The Republican crackup: A clash between liberty and democracy

The old Republican coalition has split. Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris. George W. Bush wrote in Condoleezza Rice on his 2020 ballot and has not made an endorsement in 2024.

More than a hundred pre-Trump era Republican officials signed an open letter endorsing Harris, citing Trump’s record on national security and the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

The reason for this split is that Trump supporters care about liberty but not democracy, whereas old-guard figures like Cheney care about democracy but not liberty.

Base Republicans tend to roll their eyes when Never-Trumpers insist that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” but there’s a grain of truth to what they are saying. The Cheneys and Bushes are right that Trump disrespects democratic norms.

For example, Trump retweeted a video suggesting that he would run for more than two terms. Although he did not encourage the Jan. 6 capitol riot, he also did not immediately tell his supporters to stop rioting.

Trump stands out among modern presidents in his willingness to seek friendly relations with autocrats like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. While other presidents have been willing to befriend autocracies like Saudi Arabia, pre-Trump presidents always framed these relationships with autocrats as temporary alliances against a greater authoritarian threats (for example, the USSR).

It should be said that the Republican base would distinguish between these democratic norms and America’s founding principles. James Madison and John Adams were explicitly critical of democracy. America’s Founders sought friendly relations with all foreign nations, including those led by autocrats.

The Republican base has always had a libertarian streak. In the 1950s and 60s, conservative grassroots organization The John Birch Society explicitly argued that liberty is more important than democracy. Peter Thiel, one of the most active donors and organizers in Republican politics and an early Trump backer wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

On this view, the purpose of the Constitution is to make government as small as possible and to affirm man's rights to life, liberty and property. The parts of the Constitution detailing the separation of powers, the procedures for changing administrations, and the rest, are peripheral to its core purpose. Democracy and separation of powers are not ends in themselves but only means to the end of securing natural rights.

Old-guard Republican elites have a totally different view of the Constitution. Liz Cheney’s new book about her “fight to defend the Constitution” does not even mention the First, Second, Fourth or Tenth Amendments. To Cheney, defending the Constitution is all about following procedures. The Constitution is synonymous with the government, the order, the way things are. Any deviation from that order is “chaos” and “instability.”

Cheney’s view also places a high importance on preventing the concentration of power in one man. To be fair, she would probably say that the prevention of autocracy is related to a concern about liberty — maybe she thinks that autocrats will inevitably start to violate the rights of their citizens. But if this is a concern about liberty, it’s an indirect one.

To Cheney, the specter of autocracy is more concerning than any particular violation of natural rights. Natural rights are not sacred in her view, democracy is.

From reading the book, one gets the impression that Liz Cheney, unlike the Republican base, does not believe that most of the federal government’s current activity is unconstitutional. More disturbingly, Cheney’s book gives the impression that she is not even aware of the argument that the vast majority of the federal government’s activity from the New Deal onward violates the plain meaning of the Constitution.

Cheney lost her 2022 primary by a 38-point margin.

The political actions of the old-guard Republican elite match their pro-democracy but not pro-liberty ideology. George Bush, Dick Cheney and the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) supported the Patriot Act. Liz Cheney opposed any effort to rein in mass surveillance of American citizens. To the Republican base, Edward Snowden is a hero. Liz Cheney describes Snowden as a “traitor.”

It’s not just about surveillance and foreign policy. The Bush administration expanded Medicare Part D, ballooned the federal deficit and bailed out the banks in 2008. Donald Trump is not the perfect pro-liberty candidate but he more or less took the pro-liberty side on COVID lockdowns, and he followed through on his pledge to reduce regulation.

Trump has also pledged to gut the bloated administrative state by firing thousands of Schedule F employees, making him the first president in modern history to take serious action against the federal bureaucracy.

The extent to which a Republican is willing to tolerate Trump’s sometimes erratic tendencies depends on his or her opinion of the government pre-Trump. Those who thought that the pre-2016 government was flawed but fundamentally sound are concerned by Trump’s flirtation with strongman-ism. Those who thought that the pre-2016 government was already corrupt beyond redemption are willing to support politicians with concerning personal qualities, as long as they take action against the regime.

Despite their silly demeanor, old-guard GOP figures like Liz Cheney really are correct that Donald Trump flouts democratic norms. Commenters from the Republican base sometimes deny the allegations of Cheney et others, but those commenters should make a different argument.

The real reason we in the Republican base don’t care about Trump’s norm-breaking is that we don’t care about those norms. We have always believed that liberty is more important than democracy.

Simon Laird lives in D.C. and works for a major conservative political organization. He has written for Aporia magazine.