The GOP extremism problem

The latest target? U.S. Marines

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One of the reasons that Republicans performed so poorly in the 2022 midterms was because they selected some very prominent and very bad candidates. In particular, they blew what should have been a perfectly good opportunity to pick up the Senate, where candidates tend to get a lot of media attention rather than fading into the woodwork like House candidates do. This led to an amusing moment during the campaign when GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell admitted on camera that “candidate quality” was likely to stop Republicans taking back the upper chamber, whereas they’d probably do okay in the House because nobody really knew who the House candidates were.

Nevertheless, some of the bad candidates got through, and they’ve now returned to wreak havoc on both American politics and the Republican Party. None more so than Tommy Tuberville, the freshly-minted senator from Alabama, and one who has decided that it’s a conservative priority to declare war on [checks notes] the United States Marine Corps.

Seeking association with the military has long been a tactic that Republicans have used to try to wrap themselves in the flag, but since the Trumpian revolution things have gone differently. Some of candidate Trump’s first public controversies - although they seem like five lifetimes ago now - involved military figures, such as the family of the American Muslim soldier Humayan Khan. Other figures in the MAGA movement have attacked the U.S. military for supposedly going “woke” and being controlled by - in the words of Donald Trump Jr. - “militant females”. Every slight movement that the military has made to embrace gender or race equality or to be more welcoming to trans or queer people has been denounced as making the American military weaker, with figures like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson serving as the unlikely arbiters of what constitutes manly and strong.

So far, most of this had been the sort of fulmination that the MAGA movement often traffics in - outrageous certainly, harmful yes, but not tied to any specific policy agenda. Then Tommy Tuberville got elected.

Tuberville’s specific beef with the military concerns abortion. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, the Pentagon introduced a policy which would allow service members time off and paid expenses in order to travel to obtain abortions. This was necessary because a soldier might be based somewhere where abortion is now illegal - like Tuberville’s Alabama - and need to go to a safe state like California to exercise their basic human rights. Many Republicans oppose this, and right now far-right Republicans in the House are threatening to tank this year’s Pentagon funding bill unless it overturns the policy.

But Tuberville considered the policy worth even more dramatic action, and so he decided to block every single military promotion or nomination which requires Senate confirmation. So far, 200 nominations have been held up, depriving the military of senior leaders and the individuals involved of career progression. He’s essentially holding the military hostage, threatening to decimate its senior ranks unless it changes its policy on abortion. His campaign has now reached the highest ranks of the military, leaving the U.S. Marine Corps without a Commandment for the first time in over 150 years - at a time when experts are saying that the Marine Corps is at a critical juncture in its history and needs to “transform or die”.

As if this wasn’t enough, Tuberville has also been playing footsie with white nationalism, denying that it exists in the military or that white nationalists are inherently racist. Although one possible explanation for this is just ignorance at what “white nationalism” means - Tuberville also apparently thinks that the three branches of the U.S. government are the presidency, the House and the Senate - that explanation loses its credibility given that this is the second time this year that he has become embroiled in exactly the same controversy. (He’s now backtracked, just like he did the first time).

Democrats have, to some extent, welcomed Tuberville’s antics. The conventional wisdom in Democratic circles is that Tuberville’s prominence is terrible for the GOP. Not only is he attacking an institution which most Americans have immense respect for, but he’s also doing so over an issue on which the Republican Party is way to the right of the American public. Abortion played a big role in Democrats’ success in the 2020 midterms, and so the thinking goes that Tuberville is only helping them. Politico even called Tuberville “the senator that Biden loves to hate”.

There might be something to this, but there’s also something much deeper and more worrying going on here. Tuberville’s war on the military is a good example of a phenomenon I’ve written about before: the extraordinary way that the U.S. political system allows one individual to become a “veto point” at which government action can be blocked. Any individual senator can decimate the military’s senior ranks, thinking as they do of nothing more elevated than whether they will be re-elected by a state representing 1.5% of the American population. As American politics becomes more polarized and the Republican Party prioritizes adherence to an extreme worldview over competence or experience, situations like this only become more likely, and America becomes more difficult to govern.