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Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) didn’t waste any time claiming that he was leaving to spend more time with his family, and he didn’t say it was time to pass the torch of leadership to a younger generation of Americans — the usual explanations of electorally vulnerable politicians. He didn’t pretend that his sudden retirement announcement this week was inspired by anything other than a pessimistic assessment of his chances in next year’s Arizona Republican primary.
Flake saw himself facing an unavoidable choice between his conscience and his career. (Two recent polls showed him losing the primary by more than 20 percentage points.) The senator said he was “freeing myself from the political considerations that consume far too much bandwidth and would cause me to compromise far too many principles.”
Before the announcement, Flake’s Senate seat had been seen as the one Democrats would be most likely to pick up in 2018. It’s too soon to say how his retirement changes that calculus. But his departure does confirm that the civil war between Republican politicians and non-officeholding actors — notably in the conservative media — is still raging, and maybe intensifying, a decade after its emergence.
The increasingly bitter divide between the elected and unelected wings of the Republican Party pits traditional leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell against media personalities like Breitbart chair (and ex-Trump adviser) Steve Bannon — two men who are now openly attacking each other as they fight for control of the GOP.
Media attention has focused on Flake’s scathing criticism of Trump on the Senate floor and in a subsequent newspaper opinion piece, in which he implied that Trump’s actions in office represent a threat to American democracy. And perhaps such forceful condemnations of an incumbent president, expressed by a senator of the same party, may reduce Trump’s chances of reelection.
That seems to be the story that much of the media is telling. But the implications of Flake’s actions for intra-Republican battles may be more important. He is only the latest prominent casualty of a longer clash that previously claimed the political careers of prominent Republican officeholders, including veteran Sens. Bob Bennett and Dick Lugar and House leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor. That conflict both predated and helped fuel Trump’s rise to the top of the party.
It’s not really about an angry Republican “base”
The turmoil in Republican ranks is often described as pitting the party’s leadership class against an unruly popular “base.” But as scholars of public opinion often point out, few citizens develop strong political opinions or are mobilized to political action without influence from trusted authorities. What’s changed is whom voters are listening to: Unelected elite actors, especially conservative media figures, are gaining influence over the behavior of Republican voters while officeholders and candidates are losing it. (Despite occasional suggestions otherwise, no equivalent purge campaign exists in today’s Democratic Party.)
A number of self-styled “constitutional” conservative elites like Flake were dismayed and baffled by Trump’s ascendance to the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, but Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and combative manner found fertile ground among a Republican primary electorate primed by years of aggressive conservative media messages. Conservative media outlets have incessantly painted conventional party leaders as overly accommodating to liberalism, ineffective in achieving major rightward policy shifts, and inattentive to the costs and threats of contemporary social change. In such a context, the Trump campaign’s lack of public support among Republican politicians during the 2016 presidential primaries turned out to be far from fatal to his popularity with party voters.
Flake presents himself as far more faithful to conservative ideological principles than the current leader of his party. Indeed, his record in office is staunchly right of center in nearly every substantive respect. According to one political science measure derived from analysis of roll-call votes, he is one of the three or four most conservative members of the Senate — and he is a well-known crusader against legislative earmarks.
Yet Flake’s sharp personal criticisms of Trump, his sponsorship of bipartisan immigration reform measures, and his relatively mild-mannered rhetoric and demeanor — which contrast dramatically with the perpetual expressions of outrage characteristic of ideologically aligned media — put him out of step with the current Republican zeitgeist. “It’s not enough to be conservative anymore,” Flake told CNN. “You have to be angry about it … and I just can’t go there.”
Flake’s departure represents a particularly alarming development for other Republican members of Congress, confirming that even ideologically loyal incumbents are vulnerable to electoral purge. Every day it becomes clearer that the insurgency led by activists and media figures on the right against Republican officeholders was not merely a byproduct of conservative frustration during the Obama years, destined to fade once the party regained power.
Indeed, the insurgency has gained a key strategic asset, electing a president who is himself an unreliable ally of his own party’s congressional wing and whose former chief strategist, Bannon, and favorite cable news host, Sean Hannity, have both proclaimed their support for toppling the current Senate majority leader and driving multiple additional Republican incumbents from office. (While allies of McConnell have formed a Super PAC to strike back against Bannon, highlighting his support for white nationalism, the group will not attack Trump, according to the Washington Post.)
Support for an insurgent conservative media — followed by blowback
Many Republicans cheered the emergence of the modern conservative media universe during the 1990s and early 2000s as a necessary counterweight to the perceived ideological bias of mainstream journalism. They may regret that support today. Over the past decade, it’s become clear the conservative media can be weaponized against Republican politicians even more easily than against Democrats, since most of its audience is far more likely to participate in a Republican primary than to consider voting Democratic in a general election.
While the conservative insurgency has few sympathizers in Washington, it is difficult to deny the argument that incumbent Republican politicians have often failed to deliver on their promises — for instance, to achieve a revolutionary reduction in the size of government and a revival of traditionalist cultural norms. Tellingly, Flake’s retirement speech on the Senate floor devoted much more attention to the veneration of conservative principles than to conservative accomplishments during his years in office.
Flake’s withdrawal from the 2018 race, and his blistering attack on Trump’s fitness for the presidency and adherence to democratic values, raise the key question of whether his opposition to the current administration will move from rhetoric to legislative action during his remaining 15 months in office. Some critics, especially on the left, are already calling for Flake, along with other Trump skeptics like Bob Corker and John McCain, to use their procedural leverage in a closely divided Senate to limit Trump’s executive power and deny him legislative victories.
But such obstruction, whatever its merits, would provide further ammunition to the charge that a Trumpian conservative victory is being undermined by a treacherous and corrupt Republican establishment. Flake portrays himself as guarding the flame of true conservatism against a president whom he describes as an impostor to the cause. But the conservative authorities who wield the greatest influence over the Republican electorate — Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Laura Ingraham — see the dispute between Trump and his Senate critics in precisely the opposite terms: They interpret any congressional challenge to the president as an illegitimate rejection of genuine conservative populism by an out-of-touch class of party elites.
Flake could challenge Trump more aggressively, but that would only prove the insurgents’ point
Should Flake take a hard stand against Trump, he will thus further fuel an intramural Republican conflict that seems likely at this stage to outlast Trump’s own presidency. To be sure, this factional warfare does not threaten the Republican Party’s ability to survive, or even to gain and hold power. For example, the Democrats of the 1930s and ’40s were very successful at winning elections even as they were perennially riven.
But the political lessons that conservative activists and voters ultimately take from the Trump presidency will depend on whether they hold Trump responsible for his failures in office, or whether they see him instead as a victim of disloyal Republican politicians. Which view wins out will determine the direction the party takes even after Trump himself is no longer at its head.
For the moment, the voices that speak the loudest inside the GOP are solidly behind Trump, and any politician who publicly dares to disagree runs the risk of becoming the next Jeff Flake.
David A. Hopkins is an associate professor of political science at Boston College. His latest book is Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He blogs about American politics at HonestGraft.com.
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