Ben Sasse and the battle over what kind of conservative leads the GOP – Washington Examiner

The expected resignation of Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), who has a lifetime American Conservative Union rating 90.96%, was celebrated by a former and possibly future president who is extremely popular among conservatives.

Liddle Ben Sasse, the lightweight Senator from the great State of Nebraska was nothing but a Fake RINO, Donald Trump wrote on his social media website, and we have enough weak and ineffective RINOs in our midst.

Much of this has to do with Trump, of course. Former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and former Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) were strong fiscal conservatives who got sideways with Trump and are now gone.

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But it isnt just about Trump, even if he played an outsize role in bringing all the Rights family squabbles to the forefront. Increasingly, it is not just about being a conservative. What kind of conservative you are is at least as important.

Sasse and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have nearly identical voting records. They have different stylistic and substantive approaches to conservatism, which cause them to have radically different fanbases.

The distinctions between them may matter little to your average Republican voter, but they attract different staffers and admirers in the pundit class. There is little overlap between people who fantasize about Sasse becoming president of the United States rather than the University of Florida and those who pine for Hawley in 2024.

While this manifests itself most prominently in controversies such as certifying President Joe Bidens election or impeaching Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Sasse and Hawley dont see eye-to-eye on trade, immigration, foreign policy, and Big Tech. They have somewhat different views on the applicability of Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party of today.

Libertarians and neoconservatives, nationalists and old-school Reaganites these factions have little use for each other. They often devote at least as much time to attacking one another as liberals or Democrats. When some conservatives denounce liberalism in 2022, they mean John Locke rather than John Dewey, George Will as much as George McGovern.

Conservatives are turning against each other in part because they have won the battle for control of the Republican Party. The centrists are routed, and liberals in the mold of Jacob Javits, the four-term GOP senator from New York, are as extinct as the Federalists or the Whigs.

As late as 2006, Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), with a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 35.95%, could win a Republican primary against a conservative challenger. He is now in at least his fourth partisan configuration since that election. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) beat his eventual successor, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), in a Republican primary in 2004 despite a 41.86% lifetime ACU rating. Specter died a Democrat.

Moderate Republicanism is now an almost entirely blue-state phenomenon, a safety valve for Democratic excess in places that otherwise would lack a meaningful two-party system. Its adherents can get elected governor or become Cabinet secretaries (in a Democratic administration as much as a Republican one), but their aspirations end there.

Even the surviving examples of this species have adapted to a changing habitat, with many of them resembling Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) without the post-Massachusetts fallback option of a Utah Senate seat, privately more conservative than they can ever admit to their constituents. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote in Reagan for president in 2020, not Nelson Rockefeller.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is arguably the most conservative lawmaker to lead Republicans in that chamber since Robert Taft. He has been savaged by the populist Right as a "Republican in name only" sell-out from the Tea Party to MAGA. Libertarians view him with suspicion despite his burying the hatchet with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). And McConnell may be the last member of the dreaded GOP establishment with any real power left.

In the Reagan years, conservatives wanted small government and tight communities, traditional values and unfettered markets, the mom-and-pop shop (and families were led by mom and pop, terms with clear definitions) to lie down with the Wall Street bank.

The fusionist promise was like the feminist one: You can have it all. Some conservatives, and some women, now fear those promises ring hollow. So if forced to choose, in the Milton Friedman rather than Margaret Sanger sense, what should conservatives prioritize?

Attitude is an important part of this story too. Attend a gathering of national conservatives and ask yourself what unites such disparate elements as right-wing industrial policy proponents, Koch network alumni, reformed neoconservatives and unreconstructed paleoconservatives, Catholic integralists, and Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony. The answer: the view that the Right has been playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules and needs to fight on the Lefts terms, even if that means wielding government power when conservatives possess it.

Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the most recent National Conservatism Conference, understand this. Sasse is no shrinking violet. He accused a president of his own party of kissing dictators butts and questioned whether Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had balls.

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But the MAGA style isnt his. It ultimately turned out not to be former Vice President Mike Pences.

Biden likes to say that this isnt your fathers Republican Party. For once, hes right.

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Ben Sasse and the battle over what kind of conservative leads the GOP - Washington Examiner