is operating with the assumption that Trump is going to lose in 2016. It’s going to be a disaster, and then the party will move on. That’s the operating assumption of everyone.
Trump’s campaign team is telling him, “Look, you’re going to lose this election.” And as a result, in 2016 in November, Trump doesn’t have a victory speech written on election day. He has to write one on the spot. He had actually been trying to fuel up the plane to go to Monte Carlo with Melania Trump after they lost.
He had conceived of his race as what he called the “greatest infomercial in the history of the world.” He’s like, “This’ll just be a great opportunity to present my brand and to do something next after The Apprentice,” basically.
Micah Uetricht
Which has kind of still proven to be true.
He just also won the presidency.
Paul Heideman
Yeah, exactly. So he wins the presidency, which is a real surprise, and this leads to this kind of situation where the Republican establishment is now coming in and saying, “Okay, we have to work with him. Maybe we can contain him.” And for most of his first term, they are able to contain Trump in various ways.
I mean, just the turnover of staff in his first administration is extraordinary, as all of these people just keep resigning, and it leads to bureaucratic paralysis, and they’re just not able to get that much done. The things they are able to get done are basically traditional Republican policy proposals like tax cuts and a more aggressive foreign policy toward Russia.
If you just look at the policy outputs of Trump’s first term, in a lot of ways it looks like a generic Republican first term, but that’s because he was constrained in all of these ways. What is happening at the same time as that, though, is that Trump is steadily remaking the party, and the people that oppose him, that don’t stand with him, are getting pushed out.
And that process just continues over the next eight years really, up until today. And really, by 2024, he has taken over the party so completely that there’s no opposition in any organized fashion left. There’s an attempt to mount the Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley primary campaigns in 2024, but once those lose, and lose quite badly, there’s nothing left.
Micah Uetricht
It’s almost like Trump understood the weakness of the party, its infrastructure and its leadership, and all the things that we were talking about in the beginning of this conversation, and just intuitively sensed that he could impose his will upon it; that there actually wasn’t a grown-up in the room who was ever going to step in. He just had the chutzpah to do it, and he obviously successfully achieved that.
Paul Heideman
I think he’s aided by his media presence and his status as this charismatic figure in various media environments, as well as the image of him as this successful businessman. All of that kind of stuff contributes to this cult of Trump in the party that results in a situation where, by 2020, the party doesn’t even write a platform in the election.
They just say, “Whatever Trump says, that’s what we believe.” And in 2024, when Trump says, “You gotta drop the pro-life plank from the platform,” the Republicans drop it. Something that had been unimaginable in the Bush years, that the Republican Party would drop a plank on abortion.
But by 2024, Trump says it, and it goes.
Every Firm for Itself
Micah Uetricht
What did big business do in 2020? It seems like capital really went, in many ways, into the Democratic Party, having just seen the nightmare of Trump’s first term and knowing that he was not going to be an effective advocate for what they wanted done. They went to the Democrats.
Is that right?
Paul Heideman
Yes, that’s right. There’s a massive move to the Democratic Party in 2020, from finance to whatever sector you want to look at, basically. Trump had very little support from business, and that is repeated in 2024. Trump has very, very little support from business in 2024.
The Democrats out-fundraised the Republicans in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024. The thing that’s really different in 2024 is that Trump is able to count on financing from a couple of extremely ideological far-right billionaires. Elon Musk, the Uihlein family, a handful of others donate just an incredible amount of money.
Elon Musk donates $250 million. So Trump’s business support in 2024 has shrunk considerably. It’s narrowed quite a bit compared to someone like George W. Bush, who had very broad business support. But it’s very, very deep. These people are willing to spend on a level that’s basically unprecedented in American politics, and that allows Trump to have enough of a campaign operation in order to win in 2024, combined, of course, with the weaknesses of the Biden administration and the Kamala Harris campaign.
Micah Uetricht
What’s the explanation for the tech tycoons who are standing behind him in the 2025 inauguration in light of everything we’ve been talking about? Why is he able to win over this segment of capital, some of the most important contemporary capitalists in America? What explains their capitulation to his agenda?
Paul Heideman
I think there are a couple things. First, there was always a sector of tech capital that was far right, that bought into various kinds of ideologies about the end of democracy and the rise of philosopher kings and all this kind of nonsense. There was always a sector of tech that was invested in those kind of politics, and they moved to Trump very quickly.
There was also, I think it’s worth remembering, this wave of abor activism and workplace activism more broadly in tech in the late 2010s and early 2020s that I think led a lot of tech executives to say, “Yeah, we have to get these guys under control.”
Micah Uetricht
Marc Andreessen. He’s always talking about this. He’s shocked that his employees were making demands on him.
Paul Heideman
Exactly. And I think that led a number of people to kind of embrace Trump and this new reactionary politics as well. And then the third tendency there is people like Mark Zuckerberg, who were really not terribly ideological and actually had been Democrats for much of the preceding decade.
But once Trump wins in 2024, I think a huge sector of tech capital and capital more broadly says, “Okay, the way to negotiate this is to cut individual deals with Trump, not to try and oppose him or organize opposition to him or anything like that. Instead, we’re going to cut individual deals.”
And they realize that, actually, if you just flatter Trump and give him something shiny, he’s willing to do huge favors for your company.So we’ve seen that again and again. They all line up to kiss the ring, to fund the inauguration, to go in and talk about what a great president and a great leader Donald Trump is.
And in return, they get various forms of clientelist handouts from the White House that are more or less openly corrupt quid pro quos. And I think that this has served to further disorganize capital, because now it’s every man for himself with Trump. Every firm goes and is trying to cut their own deal with Donald Trump rather than organizing any kind of common agenda.
So with the tariffs, for example, rather than companies saying really strongly, “This is a terrible agenda. You need to roll this back. This is hurting us,” they’re all trying to cut individual deals to get their products exempted in various ways. “Oh, no, no, actually, the tariffs aren’t appropriate for my product, Mr President. I think the tariffs are fantastic in general. They’re a great idea. But just for my product, they don’t really work, so can we please have an exemption? And by the way, here’s this donation, and here’s a gold square that can sit on your desk,” or something like that. That’s been what’s happening in business.
If you look at the Supreme Court case with the tariffs, it’s all companies you’ve never heard of, because they’re the ones that don’t have the juice to get an individual deal with Trump. So for them, forthright opposition to the policy is the only avenue left.
Interestingly, since the tariffs have been overturned, you have seen more of the really big companies in the United States starting to launch lawsuits to recover their lost tariff revenue. So I do think that now that that policy has lost, you are seeing more business opposition to it emerge.
The Decider
Micah Uetricht
I wonder what you think about the fact that, on my read, Trump seems completely uninterested at this point in fulfilling many of his core campaign promises, whether it’s bringing prices down for consumers or not going to war in Iran. He’s so underwater on all of these issues. There’s increasing talk of many of his supporters feeling betrayed by what he’s doing.
There’s a rise of prominent figures on the Right who are increasingly willing to say that Trump is betraying many of the core promises that they thought were at the heart of MAGA. What explains all of this? Is it just because he truly doesn’t care about what happens to the Republican Party after he’s gone?
Is he just happy to listen to whomever is in his ear at the last moment and decides to go that way, and he isn’t even thinking about fulfillment of campaign promises? Why is he acting with such disregard for the popular things that he did run on that delivered the 2024 presidency for him?
Paul Heideman
Marxists like to talk about the relative autonomy of the state and the idea that there’s a certain distance between the state and capital. It’s not a one-to-one relationship. And I think Trump is a great study in this concept, in that, when you have someone who has attained as much power as he has, where he has this party that’s totally subordinate to him that runs all the branches of government, his individual psychology does actually start to be more important in explaining things.
And I think fundamentally what Trump loves is getting to be the decider and the dealmaker. That’s what he loves. That’s the most important kind of image of himself. And so something like the tariffs set him up to do that. He’s like, “I’m going to do this tariff war against the entire world and then everyone’s got to come beg me for favors and I get to decide who the winner and who the loser is.”
He kind of wants the presidency to be The Apprentice, where people have to come and compete for his favor. And I think there’s something similar with Iran. I think Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis said, “You just did such a great job with Venezuela. You can do the same thing with Iran and then you get to pick who the new leadership will be and they’ll be totally dependent on you. Won’t that be great?”
So I do think that element of his psychology is important to understanding why he doesn’t care about electability, affordability, any of these things. The people around him — like Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, whose job it is to say, “Well, is this going to be good for the midterms?” — I think they have a very difficult job, frankly. So yeah, I think that understanding Trump’s psychology is important. I’m accordingly very resistant to some of the strain of thought you see on the Left that says, “Well, actually, Trump is really being rational about all of this, and actually there’s a real logic to all of this. He might be evil, but he’s not stupid.”
I just think that with everything we’ve seen over the past year and a half or so, it’s very hard to reconcile that argument with reality. This war was clearly launched with no plan whatsoever, is a total disaster in every way, and is probably going to end with Trump basically pulling out in defeat in one sense or another.
He won’t call it that. He won’t talk in those terms, but that is looking like the most likely end at this point. So I do think that attempts to kind of “sane-wash” Trump, as some have called it, are deeply unconvincing in this moment.
Who Inherits the Party?
Micah Uetricht
And what do you think about the movement on the Right where people like Tucker Carlson, for example, are increasingly dissenting on some key parts of what Trump is doing? Some people seem to be trying to set themselves up for future leadership fights within the party. It seems unlikely that we’re going to see a replication of Trumpism without Trump. He really is a once in a generation figure.
But there is going to be somebody who emerges as the leader of the party after Trump, and it seems like we’re starting to see people try to stake out different lanes in that future fight right now. So what is your read on how these things are beginning to play out, and how these figures like Carlson and others are staking out a sort of Trumpist approach but with some key distinctions, and in some ways trying to be — on paper, in terms of their policy agenda — more Trump than Trump himself, or trying to stay true to what they consider to be the real heart of MAGA?
Paul Heideman
I think one lesson of the first Trump administration is Trump is the only one who gets out alive. Everyone else’s career gets destroyed by it. If you just go through the first Trump administration and look at who served in it, they’re all out to pasture now. None of them are really political players anymore, with the exception of someone like Stephen Miller, who’s kind of a lamprey attached to the shark.
I think we’re likely to see something similar play out with this administration, that the people in the administration are political goners. I think J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio are the two most likely to try and inherit the party. They’re the Donald and Eric Trumps in the cabinet.
And I think that they are just going to be so attached to all of the disasters of the administration that it’s going to be really, really hard for them, just as it would be really hard for anyone attached to the George W. Bush administration to succeed him in 2008. So I think we’re going to see some real Republican knife fighting over the next few years as people try to position themselves.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone like Thomas Massie makes a halfway credible run for the nomination in 2028. I doubt he’ll win, but I think he could easily be one of the top three. And if you told someone in 2020 that Thomas Massie might be a top three Republican candidate, they’d look at you like you’re insane.
But I think someone like him or Carlson. And I really think that whoever it is who rises to the top will be someone who can distance themself most effectively from the administration and from the disasters that it’s creating. I think that’s going to be an increasing trend, particularly after the midterms this year; we’re going to see Trump’s hold on the party really start to splinter and look a lot more fragile than it has.
Micah Uetricht
In their campaign against Dodd-Frank, they’re able to reunite with some of the sectors of big business that they had really alienated along the bailout in particular. So the Republican war on Obama’s policy agenda reflects some of the splits among business and the way that manifests in the Republican Party, but also is an opportunity for the Republicans to rebuild some bridges at various points.
The Establishment’s Last Stand
Micah Uetricht
In hindsight, especially given everything that we’ve talked about so far, the 2012 presidential campaign and the party’s decision to run Mitt Romney as its presidential candidate look absurdly idiotic. Just clearly a candidate from a bygone era of Republican politics who was not going to be up to the challenge of dealing with where so much of the base of the party was at.
And he was a candidate of capital in a party that was no longer acting at the behest of capital as a class, basically.
Paul Heideman
Romney’s nomination reflects part of what I alluded to earlier, in that the right wing of the GOP was never very good at producing presidential candidates.
In 2012, they didn’t really have a strong candidate. There wasn’t a good Tea Party candidate for the presidency. So you get Romney, who had massive support from business, and, in the general election, business just goes massively for Romney. They really don’t support Obama in big numbers at all.
Except for some firms, some industries like tech, really stay with Obama. But on the whole, the business class goes for Romney. They lose partially because Obama had built such an incredible fundraising machine that was able to harness all these small donors in 2012. And so Romney’s support from business doesn’t translate into electoral victory.
At the same time, his defeat really opens the floodgates for the Republican right, in that it’s a really decisive discrediting of the Republican establishment. They had really expected to win that election. Paul Ryan famously had to explain to his crying children that they weren’t going to be moving to Washington, DC, after all.
The Republicans really thought they had 2012 in the bag. And when they lose it, it’s kind of the Republican establishment’s last stand.
Trump Walks Through the Open Door
Micah Uetricht
Given everything that we’ve talked about, now that we’ve arrived at 2016, Trump and his victory in 2016 don’t seem quite so odd anymore.
It seems like the culmination of everything that we’ve been discussing thus far. How does Donald Trump relate to this kind of factional warfare within the party and capitalize on much of it?
Paul Heideman
Trump comes in as a creature of neither side. He’s not a Tea Party guy at all.
In fact, he’s famously against cutting Social Security and Medicare. He runs as really an economic moderate who’s not going to be a budget cutter. At the same time, he’s very much not one of the establishment. He runs on this insane xenophobia and anti-immigrant politics that the establishment, particularly after 2012, had really been trying to jettison.
They saw that xenophobia as a weakness for the Republican Party and said, “We have to go back to George W. Bush and try to be more pro-Latino.” So he wrong-foots both sides, because he’s not from either of them. And at the same time, it turns out that the audience among the Republican primary electorate for this combination of economic moderation with really intense culture-war politics was quite large.
There was a large audience for that sort of politics. And because the Republicans had been locked into trench warfare within the party, the party’s electoral base was not really listening to the cues that were coming from elite Republicans anymore, because the party had been so divided.
There wasn’t any kind of consensus within the party anymore. So when Trump comes in, he’s able to sidestep this battle, and both sides thought Trump would be to their advantage. Jeb Bush is like, “He’s going to split the far-right vote with Ted Cruz, and that’s going to be great for me. That’s going to make it easier for me to win the primary.”
Ted Cruz says, “Trump is going to rile up all these voters and make these kind of culture-war issues more salient in this election, but ultimately those voters will come to me, because I’m the person who can present those most effectively. I can do it better than Trump, so actually it’s good for me that Trump is in the race.”
So both camps also were like, “We don’t really want to spend that much time attacking Trump, because we think his presence in the race will be to our advantage.” So that’s what enables Trump to win. Without the kind of division of the party in the 2010s and the factional warfare that had developed, I don’t think there would’ve been an opportunity for Trump to come in and win in the same way that he was ultimately able to do.
So I think Trump is very much a creature of the divisions in the party even as he’s not associated with either side of them.
Micah Uetricht
Can you talk about your thesis about a weak Republican Party and a lack of real organizing by capital, and how these play out during his candidacy and then his two terms as president?
Paul Heideman
Trump has the ability to finance his own campaign in the primaries. And so even though basically all of business is against Trump in the primaries, he’s able to raise so much money just from himself that it doesn’t hurt him that much. And then once he wins, business really deserts the Republican Party.
A lot of traditional Republican funders, some of the party’s biggest donors, refuse to open their wallets to Trump. And by August of 2016, Trump is having to lay off campaign staff. His campaign is on the verge of disintegrating. And he’s finally able then to convince a couple of key Republican billionaires, like the Mercers, a very rich finance family from Long Island, to fund his campaign in a major way.
And they are able to allow his campaign to limp through the rest of the fall. But basically everybody is operating with the assumption that Trump is going to lose in 2016. It’s going to be a disaster, and then the party will move on. That’s the operating assumption of everyone.
Trump’s campaign team is telling him, “Look, you’re going to lose this election.” And as a result, in 2016 in November, Trump doesn’t have a victory speech written on election day. He has to write one on the spot. He had actually been trying to fuel up the plane to go to Monte Carlo with Melania Trump after they lost.
He had conceived of his race as what he called the “greatest infomercial in the history of the world.” He’s like, “This’ll just be a great opportunity to present my brand and to do something next after The Apprentice,” basically.
Micah Uetricht
Which has kind of still proven to be true.
He just also won the presidency.
Paul Heideman
Yeah, exactly. So he wins the presidency, which is a real surprise, and this leads to this kind of situation where the Republican establishment is now coming in and saying, “Okay, we have to work with him. Maybe we can contain him.” And for most of his first term, they are able to contain Trump in various ways.
I mean, just the turnover of staff in his first administration is extraordinary, as all of these people just keep resigning, and it leads to bureaucratic paralysis, and they’re just not able to get that much done. The things they are able to get done are basically traditional Republican policy proposals like tax cuts and a more aggressive foreign policy toward Russia.
If you just look at the policy outputs of Trump’s first term, in a lot of ways it looks like a generic Republican first term, but that’s because he was constrained in all of these ways. What is happening at the same time as that, though, is that Trump is steadily remaking the party, and the people that oppose him, that don’t stand with him, are getting pushed out.
And that process just continues over the next eight years really, up until today. And really, by 2024, he has taken over the party so completely that there’s no opposition in any organized fashion left. There’s an attempt to mount the Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley primary campaigns in 2024, but once those lose, and lose quite badly, there’s nothing left.
Micah Uetricht
It’s almost like Trump understood the weakness of the party, its infrastructure and its leadership, and all the things that we were talking about in the beginning of this conversation, and just intuitively sensed that he could impose his will upon it; that there actually wasn’t a grown-up in the room who was ever going to step in. He just had the chutzpah to do it, and he obviously successfully achieved that.
Paul Heideman
I think he’s aided by his media presence and his status as this charismatic figure in various media environments, as well as the image of him as this successful businessman. All of that kind of stuff contributes to this cult of Trump in the party that results in a situation where, by 2020, the party doesn’t even write a platform in the election.
They just say, “Whatever Trump says, that’s what we believe.” And in 2024, when Trump says, “You gotta drop the pro-life plank from the platform,” the Republicans drop it. Something that had been unimaginable in the Bush years, that the Republican Party would drop a plank on abortion.
But by 2024, Trump says it, and it goes.
Every Firm for Itself
Micah Uetricht
What did big business do in 2020? It seems like capital really went, in many ways, into the Democratic Party, having just seen the nightmare of Trump’s first term and knowing that he was not going to be an effective advocate for what they wanted done. They went to the Democrats.
Is that right?
Paul Heideman
Yes, that’s right. There’s a massive move to the Democratic Party in 2020, from finance to whatever sector you want to look at, basically. Trump had very little support from business, and that is repeated in 2024. Trump has very, very little support from business in 2024.
The Democrats out-fundraised the Republicans in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024. The thing that’s really different in 2024 is that Trump is able to count on financing from a couple of extremely ideological far-right billionaires. Elon Musk, the Uihlein family, a handful of others donate just an incredible amount of money.
Elon Musk donates $250 million. So Trump’s business support in 2024 has shrunk considerably. It’s narrowed quite a bit compared to someone like George W. Bush, who had very broad business support. But it’s very, very deep. These people are willing to spend on a level that’s basically unprecedented in American politics, and that allows Trump to have enough of a campaign operation in order to win in 2024, combined, of course, with the weaknesses of the Biden administration and the Kamala Harris campaign.
Micah Uetricht
What’s the explanation for the tech tycoons who are standing behind him in the 2025 inauguration in light of everything we’ve been talking about? Why is he able to win over this segment of capital, some of the most important contemporary capitalists in America? What explains their capitulation to his agenda?
Paul Heideman
I think there are a couple things. First, there was always a sector of tech capital that was far right, that bought into various kinds of ideologies about the end of democracy and the rise of philosopher kings and all this kind of nonsense. There was always a sector of tech that was invested in those kind of politics, and they moved to Trump very quickly.
There was also, I think it’s worth remembering, this wave of abor activism and workplace activism more broadly in tech in the late 2010s and early 2020s that I think led a lot of tech executives to say, “Yeah, we have to get these guys under control.”
Micah Uetricht
Marc Andreessen. He’s always talking about this. He’s shocked that his employees were making demands on him.
Paul Heideman
Exactly. And I think that led a number of people to kind of embrace Trump and this new reactionary politics as well. And then the third tendency there is people like Mark Zuckerberg, who were really not terribly ideological and actually had been Democrats for much of the preceding decade.
But once Trump wins in 2024, I think a huge sector of tech capital and capital more broadly says, “Okay, the way to negotiate this is to cut individual deals with Trump, not to try and oppose him or organize opposition to him or anything like that. Instead, we’re going to cut individual deals.”
And they realize that, actually, if you just flatter Trump and give him something shiny, he’s willing to do huge favors for your company.So we’ve seen that again and again. They all line up to kiss the ring, to fund the inauguration, to go in and talk about what a great president and a great leader Donald Trump is.
And in return, they get various forms of clientelist handouts from the White House that are more or less openly corrupt quid pro quos. And I think that this has served to further disorganize capital, because now it’s every man for himself with Trump. Every firm goes and is trying to cut their own deal with Donald Trump rather than organizing any kind of common agenda.
So with the tariffs, for example, rather than companies saying really strongly, “This is a terrible agenda. You need to roll this back. This is hurting us,” they’re all trying to cut individual deals to get their products exempted in various ways. “Oh, no, no, actually, the tariffs aren’t appropriate for my product, Mr President. I think the tariffs are fantastic in general. They’re a great idea. But just for my product, they don’t really work, so can we please have an exemption? And by the way, here’s this donation, and here’s a gold square that can sit on your desk,” or something like that. That’s been what’s happening in business.
If you look at the Supreme Court case with the tariffs, it’s all companies you’ve never heard of, because they’re the ones that don’t have the juice to get an individual deal with Trump. So for them, forthright opposition to the policy is the only avenue left.
Interestingly, since the tariffs have been overturned, you have seen more of the really big companies in the United States starting to launch lawsuits to recover their lost tariff revenue. So I do think that now that that policy has lost, you are seeing more business opposition to it emerge.
The Decider
Micah Uetricht
I wonder what you think about the fact that, on my read, Trump seems completely uninterested at this point in fulfilling many of his core campaign promises, whether it’s bringing prices down for consumers or not going to war in Iran. He’s so underwater on all of these issues. There’s increasing talk of many of his supporters feeling betrayed by what he’s doing.
There’s a rise of prominent figures on the Right who are increasingly willing to say that Trump is betraying many of the core promises that they thought were at the heart of MAGA. What explains all of this? Is it just because he truly doesn’t care about what happens to the Republican Party after he’s gone?
Is he just happy to listen to whomever is in his ear at the last moment and decides to go that way, and he isn’t even thinking about fulfillment of campaign promises? Why is he acting with such disregard for the popular things that he did run on that delivered the 2024 presidency for him?
Paul Heideman
Marxists like to talk about the relative autonomy of the state and the idea that there’s a certain distance between the state and capital. It’s not a one-to-one relationship. And I think Trump is a great study in this concept, in that, when you have someone who has attained as much power as he has, where he has this party that’s totally subordinate to him that runs all the branches of government, his individual psychology does actually start to be more important in explaining things.
And I think fundamentally what Trump loves is getting to be the decider and the dealmaker. That’s what he loves. That’s the most important kind of image of himself. And so something like the tariffs set him up to do that. He’s like, “I’m going to do this tariff war against the entire world and then everyone’s got to come beg me for favors and I get to decide who the winner and who the loser is.”
He kind of wants the presidency to be The Apprentice, where people have to come and compete for his favor. And I think there’s something similar with Iran. I think Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis said, “You just did such a great job with Venezuela. You can do the same thing with Iran and then you get to pick who the new leadership will be and they’ll be totally dependent on you. Won’t that be great?”
So I do think that element of his psychology is important to understanding why he doesn’t care about electability, affordability, any of these things. The people around him — like Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, whose job it is to say, “Well, is this going to be good for the midterms?” — I think they have a very difficult job, frankly. So yeah, I think that understanding Trump’s psychology is important. I’m accordingly very resistant to some of the strain of thought you see on the Left that says, “Well, actually, Trump is really being rational about all of this, and actually there’s a real logic to all of this. He might be evil, but he’s not stupid.”
I just think that with everything we’ve seen over the past year and a half or so, it’s very hard to reconcile that argument with reality. This war was clearly launched with no plan whatsoever, is a total disaster in every way, and is probably going to end with Trump basically pulling out in defeat in one sense or another.
He won’t call it that. He won’t talk in those terms, but that is looking like the most likely end at this point. So I do think that attempts to kind of “sane-wash” Trump, as some have called it, are deeply unconvincing in this moment.
Who Inherits the Party?
Micah Uetricht
And what do you think about the movement on the Right where people like Tucker Carlson, for example, are increasingly dissenting on some key parts of what Trump is doing? Some people seem to be trying to set themselves up for future leadership fights within the party. It seems unlikely that we’re going to see a replication of Trumpism without Trump. He really is a once in a generation figure.
But there is going to be somebody who emerges as the leader of the party after Trump, and it seems like we’re starting to see people try to stake out different lanes in that future fight right now. So what is your read on how these things are beginning to play out, and how these figures like Carlson and others are staking out a sort of Trumpist approach but with some key distinctions, and in some ways trying to be — on paper, in terms of their policy agenda — more Trump than Trump himself, or trying to stay true to what they consider to be the real heart of MAGA?
Paul Heideman
I think one lesson of the first Trump administration is Trump is the only one who gets out alive. Everyone else’s career gets destroyed by it. If you just go through the first Trump administration and look at who served in it, they’re all out to pasture now. None of them are really political players anymore, with the exception of someone like Stephen Miller, who’s kind of a lamprey attached to the shark.
I think we’re likely to see something similar play out with this administration, that the people in the administration are political goners. I think J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio are the two most likely to try and inherit the party. They’re the Donald and Eric Trumps in the cabinet.
And I think that they are just going to be so attached to all of the disasters of the administration that it’s going to be really, really hard for them, just as it would be really hard for anyone attached to the George W. Bush administration to succeed him in 2008. So I think we’re going to see some real Republican knife fighting over the next few years as people try to position themselves.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone like Thomas Massie makes a halfway credible run for the nomination in 2028. I doubt he’ll win, but I think he could easily be one of the top three. And if you told someone in 2020 that Thomas Massie might be a top three Republican candidate, they’d look at you like you’re insane.
But I think someone like him or Carlson. And I really think that whoever it is who rises to the top will be someone who can distance themself most effectively from the administration and from the disasters that it’s creating. I think that’s going to be an increasing trend, particularly after the midterms this year; we’re going to see Trump’s hold on the party really start to splinter and look a lot more fragile than it has.
Micah Uetricht
Eu acredito em tudo o que você está dizendo. Acho que voltaria ao que mencionei anteriormente para dizer que isto não me faz necessariamente sentir melhor ou mais confiante sobre o que o futuro político me reserva, dado que o seu livro é todo sobre estes ciclos destas lutas intrapartidárias com facas, e tenho a certeza de que, na altura em que estavam a acontecer, as pessoas da esquerda ou dos liberais estavam entusiasmadas por ver este tipo de luta acontecer e pensar que isso pressagia a ruína para o Partido Republicano.
Mas então, na verdade, esta nova geração de direitistas ainda mais reaccionários assume posições de liderança e ocasionalmente ganha eleições. Especialmente se tudo isto estiver a acontecer contra um Partido Democrata que dirige alguém como Gavin Newsom como sua figura de proa. Poderíamos ver todas estas lutas internas feias dentro do Partido Republicano, e poderíamos ver verdadeiras disputas sobre onde o partido deveria ir, mas se eles enfrentarem alguém no Partido Democrata que é um defensor do status quo, não há garantia de que o Partido Republicano não continuará a dominar a política neste país.
Paulo Heideman
Sim. Penso que a diminuição da capacidade do Partido Republicano para forjar consenso entre os seus diferentes elementos constituintes irá tornar as coisas eleitorais mais difíceis para eles, pelo menos no curto prazo.
Ao mesmo tempo, se for uma corrida entre Gavin Newsom e Tucker Carlson em 2028, penso que será um verdadeiro pesadelo para a esquerda, para o país e, basicamente, para a civilização humana. Mas também acho que você está certo ao dizer que veremos uma radicalização crescente do Partido Republicano.
Acho que o anti-semitismo aberto se tornará muito mais comum no Partido Republicano. E penso que um abandono total da adesão a elementos do tipo de religião cívica americana em torno da moralidade, do multiculturalismo, etc., irá provavelmente tornar-se ainda mais intenso no partido nos próximos anos, e veremos algumas coisas que poderiam ter sido inimagináveis nos anos Bush, por exemplo, para serem adoptadas por políticos republicanos proeminentes.
Portanto, sim, não vejo qualquer fim para este ciclo de radicalização no partido, apenas uma manifestação cada vez mais caótica e turbulenta no curto prazo.
Colaboradores
Paul Heideman é PhD em Estudos Americanos pela Rutgers University–Newark. Mais recentemente, ele é o autor de Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos.
Micah Uetricht é o editor da Jacobin. Ele é o autor de Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity e co-autor de Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
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