The derangement of the Republican Party has been the central political development of recent US history. In Rogue Elephant, Paul Heideman has written a concise and highly readable account of the party’s evolution from the mid-20th century to the present. He focuses not on the development of right-wing ideas or shifts in voter opinion but on deeper structural shifts in US politics.
Since the 1970s, Heideman explains, the Republican Party has grown weaker, more conservative, more internally divided, and more conflicted with its traditional big business sponsors.
Not being membership organisations, US political parties have always been weaker than their European counterparts. Yet the introduction of presidential primaries in the 1970s prevented parties from even choosing their own candidates. Anyone who can raise enough money can compete effectively in primaries – and changes to campaign finance law made raising money easier.
Changes in campaign financing that meant money flowed to political action committees rather than parties prevented Republican leaders in Congress from disciplining their caucus. Indeed, Republican Congresspeople learned they could buck their leaders, pose as more stridently conservative, and reap rewards from right-wing donors and media. The past three Republican speakers of the US House have been brought down by internal challenges. The Republican-controlled Congress is so dysfunctional that Trump has largely bypassed it altogether.
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Heideman focuses especially on the relationship of Republicans to big business. The party could once be counted on as a rational and reliable ally of corporate interests. And yet that is clearly no longer the case. Trump has wreaked chaos in the domestic and global economy through his war on immigration and his tariff policies.
Part of the reason, Heideman argues, is that US corporations are too weakly organised to advocate for their common political interests. Big business banded together during the 1970s, but it demobilised after winning much of what it wanted – tax cuts and deregulation – under Reagan. Corporations still seek political influence, but they largely do so for their particular interests. Hence, companies ask to be exempted from Trump’s tariffs rather than joining together to back free trade.
While still reliably cutting taxes on the wealthy, Republicans have at times acted against corporate interests. Heideman notes the first major split as the Republicans’ quixotic impeachment of Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. George W Bush restored the party to its corporate roots, but by the end of his second term Congressional Republicans rebelled. Most remarkably, with the global economy teetering on the brink in 2008, Republicans in Congress voted against Bush’s bank bailout. His bill passed only on a second attempt and with support mainly from Democrats.
The biggest divide between corporations and Republicans emerged after the January 6th insurrection. One-quarter of Fortune 500 corporations boycotted Republican candidates who denied the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in 2020. But with access to a mass of small donors or a few right-wing billionaires, election deniers continued to win primaries and the boycott petered out.
Structural transformations in the Republican Party, Heideman argues, enabled Trump’s hostile takeover of it. In the 2010s, the party was divided between two factions: one centred around the Bush machine, the other around the right-wing Koch brothers. An internally divided party allowed an outsider such as Trump to take control. Trump recognised, moreover, that a large percentage of Republicans were uninterested in the traditional conservative agenda of “free markets, entitlement cuts, and immigration reform”.
Once Trump won the nomination and then the presidency, he filled the vacuum at the centre of the Republicans’ hollow party. He reshaped the party – to a degree never before seen in US history – around his own personality. And he held on to that control even after his 2020 defeat.
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Rogue Elephant’s focus on political structures is valuable, but should not be taken to diminish the importance of political ideas and movements. After all, the rise of a radical right has been evident in many other countries without the same structural problems as in the US. And Heideman understates the extent to which patriarchy and white supremacy have provided a consistent agenda for the Republican Party.
Rogue Elephant was finished before the onset of Trump’s second term. As such, one needs to revise Heideman’s assessment that the “American state is deeply ill suited to personalist rule” of the kind that Trump has subjected the Republican Party to. For in his second go, Trump has precisely sought to bend the US government to his personal will, ruling in increasingly authoritarian terms often with considerable success. And key segments of big business, notably in tech, have come to support him.
Still, if Rogue Elephant may not be the best guide to the present, it is essential for understanding the past and the future. What will happen to the Republican Party when Trump is no longer around to hold it together? Even if Trump were to run for an unconstitutional third term, he’d be 82 at the time of the election, and based on current opinion polls would be unlikely to win. Only Trump has been able to hold together a party so at war with itself and at odds with its traditional support base in big business. The future of the Republican Party looks very messy indeed.
Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott professor in US history at Trinity College Dublin
