Long-time readers know that I occasionally have speculated that the GOP will slowly shrink, not only as a matter of demographics (it’s base being composed mostly of older white males), but due to the mechanics of “purity.” Those who are insufficiently loyal to the current set of principles, or in more primitive circumstances The Leader, are eventually tossed out of the Party. Then the cycle repeats, because that’s how you ensure power – when you’re a paranoid power-monger. Hell, it happened to a friend of mine twenty or thirty years ago, tossed out of the Minnesota Independent-Republicans for being insufficiently conservative.
What I did not foresee, even though it was bloody obvious, is that this would also happen with the associated organizations. RedState is a long-time, almost legendary conservative collective blog founded long edited by Erick Erickson, who is now with The Resurgent. Today, CNN is reporting a drastic cut in its staff by current owner Salem Media. Who took it in the neck?
Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal.
“Insufficiently partisan” was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat.
“They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump,” one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, “how do you define being ‘sufficiently supportive’ of Trump?”
But if it was about politics, it was also about money.
I include the last paragraph to be thorough, although money may not have been a reason so much as an excuse. I expect there will excuses given about removing the deadweight, budgets, and that sort of thing. For me, a couple of thoughts come to mind.
First, if they do use those excuses, they may be sincere, but they’re also signs of failure and doom for RedState, because it’s a signal of the application of a business model to a profoundly non-business entity. Politics is not a business, it’s about winning the right to govern, and then governing effectively. I’ve been through this before and shan’t bore my readers by repeating myself; new readers should find at least some enlightenment here, where I discuss the problems of moving societal sectors’ processes to foreign sectors, and why this generally doesn’t work. This may be the beginning of the end for RedState, if it doesn’t gain a leader (an editor or whatever they call it) who understands what it means to publish, rather than run a business.
Second, this is a signal of how the intellectual political environment of the GOP is slowly sterilizing itself. Intellectual subjects nearly always grow through conflict. In science, for instance, it’s competing hypotheses concerning reality that are measured for congruence with that reality. The reason that sounds nice and easy and clean is because science, ideally, takes an objective approach to these things.
Politics, governance, and that whole lot are not nearly that clean.
But to get on with my argument, a political environment without conflict is a limping movement, a beast that is fighting off a deadly poison[1]. Those who fight the tide are, sometimes, those who are in the business of saving the organization from a major mistake. That is what the Never-Trumpers have been doing, for example. When the people who present reasoned arguments against the current momentum are removed from the arena, it becomes poorer because the other side then doesn’t have to work as hard to justify their side. Their arguments become weak, they are distracted by deadly self-interest, and soon they find themselves to be in a cesspool from which they daren’t leave, because, well, all the usual reasons – wealth, near-wealth, fear of poverty, and their friends – who they really don’t like – are part of the group.
The politics of purity simply means the group becomes smaller, the umbrella less effective. Ask every religious cult that has been afflicted with terms such as blasphemer, and then ask those who did the afflicting. Those who survive the perpetrators or the victims will agree that it was a terrible error which drove them apart – and made them weaker.
The United States has been strong precisely because it’s impure, even though its citizens sometimes hate that. The GOP is, in essence, engaging in anti-American activities, in spirit only, everytime they engage in purifying the movement.
1Oddly enough, in software they say if you’re not fixing bugs in your product, it’s a dead product. Perhaps that’s irrelevant.
