Everybody Wants to Rule the World

It was always about power.

Yesterday, I wrote about how political disagreements on the right are often cover for long-simmering beefs and personal vendettas. Let me just say it struck a few nerves, though as usual, feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

That raises the obvious question: why? Why spend so much time and energy fighting people with whom you agree 80, 90, or even 95 percent of the time? Wouldn’t it make more sense to work together toward common goals instead of tearing each other down like crabs in a bucket?

The reason, I believe, is obvious once you see it: it’s all about power. It’s not enough to be on the bus together—everyone wants to be in the driver’s seat. At the heart of so many conflicts on the right is the basic question of who gets to decide which way we go, and more importantly, who is allowed on the bus at all.

Factions that should be working together instead fight over who gets to set the tone. There’s a concept called the Overton Window, developed by political theorist Joseph Overton in the 1990s. It describes the range of ideas considered acceptable in public discourse at any given time.

Image by Hydrargyrum | CC BY-SA 2.0

Overton’s colleague at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Joseph Lehman, explained it this way:

It just explains how ideas come in and out of fashion, the same way that gravity explains why something falls to the earth. I can use gravity to drop an anvil on your head, but that would be wrong. I could also use gravity to throw you a life preserver; that would be good.

Some activists see their role as pushing the Overton Window to include their ideas, while others try to restrict it, believing that anything outside the window is unfit for discussion.

Yet the window is always shifting. Up until the 1950s and 60s, racial segregation was still considered acceptable for debate. Today, anyone who wants to bring back Jim Crow is rightly excluded from polite company. Tariffs were outside the Overton Window for a long time, until Donald Trump challenged conventional wisdom on free trade. During Trump’s first term, mass deportations were viewed as radical—but after four years of the Biden border crisis, they are now seen as a centrist position.

Amusingly enough, perhaps the best example of this came this week from actress Sydney Sweeney. A henpecking journalist from GQ repeatedly tried to get Sweeney to apologize for her American Eagle jeans ad (“Sydney Sweeney has good jeans!”), but to her credit, she declined to take part in the struggle session.

Ten years ago, she likely would have been canceled for refusing to kowtow to progressive demands to feel shame for her ethnicity. Yet she showed more backbone in that short clip than many politicians have in their entire careers.

I briefly mentioned yesterday the fight between various Republican factions at the national level. On the surface, the dispute is about whether someone like Tucker Carlson, with a huge platform, should be allowed to interview figures like Nick Fuentes, whose views on race and ethnicity are far beyond the pale for most Republicans. Both left and right engage in this kind of gatekeeping. Many see themselves as guardians of the edges of the Overton Window, with a duty to cancel anyone who steps outside.

But at a deeper level, this dispute is really about who will inherit the MAGA mantle from Donald Trump. Who will inherit the elephant crown?

Before Trump, the GOP establishment prioritized free trade, foreign intervention, tax cuts, and deregulation. The Tea Party movement of 2009–10 arose as a rejection of government bailouts and Obamacare, but the burgeoning populist right was quickly co-opted by the party establishment. The GOP offered figures like Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy as the party’s future.

Trump upended all of that. His 2016 campaign—built on tariffs, immigration restrictions, and no new wars—posed an existential threat to the old guard. They attacked him in the primary, demanded he drop out after the Access Hollywood tape, and even endorsed Hillary Clinton as a bulwark against the MAGA movement. Yet Trump still won.

Some in the NeverTrump camp grudgingly got on board, while others made opposing him their defining cause. Commentators like Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol, once Republican kingmakers, founded outlets such as The Bulwark to attack Trump constantly. They were surely frustrated by their loss of influence with rank-and-file Republicans. Had Trump lost in 2016, as nearly everyone expected, they could have positioned themselves as the “sane adults in the room” to whom the party would come crawling back.

When Trump left the White House in 2021, the old establishment thought they were back in charge. Despite Trump announcing a reelection bid in December 2022, the NeverTrump faction saw Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis as their path back to power. Yet Trump shocked the world again, winning a second nonconsecutive term. Most of the dwindling anti-Trump Republicans have now realized they can’t stop Teflon Don, so they’re trying to stack the deck for 2028. Vice President J.D. Vance is arguably even more populist and nationalist than Trump—and that scares them.

Mark my words: every facet of this national intraparty conflict is about who will take the baton in 2028. It’s a Game of Thrones style power play, where nothing is as it seems.

The same dynamic is playing out here in Idaho. The former state party establishment could not accept Dorothy Moon’s election as chair in 2022 and spent two years and considerable resources trying to oust her and her allies. Former chairs Trent Clark and Tom Luna formed Gem State Conservatives, which funded and coordinated campaigns for precinct committeemen across the state.

It was all for naught, as Moon won reelection in 2024 by an even greater margin. Yet they didn’t stop. Gem State Conservatives morphed into Party Watch, which regularly sends snarky AI-drafted anonymous emails to any address it can find, spreading rumors, innuendo, and secretly recorded conversations—all in an effort to damage the reputation of Dorothy Moon and those who work with her. I was even the subject of one of their hit pieces, full of lies, half-truths, and wild accusations.

(Full disclosure: I work on contract with the Idaho GOP to handle communications and social media.)

What is so important about the position of Idaho GOP chair that drives people to such lengths? It’s not a paid role, and it’s certainly not easy—Dorothy Moon has spent the past three and a half years traveling the state, and every word or action draws fire from loud critics.

Yet the state party chair has a megaphone, a ready-made platform to spread a message. Whoever leads the Idaho GOP has the ability to define the terms of the debate, to frame the Overton Window in Idaho. Dorothy Moon’s weekly column is republished across Idaho (including in the Gem State Chronicle), so people pay attention. It’s a powerful position that carries great responsibility.

Former chairman Tom Luna used that platform as well. In 2021, when Ammon Bundy filed to run for governor in the Republican primary, Luna declared that he was not welcome in the party. Luna later oversaw a lawsuit against the Bonneville County GOP for allegedly breaking party rules by endorsing certain primary candidates—a factor that contributed to his 2022 convention defeat.

Of course, Luna never needed help getting his message out. Having served two terms as Idaho’s superintendent of public instruction and built a successful business career, people generally listened when he spoke. In December 2022, Luna published an op-ed urging Republicans to move on from Donald Trump:

For the sake of America, the Republican Party must start winning again. The key: Bring the Republican Party back to the party of Lincoln and Reagan. Nominate good candidates and embrace a legitimate conservative agenda focused on religious freedom, protecting the right to life, and promoting smaller government, less taxes and personal responsibility.

That’s how we start winning again and will lead to a real Republican “red wave” in 2024.

Thankfully, the GOP did not heed Luna’s advice, and Donald Trump is president again—much to the chagrin of old-guard Republicans who still want to be in the driver’s seat.

Of course, even the conservative insurgency has devolved into factional infighting. Who gets to be called “conservative”? The answer depends on whom you ask. Is the Idaho Freedom Caucus the standard-bearer for conservatism in the Legislature, or is it the Gang of 8? It’s a silly argument, since members of each group probably agree on more than 95% of policy positions. Yet the question of who gets to define “conservative,” who gets to drive the bus, who decides who’s in and who’s out—that lies at the heart of the conflict.

Pseudonymous Twitter user FischerKing posted something insightful as I was writing this essay:

Gate keeping is pretty pointless because there are no gates any longer. People are gonna just have to roll with it and make the best arguments they can.

The GOP establishment tried to close the gate on Donald Trump in 2016 and utterly failed. Yes, Trump already had billions of dollars and was a household name, but he also bypassed the establishment’s control over information by speaking directly to the American people. The ability of any centralized authority to decide who may or may not share ideas is disintegrating. The Overton Window now expands and contracts rapidly, and it’s hard to keep up. Tom Luna certainly didn’t have the return of Donald Trump on his 2022 bingo card.

In chaotic times like these, sacred cows are slaughtered left and right. A veteran politician, standing firm on what he believes are timeless positions, can suddenly find that voters have moved on—and he’s now the one standing at the radical edge of the Overton Window. Many in that position try to cling to power, to force people back to where they think they should be. But that never works. Time marches on, no matter how much you want it to stop.

History shows that societies are never static. Nations grow and evolve, and though we should strive to protect freedom and prosperity for the next generation, we can’t simply—as William F. Buckley famously declared—stand athwart history and yell “Stop!”

Political leaders who attempt to define the bounds of public discourse often end up on the outside looking in. That’s true of the national conversation and our debates here in Idaho. Our state is trending more conservative, which means conservative leaders can accomplish a lot if they simply work together. It’s time to be less concerned about who’s driving the bus and just sit back and enjoy the ride.