Young Guns: a requiem

Farewell to a "new generation of conservative leaders"

“We believe it’s time for Republicans to reconnect with our principles, reinvigorate our message, and show our true face to America. We respect those who came before us, but as far as Paul, Kevin, and I are concerned, America is looking for more than our grandfather’s Republican Party…. We’re ready to take our belief in the ideas that have made America great and translate them into solutions that will make our future even better. America is ready for a new direction—the country urgently needs a new direction—the only question is: who is going to provide it?”

—Eric Cantor, Young Guns

Ten years ago next month, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy published a book titled Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders. A generation is supposed to last about 25 years, but Cantor and Ryan are now gone, and the Washington Post reported yesterday that House Republicans are starting to talk about replacing McCarthy as House minority leader. All three are victims of Trumpism.

Cantor, who once proposed taxing the poor as a superior alternative to taxing the rich, was the least likable of the three, and the first to go. Despite being House majority leader, Cantor was defeated in the 2014 primary, the first person in that position ever to suffer that particular humiliation. Actually, Cantor lost in large part because he was House majority leader.

Cantor lost to Dave Brat, a quirky economics professor from Randolph-Macon College who was then identified as a Tea Partier. In retrospect, though, Brat was more of a proto-Trumpie because, egged on by Laura Ingraham (later a key Trump propagandist), Brat made immigration hawkery the number-one issue in campaign. Tea Partiers were more anti-immigrant than mainstream Republicans, but they were nowhere near so anti-immigrant as the Trumpies that succeeded them. Cantor was, Vox’s Dara Lind noted, the House leader most resistant (on political rather than ideological grounds) to passing an immigration bill, but simply being part of a Republican House leadership that wanted to pass any such a bill was enough to finish Cantor off.

The next Young Gun to fall was Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate and the brightest star among the three. Ryan positioned himself as the legatee of Jack Kemp, who’d preached heartfelt compassion for the poor and had once been Ryan’s boss. But it was a poor fit. Kemp was a tax-cutter, and Ryan was primarily a spending-cutter, something that had never interested Kemp because he believed so completely that tax cuts boosted revenues that he thought spending cuts would be unnecessary. “People don’t elect Republicans to repeal the New Deal,” Kemp once said. Ryan thought that was precisely what people elected Republicans to do, and possibly he was right about that. Certainly the “Jack Kemp wing” of poverty-fighting Republicans that political commentators allude to never existed. Kemp was its only member.

Ryan succeeded John Boehner as House speaker in 2015. It was a job that McCarthy was expected to take. But Rep. Walter Jones (R.-N.C.) wrote a letter hinting he’d make an issue of an extra-marital affair that McCarthy was rumored to have conducted with Rep. Renee Ellmers (R.-N.C.). McCarthy denied the rumor but quickly withdrew from the race. Ryan was urged to take his fellow Gun’s place and, reluctantly, he did.

The speakership put Ryan in an impossible position, first with Tea Party troublemakers like Jones, and later with Trump, whose public statements Ryan would on occasion identify, explicitly or indirectly, as racist. Ryan’s criticisms of Trump dwindled, and over time Ryan’s face acquired the hangdog look of defeat. Seven months before the GOP’s midterm debacle Ryan announced he was retiring from the House.

That left one Gun. McCarthy succeeded Ryan as speaker, his path cleared by Ellmers’ departure from Congress in 2017 and Jones’ prolonged absence from Congress before he died from Lou Gehrig’s Disease in early 2019. (Jones had at any rate withdrawn the accusation years before.) Of the three Young Guns, McCarthy is the least ideological, and it’s telling that he’s lasted the longest.

As speaker, McCarthy’s strategy has been to embrace Trump, whom he obviously despises, with gusto. After the QAnon conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene won a Georgia House primary, the Post reports, McCarthy made no public comment against her, and privately he made peace with her, and after Trump earlier told four women of color who are members of Congress to “go back” to their countries of origin, even though they were all Americans, McCarthy declined to protest publicly, telling one Republican member that the president doesn’t like to be criticized. “He does nothing but lick Trump’s boots. That’s all he cares about,” one House Republican told the Post.

If Trump loses and the Republicans lose House seats in November, as seems likely, the expectation is that McCarthy will have to go. Then there will be no Guns. It will be a defeat not only for three brash upstarts but also for conservatism, because, contrary to the way he’s often characterized, Trump isn’t conservative. He’s a poll-driven, transactional politician who panders to conservative constituencies, which isn’t the same thing. The GOP had been headed down this road for some time, but Trump is the first party leader who doesn’t even pretend to embrace any political philosophy. Ten years after the publication of Young Guns, conservatism lies in tatters. As past and present leaders of the House of Representatives, the book’s authors don’t have anybody but themselves to blame.