I have spent a lifetime watching American politics twist and turn, sometimes toward justice, sometimes toward cruelty, often in the messiness in between. But lately I cannot shake the observation that the Republican Party no longer seems to have any grand vision for our country.
There was a time when parties staked out sweeping goals. Franklin Roosevelt spoke of the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society. Even Ronald Reagan, love him or hate him, painted a picture of smaller government and unrestrained markets as the path to prosperity. That kind of forward-looking project is absent now. What fills the vacuum instead feels like petty malevolence, as though the engine runs not on hope or ambition, but on grievance and spite.
When I listen to Republican leaders today, I rarely hear talk about what they want America to be ten years from now. I hear instead about what they want to tear down, who they want to punish, and which cultural enemies they want to humiliate. Policy takes a back seat to performance. If something can be turned into a weapon against the other side, it is seized. If it can be dramatized for cable news or YouTube clips, it is exaggerated. Governing, in the sense of solving the country’s problems, is almost an afterthought. It has become politics as theater, with cruelty written into the script.
This is not just my impression. Political scientists and journalists who follow the Republican Party closely have been saying the same thing. Thomas Edsall of the New York Times has written that the party’s main source of cohesion now is resentment and fear of change, not a constructive program. Jason Stanley, in his book How Fascism Works, notes that authoritarian movements normalize cruelty by making it part of political identity. When a party positions itself as the defender of a certain cultural group, punishing outsiders becomes the very point. It explains why so much of what we see coming out of Republican legislatures is symbolic, punitive, and disconnected from practical governance.
Consider the fixation on banning books. Does removing novels from school libraries really solve the economic or social challenges of the twenty-first century? Or the obsession with restricting the rights of LGBTQ citizens. Do such moves make working people’s lives better, make healthcare affordable, or strengthen communities? Of course not. But they provide theater. They allow politicians to perform righteousness to their base. They create enemies to rally against. And they provide endless spectacle, which is what modern politics seems increasingly to be about.
The French theorist Guy Debord once described modern society as a “society of the spectacle,” where appearances and performances matter more than substance. Politics becomes a show that is staged for the public, and the show itself is treated as reality. That idea feels all too relevant now. When Donald Trump transformed American politics into reality TV, he did not invent this dynamic, but he perfected it. His rallies were not forums for policy discussion. They were variety shows of grievance, designed to thrill and outrage. And now many Republican politicians have learned the lesson. Why govern when you can perform? Why build when you can destroy?
What worries me most is not just the cruelty, though that is bad enough. It is the sense of aimlessness that underlies it. A movement without a constructive purpose becomes dangerous precisely because it has nothing to lose. If your only goal is to make your enemies miserable, then any tactic can be justified. That is how shutdowns of government become routine bargaining chips. That is how basic institutions of democracy are turned into weapons. That is how politics becomes not a contest of visions but a contest of who can inflict more pain.
There is also, I think, an element of boredom here. Politics has always had its share of opportunists and scoundrels, but they at least had some project to occupy their energies. Today’s Republicans, lacking such a project, seem to amuse themselves by pushing boundaries for their own sake. What outrageous bill can be introduced? What conspiracy theory can be floated? What insult can be hurled across the aisle? The aim is not to make America better, but to keep the drama going, to stave off the emptiness that comes when you have nothing larger to fight for.
The country deserves more than this. Even people who disagree profoundly on policy should be able to articulate what kind of nation they want to hand down to their children. But when that conversation is absent, the only thing left is the politics of destruction. And destruction, once normalized, takes on its own momentum. It is always easier to smash than to build, easier to divide than to unite, easier to inflame than to inspire.
I think often about how much energy ordinary people spend on trying to build something meaningful. Families raising children. Teachers shaping the next generation. Workers holding communities together with their labor. Volunteers giving their time to keep local institutions alive. These people are building. They may disagree about politics, but they are engaged in acts of construction. Shouldn’t our leaders do the same? Shouldn’t the people we send to Washington be as committed to building as we are?
There is still time for Republicans to rediscover the idea of a grand project. Conservatism does not have to mean cruelty. It can mean stewardship, responsibility, prudence. It can mean conserving the good in our institutions while working to improve the rest. But it would require leaders who are less interested in play-acting grievance and more interested in the real work of governance. And it would require voters who demand more than theater from those who ask for their trust.
Until then, we remain trapped in this strange cycle, where one of our major parties has reduced itself to petty malevolence, mistaking cruelty for strength, boredom for politics, and spectacle for vision. America deserves better than that. We deserve leaders who understand that history remembers the builders, not the destroyers. And unless we insist on something greater, we will continue to drift in the aimlessness of a politics that has forgotten its purpose.
Disclaimer: Jim Powers writes Opinion Columns. The views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing Company or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.