Highlights: As Republican hardliners tossed Speaker Kevin McCarthy out of office and attempted to dictate his replacement, one word kept recurring in their complaints about existing GOP leaders: “uniparty.”
The term crystallizes an idea widespread on the MAGA right: that too many Republican politicians and especially leaders are, on key issues, aligned with Democrats and the Washington establishment, and working against Donald Trump and the right.
“Right now, we are governed by a uniparty that Speaker McCarthy has fused with Joe Biden and Hakeem Jeffries,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said last month.
One key outside ally for Gaetz was Steve Bannon, the former Trump aide and now commentator. Bannon frequently deploys the “uniparty” epithet, as he’d done for years. He’s long tried to purge the GOP of its more conventional members, replacing them with hardliners who will more loyally back Trump and far-right causes.
In many ways, the idea that Kevin McCarthy was indistinguishable from a Democrat seems self-evidently absurd.
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Indeed, “uniparty” is an exaggerated, sloppily conceived concept that’s often deployed as a way to blame the right’s own failures to achieve a conservative policy paradise on some sort of dastardly conspiracy against them by their own leaders.
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These range from major foreign policy questions about the US’s role in the world, to preferences about tactics in government spending battles, to issues at the heart of American democracy — such as whether elections that Donald Trump loses should be certified.
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Politicians and political commentators have long loved a good rhetorical flourish that pits them as plucky underdogs fighting for the interests of the common people against a dastardly, powerful cartel.
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As president, Trump happily embraced conventional Republican policies on many issues (tax cuts, judicial appointments, rolling back regulations) while the GOP establishment moved in his direction on others (party elites largely abandoned their longtime support for immigration reform and free trade deals).
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And Obama aide Ben Rhodes viewed that administration’s foreign policy on Iran and the Middle East as an effort to push back against a “Blob” of entrenched establishment thinking.
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GOP establishment leaders in Congress and on the appropriations committees generally profess that they’d love to cut spending more, but that the activists’ demands and their understanding of politics are simply absurdly unrealistic.
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