In recent columns I’ve mentioned several political phrases I’ve recently heard for the first time – clock setting, and the Curley Effect.
Today another one is on my mind. I’d heard of this one long ago, but it’s been on my mind a lot lately, because of all of the internal battles in the GOP about purging RINOs during primaries, and when that is a good idea.
The phrase is “addition through subtraction.”
I first heard it in relation to organizations: if there are 100 workers in an office or business, it’s not unusual that the most troublesome handful of those 100 are actually a negative drag on the company. So productivity and quality-of-workplace issues might actually be improved by getting rid of the bottom 3, or 5, or 10 of those workers.
In those cases, you would be adding quality and output by letting go some who had been on the team. Hence, addition through subtraction.
That same term has been applied to politics, usually in the context of when/if it’s wise to boot some people out of the party, because they might be a net negative. Easy examples would be if you’ve got an extremist fringe in a campaign where you’ll need to win voters across a wide political spectrum.
For example, in healthy majoritarian parties in the United States, there are some anti-Semites on both sides, and extreme radicals on both sides. Both of those groups can arguably cost more in support than they bring in, so the parties would be adding (voters) by subtracting (loons).
Of course the danger is in misdiagnosing, and becoming overly purist. As a devoted conservative, I often spend time making RINO voodoo dolls and then sticking pins into them. (Shut up. We all have our quirky hobbies.)
But I also recognize that in a politically diverse country, if a more-conservative party is going to win national elections and political power, it’s going to need to win some purple, moderate states. And if it’s going to win congressional representation in those states, we’re going to need to run some candidates who are moderate, or even, [grits teeth like Clint Eastwood staring down a gunfighter] RINOs.
The wisdom lies in choosing when we have to settle for a RINO, and when we should kick a RINO to the curb. As often happens, the wisdom of the late great Bill Buckley is instructive here: “In any election, vote for the most conservative ELECTABLE candidate. (Emphasis mine.)
For a good example, I think Republicans were wise to run and vote for Mitt Romney for MA governor, since that milquetoast moderate was the most conservative electable candidate in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. By the same token, Republicans in red Utah were idiots for voting for Romney for Senator, since they could have easily gotten an actual conservative in that slot.
Which brings me to the wise-guy critics of Trump’s recent attacks on a lot of GOP candidates around the country. I’m thinking of Indiana – where Trump backed challengers to 7 sitting GOP officials, successfully taking out 5 – and Louisiana, where he successfully helped take out Bill Cassidy – and Texas, where he stood against John Cornyn and for Bill Paxton – and Kentucky, where he led a push to get Massie tossed out in the primary.
In the past, Trump hasn’t always been smart about those kinds of decisions, being led as he often is by his own personal self-interest, and often, grudges. His over-the-top denunciations of conservative Republicans during his rise to the White House – Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis, etc. – were often ridiculous, IMHO. (I still can’t get over Trump calling DeSantis, of all people, a RINO!)
He also took a self-defeating stance in Georgia’s governor race in 2022, backing David Perdue (an actual RINO) against Brian Kemp, because Trump didn’t believe that Kemp had been personally loyal enough in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Trump did everything he could to push Perdue, but in that case the GOP voters weren’t buying it, and rejected Perdue (who might well have lost a general election to a Democrat) by a wide margin, and re-electing Kemp.
However, in these recent cases, I think Trump’s calls have been smart, and good examples of addition through subtraction. Because in each case, he got rid of a less conservative Republican in favor of a more conservative one. In most of them, in fact, the ousted candidates had all obstructed GOP goals – voting against conservatives and/or conservative policies – and several of them personally attacked and tried to weaken the head of the party. Which, unless the president is truly reprehensible and worthy of impeachment (spoiler alert: Nope!), deserves nothing less than a forced expulsion.
The only one of those which is even possibly a close call for me, might be dumping Cornyn in favor of Paxton. On the one hand, I do see Cornyn as way more of a RINO than we should have to settle for in Texas, and Paxton supposedly has some baggage that gives him a lower percentage chance of winning than incumbent Cornyn. On the other hand, we’ll be running against goofy James Talarico, who gives me off-putting Beta O’Rourke vibes. So my gut tells me that unless Paxton has a lot of downside that I don’t know about, swapping him out for Cornyn should be a net positive.
As much as I hate to say it, I sometimes envy the Democrats because of the aggressiveness of their candidates. Dems are knife-fighters and true-believers, and all else being equal, Dems with a slim majority are going to aggressively push and get much more of their way than the GOP with a similarly slim majority. Or even a larger majority, on an issue that favors them. ([cough] SAVE ACT [cough]). Which is the best reason to support the way that Trump has been culling the RINOs in red areas.
And the best part for us is that while the Dems do definitely have the advantage over us in their aggression vs. GOP wussiness, they have one huge weakness that the GOP doesn’t. Their base is bat-guano, far-left, Jew-hating, race-baiting extremists, which is ballot-box poison in all but the deepest of blue areas.
So when they do subtraction, it more often takes the form of driving out more moderate Dems (to the extent they still exist on that side) in favor of more radical ones. Which results in failure in much of the country, but victory in blue cities and states, with mayors like Mamdani in NYC, Katie Wilson in Seattle, and Brandon Johnson in Chicago.
Annnnddddd… civilizational collapse!
To summarize, I think that recently, we’ve been adding through subtraction, and they’ve been subtracting through subtraction.
Of course, I’m just a humble hilarious genius and retired English professor, and certainly no mathematologist.
But I think those numbers work in our favor.
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Martin Simpson 