Anti-Tax Lobby Seeks to Purge Democracy Supporters From the Republican Party
The Club for (Malignant) Growth bills itself as “the leading free-enterprise advocacy group in the nation,” whose mission is to “exert maximum pressure on lawmakers to vote like free-market, limited government conservatives.” Politico reports that its newest campaign is to support primary challenges against two prominent House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump over his unsuccessful putsch.
Perhaps this sounds confusing. What does “free enterprise” have to do with taking revenge on Republicans who didn’t want Trump to seize an unelected second term? Indeed, the two Republican targets of the campaign, Liz Cheney and Anthony Gonzalez, are fervent advocates of precisely the model of ossified Reaganite anti-government dogma the Club for Growth promotes.
What this intervention illustrates is how deeply intertwined the supply-side movement has become with Donald Trump and his authoritarian style.
The professional conservative movement (lack of) intelligentsia has three wings: foreign-policy hawks, the religious right, and economic conservatives. (The latter category has been dominated for decades by supply-siders, who have made low tax rates for the rich the party’s highest priority.) All these factions had reasons to distrust Trump, but they responded to his rise in different ways. The hawks were the most horrified with Trump, and many of them left the party permanently. Social conservatives mostly accepted him, though a handful of luminaries (like Bush administration veterans Peter Wehner and Michael Gerson) defected.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/anti-tax-lobby-seeks-to-purge-democracy-supporters-from-the-republican-party/ar-BB1eQjQS?li=BBnb7Kz
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