A photo of Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in 2019 during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing – a great example of where inter-faction cooperation is needed in the GOP. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
If modern Republicans want victory, we need to be willing to make deals with those we dislike.
Henry Kissinger famously played a strategy game called Diplomacy. Despite his being such a well-known public figure on the international stage and in history, the game never gained wide popularity domestically. All that aside, I think this strategy has an important lesson for today’s Grand Old Party.
For all who don’t know – Diplomacy is a multiplayer war game where players are encouraged to either make deals with one another, gang up on each other, or lie and betray each other for victory. Every player in a diplomacy game understands that every other actor’s goal is to defeat him. Furthermore, every player understands that every other actor knows that he has the same malign intentions towards them. Despite this, the entire game is predicated on the hope of cooperation. It is the skill of negotiation with foes that is badly needed for cooperation in the political Right today.
After the twin events of Trump’s stark over-performance at the polls in 2020 and the Republican success of a Trump-skeptical gubernatorial candidate in Virginia – a state that Trump lost by a wide margin – it is abundantly clear that not only does the Republican party contain two distinct factions, but also that those factions each have substantial political strength.
True, the Tea Party fought the Establishment as early as 2010, but what has changed is the degree of animosity between the factions. Their willingness to do harm to the representatives of opposing Republicans through impeachment votes or committee assignment removals, and to refrain from supporting their internal opponents against the Democrats is alarming, to say the least. A great example of this is the fact that at least some Youngkin voters threw Virginia to Biden. We also saw several Republicans voting to impeach Trump while the congressional GOP leadership voted to oust Liz Cheney and the Nebraska GOP censured Senator Ben Sasse – all indicating that internal Republican disagreements are now threatening the party’s ability to work together against the Left.
Despite the anger and desire for revenge between the GOP factions, we must remember our shared goals.
I think I can say without fear of common contradiction that the first priorities of the Right must be to 1) secure the American people against threats foreign and domestic (crime, Russia, harmful immigration, the PRC, etc.) and 2) to preserve a reasonably sized private sphere where Americans can make their own decisions concerning their own lives without interference from the government.
What we must understand is that these primary goals are shared by the pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions while their disagreements are only on secondary priorities (international trade, decorum, foreign alliances, etc.). These are important disputes, but success in them is of little value without the security and liberty that must win out against the Left’s opposition.
Clearly, reason demands we come to terms on the lesser goals in order to achieve the greater ones.
That is why, to facilitate cooperation between the Republican factions, I asked a pro-Trump friend and an anti-Trump friend to give me a list of their demands for the other side.
My anti-Trump friend’s demands were these:
- Expel Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress
- Publicly state that Trump lost the 2020 election
- Commit to conceding if defeated (after lawsuits)
- Publicly laud whatever anti-Authoritarian uprising occurs abroad
- Make a statement in support of free trade
- Renounce regulatory designs on social media platforms
My pro-Trump friend’s demands were these:
- That Marjorie Taylor Greene only be expelled if Ilhan Omar is also expelled
- That the anti-Trumpists resolve all future disagreements in primaries and behind closed doors
Among these demands, the first two from the anti-Trumpists and the first from the pro-Trumpists are entirely symbolic. I would urge everyone to abandon such requests. If you make them and don’t make a deal, then they lost you the policy gains of an agreement for nothing. Even if you were to make a deal, then somewhere down the line getting those empty gestures will end up costing you real policies. Making such demands evinces the error we must correct: the idea that we must agree on what we care deeply about rather than simply cooperate. We must adopt a spirit of ruthless negotiation, seeking cooperative benefits without regard to the moral worth of our Opposition.
This leaves four demands of substance: pro-Trump candidates must 1) commit to conceding if they lose 2) make a statement in support of free trade and 3) renounce any intent to regulate social media platforms while anti-Trump candidates must 4) express support for all candidates of the Republican party.
The fourth demand is necessary for any conceivable agreement, because without loyalty to our party – unity is lost.
What’s more, the commitment to conceding if defeated would have been a very serious problem for the pro-Trump side if they had been asked before 2020. At that time election security was weak, making a further campaign to fuel voter skepticism necessary to pass security laws. Since those have been enacted, committing to conceding if defeated is reasonable now.
Support for free trade could be expressed in several ways. Dinesh D’Souza (an intellectual prosecuted by Obama and pardoned by Trump) has made the case for tariffs saying that they should only be applied to force foreign countries to lower their tariffs for greater free trade overall. Such a statement should satisfy all sides.
Renouncing social media regulation is the most contentious demand. Anti-Trumpists see it as threatening the private sphere. Trumpists see it as necessary retaliation for deplatforming. I would offer slightly pro-Trump and slightly anti-Trump compromises.
In the pro-Trump version, the Republican candidate would support social media regulation but promise 1) that regulation would only punish all censorship by statute (i.e. Section 230 reform) not create a regulatory agency to decide what censorship is acceptable and 2) that such regulation would never extend to any other industry and is necessitated only by the grave exigency that is the tech companies’ ability to control the modern public square.
In the anti-Trump version, the Republican candidate would reject all forms of internet regulation as opening a Pandora’s box that would only end up being used against us by the Left. He would instead engage in the vigorous promotion of alternative internet platforms and use his campaign to drive traffic towards social media companies that sign an anticensorship pledge or similar.
I suggest that the pro and anti-Trump factions coalesce around a GOP candidate who makes the following commitments:
First, that free trade is good though it may be achieved by realpolitik means. Second, this ideal candidate will not call the legitimacy of the election into question beyond the ruling of the last court if he loses. And, regarding regulation, he will either ban all censorship on only social media or propose purely free-market solutions to the censorship crisis.
All that said, the bottom line is this: Alliance politics is the only path back to victory.