The Power Center in the GOP Isn't Just Trump, It's the Conservative Media

Donald Trump is still the Republican Party's spiritual leader in exile. Most other Republican politicians don't dare express criticism of Trump in public, ambitious candidates troop to Mar-a-Lago to seek his endorsement, and his style of resentment politics continues to gain adoption even among former detractors in his party. But Trump's repeated denunciations of the infrastructure legislation being developed in the Senate by a bipartisan "gang of 20" do not yet seem to be having much of an effect on its amount of Republican support; the bill survived its first test vote on Wednesday evening when the motion to begin consideration passed with the votes of 17 Republican senators, including minority leader Mitch McConnell.

This reflects something important about the nature of Trump's internal power within the GOP. The main conduits through which Trump exerts control over other Republicans are the conservative media outlets with which he has maintained a close alliance ever since his 2016 nomination. Trump is much more effective at imposing his preferences on the party when the Republican electorate is made aware of those preferences by the informational sources they trust the most.

When Trump was president, and before he was banned from social media, we often heard about how he had uniquely harnessed the power of Twitter. But it wasn't his tweets themselves that were especially powerful (only a small slice of the American public would have seen any of them directly), it was his tweets as amplified by other media platforms with much larger popular audiences. Republican members of Congress enjoyed much more political leeway to reject or ignore President Trump's policy proposals than they did to explicitly disapprove of his personal behavior, because substantive differences with Trump did not usually receive much attention from the media—including the conservative media—while personal differences could turn into headline news.

Trump is no longer allowed to tweet, but he still issues statements that resemble his old social media posts. Now, however, his goal of attracting widespread attention for these messages is even more dependent on the decision of others with louder bullhorns to give them publicity.

Some of the Senate Republicans participating in the bipartisan infrastructure negotiations, like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, have already survived confrontation with Trump or his conservative media allies. Others, like Rob Portman and Richard Burr, are not planning to seek another term and may not care much what the Fox News audience thinks about them. But a few Republican members of the "gang of 20," like Todd Young of Indiana or Mike Rounds of South Dakota, might well be made uncomfortable if their names and faces repeatedly led off the top of Tucker Carlson Tonight broadcasts as accused enemies of Trump and the conservative cause.

Fortunately for them, the infrastructure bill simply hasn't been promoted to Republican supporters in the electorate as a critical test of ideological purity. The attention of Carlson and his fellow conservative media personalities is mostly trained elsewhere these days, on the various cultural concerns that have come to dominate the agenda of the popular right. This may cause Trump some frustration. But if the energy of conservative activists and voters has indeed shifted in recent years from opposing increases in government spending to fighting the contemporary culture war, Trump—as well as his friends in the right-of-center media world—surely bears considerable responsibility for encouraging this change in priorities.

Today's Generation Gap Is Being Widened by the Conservative Media

Americans disagree much more about politics today across generational lines than they did in the well-chronicled era when youthful cultural icons announced to their parents that "your sons and your daughters are beyond your command" and "I hope I die before I get old." The partisan differences between the youngest and eldest cohorts of voters have not received the same public attention as other forms of contemporary political conflict, but they are now bigger in size than the more celebrated divisions between men and women, the college-educated and the non-college-educated, and the residents of red and blue states.

Younger people may be reliably more idealistic and less nostalgic than their elders, but that doesn't always make them more liberal. In the 1980s, for example, Ronald Reagan and other Republicans ran as well or better among the young as the old. Reagan-era conservatives appealed to younger Americans by portraying themselves as innovative and forward-thinking, while arguing that the Democratic Party had become a corrupted relic of bygone days.

But over time, the dominant tone of conservative rhetoric has become darker, more pessimistic or alarmist about the future, and more critical of ongoing social trends of which young people largely approve. Conservatives responded to the rise of Barack Obama, a personally popular figure among younger Americans, with eight years of relentless opposition. And as conservatism's messages have evolved, so too has the receptiveness of newer generations to conservative politicians and ideas. Voters under the age of 40 were evenly split between the parties as recently as the 2000 election; by the 2010s, the Democratic Party was reliably prevailing among this age group by margins of 20 points or more.

From time to time, Republican officials have expressed concern about this development and have proposed steps to increase their party's standing among younger voters. But power within the extended Republican network has been flowing away from politicians and toward the conservative media over the same period that the GOP's youth problem has emerged. It's media talking heads, not elected officials, who are now the primary spokespeople for American conservatism. Freed from political candidates' need to court a popular majority, the increasingly loud voices of Fox News and talk radio are free to appeal to their smaller core audience of right-leaning senior citizens by ignoring or even explicitly ridiculing the concerns and activities of younger Americans.

Contemporary conservative rhetoric is often characterized by exhibitions of bewildered discontentment directed at younger people and the cultural environment that envelops them. Mockery of millennials and college students as "snowflakes," "campus crazies," and "social justice warriors" has become commonplace in conservative media outlets over the last few years, intensifying when an issue arises that especially activates the generational divide. Last Thursday, for example, a 54-year-old conservative prime time host engaged in a public fight with a 33-year-old who is also perhaps the most popular professional athlete of his generation, insisting that his proper role in society is to "dribble" rather than express his views about race relations in the United States.

As high school students who survived the Parkland, Florida school shooting have mounted a public anti-gun campaign over the past week, several conservative media personalities have responded by suggesting that the young age of the activists renders their opinions on the subject illegitimate. (Meanwhile, the more conspiratorial corners of the conservative media ecosystem have reacted in their own unique fashion, dismissing the students as actors on the payroll of shadowy leftists.) President Trump, himself a conservative media figure before he ran for elective office, argued today that violent movies and video games help to encourage school shootings—placing responsibility for social violence on young people's own consumer choices.

All in all, the messages transmitted by conservative elites these days are doing little to redirect younger citizens' collective left-of-center political alignment. Even young adults who are skeptical of gun control or other liberal causes are unlikely to respond positively to the argument that they should automatically defer to the judgment of their elders on political matters, or that social ills can be cured by regulating their favorite pastimes.

It's possible that the current state of political conflict will lead today's younger citizens to form a lifelong preference for the Democratic Party, thus burdening Republicans with a long-term electoral disadvantage. Whether or not that happens, however, the more immediate consequences of stoking generational warfare are not necessarily unfavorable to conservatives. Seniors and near-seniors have become more pro-Republican over the past decade, and they participate in politics at much higher rates than their children and grandchildren.

So far, evidence of an incipient millennial-led liberal revolution is much more apparent in the youth-dominated pop culture world than in a political system led by conservative Republicans at every level of government. If conservative media rhetoric is partially at fault for alienating young people from the Republican Party, it may be equally responsible for attracting more older Americans to the ranks of the GOP during the same period. Fox News Channel recently retired its famous slogan "Fair and Balanced"; perhaps its next catchy motto will be "Don't Trust Anyone Under 30."