How the Culture War Co-Opted a Free-Market Zealot Francis Wilkinson | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes

 

How the Culture War Co-Opted a Free-Market Zealot

Analysis by Francis Wilkinson | Bloomberg

July 26, 2023 at 7:50 a.m. EDT

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 30: House Freedom Caucus memebers (L-R) Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) announce they would oppose the deal to raise the debt limit during a news conference with fellow caucus members outside the U.S. Capitol on May 30, 2023 in Washington, DC. The conservative lawmakers urged their fellow House Republicans to vote against the compromise between Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and President Joe Biden that would avert a government default. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America)

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“We’re all about economic growth.” So says the website of the Club for Growth, the political action group that Politico once called “the pre-eminent institution promoting Republican adherence to a free-market, free-trade, anti-regulation agenda.”

Indeed, the Club was founded more than two decades ago as a political engine for ultra-free-marketers. But in a July 20 “strategy memo” from Club for Growth Action, its super PAC, you can see what that entails in the Year of Our MAGA 2023. The group announced that it is prepared to spend $20 million in the 2024 election cycle to support a group of House Republicans that it calls the “Patriot 20.”

The Patriot 20 includes such leading economic thinkers as Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who failed to vote on the debt ceiling this year after arriving at the Capitol once the roll call was closed, and Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, a former dentist who is now a full-time conspiracy theorist with an uncanny habit of linking arms with anti-semites. Others on the list include Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican who takes his job as a legislator so seriously that he introduced more than 500 bills in a single day earlier this year; the shape-shifting Representative Anna Paulina Luna, whose personal history seems unusually inventive; and Scott Perry, the congressman from Pennsylvania who was an especially eager supporter of Donald Trump’s attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of the US.

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Like other big players in Republican politics, the Club appears to have concluded that politicians whose only skill is setting fires, or pouring gasoline on those set by others, can be useful allies. “That’s sort of their strategy — that the prairie fire is going to help us because we’re going to burn down some things we want to burn down, or the smoke’s going to confuse enough that we can get some things done,” said Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina. “But it’s just such a dangerous strategy. Because you cannot control where the prairie fire is going.”

Of course, Trumpism, and the people drawn to it, has made it increasingly difficult to participate in national Republican politics without consorting with some questionable characters. But the Club for Growth had initially set out to be a beachhead restricted to economic libertarianism. It was agnostic on the most contentious social issues, such as abortion, which it ceded to other factions in the GOP coalition. Over time, however, the Club has become just another vector for far-right culture warriors and agitprop performance artists, albeit one fueled by vast sums of money. 

Democracy skeptic Peter Thiel and right-wing anti-tax crusader Richard Uihlein are among the billionaires who have funded the group, which spends millions every election cycle on behalf of right-wing candidates. It may be that candidates who think mostly about their next shock video or conspiracy tweet are not so much the candidates whom the Club is stuck with, but rather precisely the candidates whom the Club prefers.

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Club leader David McIntosh has had a sometimes bumpy relationship with former President Trump, but he also signed a letter after the 2020 election tacitly validating Trump’s lies about fraud and encouraging Trump to keep up his bogus fight for “election integrity.” Like election lies, culture war can be a useful distraction from deeply unpopular economic policies that serve the very wealthiest people in the nation. Those happen to be the policies that the Club holds most dear.

As University of Michigan political scientist Robert Mickey told me a few months ago, Republicans can’t make credible economic appeals to voters because GOP policies are designed to benefit the likes of Thiel and Uihlein. As a result, “they double down on right-wing populist appeals.”

Maintaining a bunch of raging MAGA heads and conspiracy crackpots in the House GOP conference is bad for democracy and governance. Many in the Patriot 20 appear dedicated to making the House ungovernable — even for conservatives — under Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But rage and reaction may be good, at least short term, for the billionaires who fund the Club for Growth. They seem less interested in “economic growth” writ large than in personal power and very personal wealth. For the Club for Growth, paeans to the free market are all well and good. But a stable of legislators who double as circus performers is apparently better.