Wait, Did the Republican Party Only Just Realize That It Hired a Bunch of Yahoos and Morons, and That’s Why It’s Falling Apart?

4 min readEnvironmental scientists call it “point-source pollution.” According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—or what’s left of it, anyway—the EPA—or what’s left of it—defines it this way.The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines point source pollution as “any single identifiable source of pollution from which pollutants are discharged, such as a pipe, ditch, ship or factory smokestack.” Factories and sewage treatment plants are two common types of point sources. Factories, including oil refineries, pulp and paper mills, and chemical, electronics and automobile manufacturers, typically discharge one or more pollutants in their discharged waters (called effluents). Some factories discharge their effluents directly into a waterbody. Others treat it themselves before it is released, and still others send their wastes to sewage treatment plants for treatment. Sewage treatment plants treat human wastes and send the treated effluent to a stream or river.Over the weekend, Politico published a lengthy examination of point-source pollution in our politics. It seems that people attempting to run the Republican party have grown concerned that the base is not sending up its best. The job market is filled with ignorant, bloodthirsty, Jesus-drunk, TikToking spalpeens who can’t find the staplers or the copy paper once they get hired.This isn’t just the standard middle-aged lament that the kids aren’t all right. It’s a criticism aimed at institutions like the Heritage Foundation that purport to identify and train the party’s future governing class. To conservative critics in and out of government, many of whom ascribe to more traditional, pre-MAGA Republican beliefs, some such institutions have spent the last decade selecting for rigid conformity to Trumpist ideology over more typical markers of expertise. Maybe that helps for enforcing the party line in the new GOP. But these critics fear a decline of merit and skill, along with a tolerance for darker ideologies that could cripple the party’s ability to govern in the long run.No duh, as the kidz say. What was your 2,345th clue, gang?“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”The last decade? This has been an essential part of movement conservatism ever since Reagan opened the Gates of Mordor back in 1980. Megachurch youth groups, wing-nut-welfare-funded college groups, college publications that gifted us with such giants as Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza, even the sainted Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point pop stand—all of these are part of a straight evolutionary line of fanaticism going back at least as far as the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom in 1960 by William F. Buckley Jr.By the way, the YAF—now doing business as the Young America’s Foundation— is still around, even though its longtime hold on campus action largely was broken by Turning Point. The YAF currently is run by goggle-eyed homunculus Scott Walker, which probably is a fine measure of how its influence has declined. Most of the “senior Republican staffers” quoted by Politico probably are products of earlier iterations of the same damn thing they’re complaining about now.If, as the adage goes, personnel is policy, the stakes are significantly higher than intergenerational trash talk, given the degree to which government staffers, across branches, effectively run the country. Student government types become interns become policy aides become senior advisers, chiefs of staff, and even heads of agencies. If the conservative personnel pipeline is changing, Republican government will change with it.“I think there is certainly a pipeline problem on the Republican side,” said E.J. Fagan, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics. Even beyond foreign policy, Fagan said that “normie expertise” has been sidelined in favor of producing “chum for the conservative media machine,” at Heritage in particular. “You’re hiring a lot of people who don’t have the chops that they used to,” he said.They have chops. It’s that they have different chops, honed by years of praise and encouragement by Republican politicians whose staffers are now bemoaning that the monster is out of the lab.The worries about the talent pipeline are especially sharp in the Senate, which remains as much a redoubt of establishmentarianism as can be found in Trump’s Washington. Of the four congressional staffers interviewed, three senior GOP aides in the Senate offered a variety of views on the issue. One said that while plenty of institutions were still churning out serious, policy-minded young job candidates, communications staff now outnumber policy staff in certain House and Senate offices—a reflection, they said, of members prioritizing “clicks and clapbacks in the ‘way too online’ corner of X,” which “doesn’t advance the conservative agenda one bit.” No, it’s not the Internet’s fault. It’s not the YAF’s fault. It’s not even entirely the Republican party’s fault. It’s the fault of modern American political conservatism, which encouraged vandalism and savagery and now finds itself a road company of Lord of the Flies. My sympathy is really quite limited.