“Never attribute to malice that which can better be explained by incompetence” is a variation of the adage Hanlon’s Razor. When it comes to the modern conservative movement, it is difficult to discern where the malice ends and the incompetence begins.
There has been much to criticize about Republican rule for many decades: a combination of cruelty and ineffectuality tainted conservative responses to everything from the HIV/AIDS crisis under Ronald Reagan to the invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush. The travesties of our era, when all but a few Republicans show fealty to former president Donald Trump, deserve their own place in the annals of incompetent malfeasance.
The spiraling descent of conservatism as a governing philosophy is only accelerating.
The GOP House Majority is so fraught with dissent, so animated by belligerence, and so lacking in policy acumen that it has passed a record-low number of bills. Last year was the least productive legislative year since the Great Depression. It saw the passage of only 27 bills. The culture of callousness that started in the 1990s with the late broadcaster Rush Limbaugh and the rise of House Speaker Newt Gingrich was at least relatively productive. Their heirs are politicians like Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who preen for Fox News and Truth Social rather than solve America’s problems. The mere election of a House Speaker last year was a comedy rather than a coronation as one candidate after another fell to internal backbiting until the House GOP Conference settled on Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Incompetence, brinksmanship, and caving to the Republican Conference’s most narcissistic and ideological members is the name of the game.
Government by threat of shutdown became commonplace because conservative politics disdains compromise, even if it means hamstringing the U.S. economy. House Republicans are hurtling the country toward yet another shutdown due to the same dynamics that have created unprecedented leadership crises in the House. Despite the recent agreement on a stopgap measure, this spring, House Speaker Johnson must determine whether to work with Democrats and the few reasonable Republicans left to pass a government funding bill of more than a few weeks’ duration—and risk losing his job—or cave to the extremists in his caucus.
Conservatives at the state level also can’t shoot straight. After the Supreme Court eliminated the 50-year-old Constitutional right to an abortion, red states virtually banned abortion and insisted on the personhood of fetuses and embryos. But these cruel policies also lacked forethought: the Alabama Supreme Court took the Alabama legislature at its word and ruled destroying frozen embryos in IVF clinics was a violation of embryo rights. Now, Republicans are in a madcap scramble to show that they favor the continued legality of the IVF procedures that have allowed so many families to have children while still maintaining that each fertilized embryo is a person. Some consistent conservatives celebrated the Alabama ruling, but Republicans are in damage control mode, trying to carve out an exemption for IVF clinics even though it proves the insincerity of their belief that life begins at conception.
Red states are also facing the consequences of cruelty and incompetence in immigration policy. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s immigration policies are negatively impacting small businesses across the state. Crops have withered in Georgia and other states due to Trumpist border policies. Migrants are dying at the border due to hateful and irrational conservative policies in states like Texas that have ignored federal law and the Supreme Court by pursuing their border policy. Rather than sign on to a border security bill negotiated in good faith by the Biden administration, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma (the designated negotiator tapped by departing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have chosen to let the border issue fester in the hopes that this will carry them to control of the House, Senate, and White House come January.
Liberals should take no comfort in the alloy of mendacity and incompetence that defines today’s conservative politicians. Eventually, they may find the means to achieve their aims. That’s certainly the goal of the 2025 Project, which is headed by dozens of conservative think tanks, aiming to end more than a century of federal civil service protections to give a Republican president the unfettered ability to fill the federal workforce with cronies and ideologues. For now, such a coup remains beyond the GOP grasp so long as Democrats control the White House and the Senate. In 2025, if the cruelly incompetent control both chambers of Congress and the presidency, then even the feckless can rule adroitly enough to enact a nationwide abortion ban, repeal the Affordable Care Act, ignore our NATO obligations, jettison climate change investments, and wreak unforeseen damage to our country and the world.
