The party should be listening to former Tea Party stalwart Joe Walsh. No, really.
In the motley ranks of Never Trump Republicans, I always harbored a guilty fondness for former Illinois GOP Representative Joe Walsh. An ardent recruit to the anti-government Tea Party movement, Walsh was never afflicted with nostalgia for a gauzy bipartisan Beltway consensus—the drug of choice for many Never Trump apostles, from right-wing pundits Bret Stephens and Max Boot to ineffective GOP hangers-on in Congress like Maine Senator Susan Collins and former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. Because Walsh launched his political career as an ideological brawler, he understand that the Trump crisis was something that the country needed to fight its way out of—and that traditional liberal household gods, such as the courts and the sainted norms of constitutional governance, were largely mirages increasingly averse to the conduct of politics itself.
Now Walsh, who had been calling himself an independent after his post-Trump defection from the GOP, has announced that he’s joining up with the Democrats. His testimony, via a Substack post, is worth lingering over at a moment when the Democratic Party finds itself in the political wilderness without a compass.
Walsh’s core lament is a familiar Never Trumpers’ refrain: To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, he didn’t leave the Republican Party; the party left him. The MAGA cult of Trump, Walsh writes, is a mortal threat to our democracy: “Anyone who cares about the Constitution cannot sit by and watch as fundamental American values—the rule of law, democracy, pluralism—are attacked. Daily. To defeat my former party and defend democracy, we must do something different. We must assemble a broad coalition of moderates, progressives, and, yes, even conservatives.”
More than that, though, Walsh understands that redeeming American democracy isn’t an exercise left to the courts or the seminar room. “For democracy and the rule of law to persevere, Democrats must succeed,” he writes. “I want to help. I want to help Democrats win. And to win, Democrats must fight. I mean really fight. I’ll say it one more time: Democrats must FIGHT.” Here is where Walsh’s Tea Party background is especially useful for a Democratic Party operating on procedural and meritocratic autopilot to hear: “Republicans fight to the death to win politically, and they’ve always believed Democrats won’t. I’ve been a fighter my whole life, and if there’s ever been a moment when Americans are crying out for a Democratic Party with some fight, it’s now.”
Walsh’s critique echoes that of another, earlier GOP defector: the economist Bruce Bartlett, a former Treasury official with the Reagan administration, who called out the GOP drift into authoritarianism during the Bush years. Bartlett is a friend of mine who contributed a closely reasoned dissection of the GOP as a power-mad cult back when I edited The Baffler and wrote a regular online column for me at The New Republic. I always found it telling that he hadn’t been feted as a prominent Never Trumper. His sin was akin to the early recruits of the US Abraham Lincoln brigade fighting the rise of Francisco Franco in Spain, whom myopic liberals of the Second World War and the Cold War dismissed as “premature antifascists.” Bartlett, by breaking with an antidemocratic and thuggish Republican Party in the early aughts, was essentially a premature Never Trumper in the dimwitted political pantheon of Beltway consensus thinking.
Bartlett’s defection came at a high professional cost. He was fired by the right-wing think tank where he’d worked for the prior decade. He was also ostracized at Republican social events, and denounced by longtime friends; one, the supply-side economist official Steven Moore, who had panned Bartlett’s anti-Bush book for The Wall Street Journal, blurted out, “You were right about Bush” to him at a DC party; it was, Bartlett writes, the last interaction he had with his former colleague.
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Bartlett, like Walsh, has long argued that Democrats need to hit back at MAGA Republicans with a simple plan to defeat them, rather than a plan to govern meekly alongside them. During the first Trump term, Bartlett contended that in order to defeat the authoritarian-pilled GOP over the long haul, Democrats needed to adopt the tactics of the Republican Party that he came of political age in:
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there was a steady stream of Democrats who became Republicans, following in the footsteps of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who defected in 1964. Republicans were generous to those crossing the aisle. Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado were allowed to keep their seniority after going over to the GOP, rendering the decision all but cost-free to their careers. By contrast, when Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon switched from the GOP to the Democratic Party in 1955, he lost all his seniority and went to the bottom of the seniority list, losing valuable committee assignments in the process.
In a similar vein, conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s eagerly embraced former Communists, such as Whittaker Chambers. Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin says that these apostates from the left were extremely valuable because they understood the left’s vulnerabilities much better than those on the right did. When I went to work on Capitol Hill as a Republican in the 1970s, much of the best political and policy advice I could find came from a group of former leftists affiliated with a small journal called The Public Interest, edited by one-time Trotskyite Irving Kristol.
Walsh, unlike Bartlett, is still a hard-line conservative in some respects—a dedicated fiscal hawk and gun-rights advocate, among other things. But he also writes that he’s “opened my eyes and listened to people who don’t think like me. And by doing so, I gained a greater understanding of and appreciation for LGBTQ issues, structural racism, the need for empathetic immigration reform, the dangers of climate change, and the role government must play to help care for the neediest and most vulnerable among us.” Yet he attributes much of his political conversion to one central development: “I’m pissed off.”
I’m pissed off at the ignorant, lying madman in the White House who’s using his position to only enrich himself and his fat cat friends, while middle-class folks and small business owners and get screwed by his chaos. I’m pissed off at all of his GOP enablers, my former colleagues, who’ve abandoned what’s right to remain in power. I’m pissed off that he and his enablers have lied repeatedly to his voters year after year, and these good folks who’ve been lied to are gonna feel real pain—and Trump and his GOP enablers don’t give a damn. I’m pissed because the opposition party, the Democratic Party, should be every bit as righteously pissed off as me.
Maybe Walsh and Bartlett can form a pissed-off caucus within the Never Trump coalition, and call themselves “right-on-time antifascists.” And now that they’re aligned with the Democrats, perhaps Democratic leaders can at long last, absorb and act on the lessons of their own sojourns on the right.
