Rachel Bovard, former Rand Paul legislative director and Conservative Partnership Institute senior director, warns that the GOP’s 2022 midterm gains stem from Democratic unpopularity, not Republican competence, while its elite remains detached from the base. She frames wokeness as a "totalitarian cult" fueled by big tech monopolies—like Google and Facebook—and calls for regulatory action akin to historical labor protections, dismissing libertarian opposition. Bovard argues conservatives must aggressively defend traditional gender roles and family structures, citing Hawley and Romney’s welfare reforms as progress, while Trump’s cultural engagement remains underutilized. The GOP risks perpetual populist backlash if it ignores these battles. [Automatically generated summary]
You've heard me talk about her before when she gave a spectacular speech.
She's the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which she helped found in 2017.
And before that, she spent a decade on Capitol Hill in various roles, including as legislative director for Senator Rand Paul.
But we just brought her on because she's a wine expert and we just thought we'd talk about Booz.
No, Rachel, thank you for coming on.
It's great to meet you, actually.
Yeah, likewise.
I'm happy to be here.
And, you know, Booze is my one transferable life skill.
So I'm happy to talk about that too.
Yes.
Yes.
It's very dear to my heart.
You know, before we just talk about your speech and what you're seeing on the political landscape, how did you get where you are?
I mean, what was your background that made you go into conservatism, which is guaranteed unpopularity?
Nobody told me that.
I think that's how I ended up there.
Ha ha, that explains everything.
Yeah, the joke's on me.
In reality, I had no plan to end up in politics.
I wasn't, you know, involved in it really as a high schooler or even as an undergraduate.
I did my undergrad work at Grove City College outside of Pittsburgh.
And I had a professor there named Paul Kangor, who I was a research assistant for him on a number of books.
And he was like, you know, I know you're thinking about law school, but you might like DC.
You should try it out.
And so he set me up with an internship and I really never looked back.
I came right out of college, stayed for 10 years on Capitol Hill, which the best way to do Capitol Hill, I think, is if you don't have another job beforehand because you don't realize how terrible it is.
So that's how you end up staying for 10 years.
Got it.
So, yeah.
And so it's been a wild ride since then.
I've seen a lot of stuff.
Well, you're producing great content.
And the speech, again, at the National Conservatism Conference was a game changer.
I think a lot of people felt that way, probably for good.
And some people probably felt that way for ill, but I thought it was a really terrific speech.
But we're going into the year with the midterms here.
All the polls are in our side, on our side, but Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is always quoting Hans Solo, saying, don't get cocky.
What are you afraid of?
What are you worried about?
You know, I think that there is a little bit of hubris from the Republican Party going into the midterm elections.
They don't seem to understand that if they sweep in Twino this year in 2022, it's not because they're awesome necessarily.
It's because Democrats are insane.
And I think that, you know, we never, this has happened before, right?
In different midterm students, we never actually learned this lesson.
But I think there is, again, this dangerous distance growing between the Republican sort of congressional elite and the base of the party.
Something I think that has been manifested since the Tea Party, honestly.
And I don't, you know, at different periods of time, I think it's gotten better.
And I think it's approaching the worst scenario again, where they don't really understand, you know, if they're given a mandate, what it's for.
And that's what I tried to make clear in that speech.
It's not for necessarily, you know, a big tax cut package, as great as that is, right?
I'm not against tax cuts, but we are facing new and emerging threats that I think demand a congressional response.
And I still think there's people in Washington, especially in the Republican Party, who are just not aware of that fact or think it's completely overblown.
It's amazing in a way that Donald Trump, who was, I feel, like the man, the necessary man for his moment in that he brought that fight forward.
They've learned, they seem to have learned nothing from him.
They don't understand that the cultural fight is the fight.
Yeah.
And that it's very dispiriting.
On the other hand, are there people you see that you're really happy about?
Are there trends that you see that make you hopeful?
Yeah, I think we have a younger generation of lawmakers who are interested in thinking differently about these questions, who really understand that the appeal of Donald Trump was that he didn't avoid the culture war, which was sort of conventional GOP orthodoxy, as you point out, for 20, 30 years, but he waded right into it.
And I think on everything people care about, you know, the more modern emerging threats, you know, from big tech to critical race theory to even long-standing concerns like the pro-life movement, Donald Trump got more done on that front than Congress has done in the last 15 years.
And I think that really should speak to, you know, the posture that we need to take.
And I do think that there are younger legislators that see this.
And I think even, you know, someone like Mike Lee, you know, it's interesting.
I talk about the Tea Party wave versus, or the Tea Party era versus the MAGA era.
I think they're two different ones legislatively.
And you even see people who are Tea Party senators like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, starting to make that shift, starting to recognize that, you know, it's not just fiscal concerns anymore.
It's those and.
And what are those?
And I think you're starting to see them pivot, which gives me a lot of hope that people are actually listening.
You said in this speech, you said that wokeness is a totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetrated by, perpetuated, sorry, by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technology in history.
You said basically that anyone who doesn't understand that wokeness is the threat should be basically cashiered as a as a Republican candidate.
I guess my question is this.
Does the Republican Party understand this?
Because it's obviously true, Rachel.
It is one of the most obvious things out there.
And does the party that ran Jeb Exclamation Point understand that this is a problem?
And is there anybody that you look at and think, yeah, these are the guys who might do the right thing?
So it's been an evolution.
I think there are a few, a handful of lawmakers that seem to understand this, but it's still rhetorical hand waving for a lot of them.
And I think there's also a big distinction between people who understand it and people who are prepared to do something about it.
Because you see a lot of lawmakers who are like, well, I don't like critical race theory, but there's nothing that we can really do.
You know, local government should just be able to mandate it.
You know, schools should be able to do it because we believe in states' rights.
And it's like, well, yes, but also no.
States are not allowed to inflict tyranny on their students.
And also children are not mini adults.
They don't have the brains to encompass, you know, their brains are still developing.
They can't encompass the nuances of critical theory.
This is wrong.
And so I think you're in a moment where the Republican Party for a long time has just had this hands-off approach and expected that all of our media editing institutions would handle the threats that we face.
And I think that's right.
That's what our conservative philosophy espouses in a lot of ways.
But it didn't account for and it doesn't account for now the fact that the left has taken over all these institutions of power.
And they themselves do not feel beholden to any sort of norm or self-restraint in imposing their worldview.
And to actively push back on that, you have to take actionable steps.
And that's the gulf.
We have people who I think cognitively and rhetorically may understand what's happening, but who are not yet comfortable taking the steps necessary to just create the space for people to exist with their beliefs anymore, because that's really where we're at, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
I have to ask this.
I mean, do you think that Trump is a good thing for the future or a bad thing or a threat?
Where do you stand on his political position?
I think Trump is a symptom of where the base is.
People are like, you know, are always asking me, do you think he should run again or not?
It's like, well, I have no control over that.
So I'm not going to spend a lot of time wringing my hands over this question.
But Trump is a symptom of the Republican Party, I think, not listening to their base.
I think the Tea Party was, yeah, the Tea Party was a shot across the bow to this, right?
And I think a lot of lawmakers recognized it, but then failed to recognize the Tea Party wasn't just about spending.
It was about Obamacare.
It was about mass amnesty.
It was about all these burgeoning threats that were not responded to.
And so when John Boehner led the House away from all of those things, Republicans responded by firing a nuclear missile, and that was Donald Trump.
And if we are unable, I think, to, again, repair that breach between our elected representatives and their base, we will be getting Donald Trump and Donald Trump and Donald Trump for the foreseeable future.
And on the culture war, maybe that's not a bad thing.
I don't know.
Yeah, no, I mean, my problem with Trump has always been that he wasn't a statesman.
He couldn't get laws passed.
And ultimately, that's how that's, as you said in your speech, that's where we have to go.
It has to have to.
And he had a lot of personnel problems too, to your point, that added to that.
I'll say, yes.
And even he and his people admit that.
The Family Divide00:08:27
One of the things you said in the speech that is very dear to my heart was your attack, and I can't call it anything else on big tech.
Every time I bring this up, I mean, I personally feel that big tech should be crushed underfoot and then the dust swept up and thrown into like a volcano somewhere at this point.
Salted the earth with their ashes.
Exactly, exactly.
But the minute you say this, the minute you say that an organization that can ban the former president of the United States from speaking directly to people has too much power, I immediately get this kind of libertarian pushback that somehow I'm destroying free speech by attacking the people who are in fact destroying free speech.
Do you have a specific approach to what needs to be done about big tech?
Well, I just totally disagree with the talking point.
And this gets hurled at me a lot too, that like, you know, these are private businesses.
They can have free association.
They can ban whoever they want.
And I just think that's such a, it's a myopic talking point that I think neglects the reality of what these technology firms are, which is sort of essential corridors of our discourse at this point.
If you consider the fact that Google filters information for 90% of the world, okay?
What Google suppresses or amplifies changes behavior.
It changes votes.
It changes opinions.
It changes.
I mean, we have never seen speech control of this magnitude.
And it's not just speech control.
It's market access.
Google and Facebook in particular are the market access points for millions of small businesses.
You can wipe out someone's industry simply for banning them over ideological reasons.
We have not taken that into account.
And so from a policy perspective, I think you have to address both those things.
You have to address the economic competition, which I think represents a monopoly.
You have a lot of competition policy problems with Google and Facebook.
And then on the speech side, I align myself with the greatest sitting Supreme Court justice of all time, Clarence Thomas, who has speculated that these may actually represent common carriage.
That these are avenues of our discourse that need to be regulated as such, where everyone has to have some kind of access to them the same way everybody has access to the telephone companies.
And the telephone companies cannot ideologically suppress speech.
So because they're changing, I mean, we have a long, and I said this in the speech, but we don't wait in America to, we don't sit back and let ourselves be reformed in a woke corporate image, right?
Innovation has a place in America, and we are the freest country in the world for that.
But when it gets to the point that it is now where it's changing our values and our discourse and our society and how we live together, we then take that innovation and we position it into our values and traditions as opposed to what's happening now, which is allowing them to reform us, which is not the correct balance in a self-government.
That's an excellent point.
I mean, whenever there's new technology, when there were factories, you had to pass laws keeping children out of factories.
You can't just say, oh, it's a private business.
If they want to let a child work in an assembly line, they can do that.
That's not regulation to crush freedom.
That is regulation to keep freedom alive.
It makes no sense.
The other thing you talked about in your speech, and this is something that I think the right is having a lot of difficulty with, there is a real divide on the right about how to approach moral problems, which basically comes down to sexuality and family formation and things like this.
I don't think anybody wants to go back to a world in which a gay person can be arrested for being gay.
That's the world I grew up in, that a guy, a cop could walk into a gay bar and if somebody propositioned him, he could take them away.
I don't think people want to go back to that.
And at the same time, I think that our families and our genders are under attack.
And women, especially, I think, are in danger of being erased as a political entity.
What's our best way forward here?
You know, this is sort of where the maximalist position of the libertarians fails, which is like everybody just gets to do what they do.
Well, no, not anymore, because as you point out, women as a class are under assault.
Like we don't even can't even compete on sports teams anymore, right?
We can't.
The most winning woman on Jeopardy is a man.
Like we're living in the upside down in this reality.
So yeah, I do think that like, you know, basic, we're not dealing with, this is such a far cry from gay marriage.
And I think a lot of conservatives have woken up to the fact that we are just dealing with the basics of gender.
And so, yeah, I do think that conservatives, especially social conservatives who are always ignored in the conservative majority, whenever there's a Republican majority, you know, in Washington, the social conservatives are like the bastard stepchild that nobody wants to talk to.
But their cause now matters because everything that we, the conservative movement, is built on, which is the family, which is the mediating institutions which flow from the family, which is the communities that are built around the family, that is under assault.
And if we cannot, I think, step forward and speak for the truth of biology, to respect people who believe in traditional marriage or who want to build the nuclear family that way, then we don't have the self-government of our founders anymore.
And so I do think we have to get more aggressive about these questions, not necessarily mandating our view, but just protecting the space in which those views exist.
And I think especially in schools and on sports teams, protecting women, just the basic biology of women.
And there's a lot of Republicans who don't seem to be able to do that, which is very distressing.
It is.
I mean, is there, does the state have an interest in preserving the mom and dad family?
Does the state have an interest in saying we're going to privilege this family because it is the best production of social good?
You know, as a conservative, I would say yes.
I think our entire philosophy is built on the family.
I think our form of government is built on the family.
Now, we can differ about what we think the family may look like, right?
But I think the nuclear family as such is a building block of our republic, a building block of our self-government.
And I think you have a government policy right now that sort of privileges the opposite.
You know, there is, it is, and I pointed this out in the speech, but as a policy matter, it is very difficult, you know, to tell, you know, two individuals, a boyfriend and a girlfriend who have had a child, that they are now going to lose their federal benefits if they get married, right?
That's completely backwards.
You know, when we have a debate in Washington right now about whether when you're on welfare, you know, should you be actively looking for a job or should there be work requirements on able-bodied adult men?
That's a debate right now.
And to me, yes, there should be work requirements.
These things that we know support moving ahead in America, which are marriage and work and family and strong communities, we should be incentivizing these things through our public policy.
I do think the state has an interest in that.
And do you think that there's anybody in the Republican Party who has the nerve to put that forward as policy?
You have seen some of this proposed by people like Senator Josh Hawley.
Interestingly, you saw this iterated on by Senator Mitt Romney, who put forward a family assistance plan that began at conception, began with the child in the womb and had no work requirements whatsoever, which a lot of us took issue with, but is beginning to recognize, I think, it's the Republican Party sort of creeping toward a recognition of the fact that, you know, we haven't done enough, I think, or that our policy right now deprivileges the things we've always said we stand for.
And so how do we actually encourage family formation instead of just talk about it, right, but encourage the formation of the family in ways that, you know, I would say conservatism has supported for a long time.
Rachel Beauvard, a senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Rachel, really interesting talking to you.
I hope you will come back as the midterms get closer and talk again and give me your idea of what you're seeing in the political world because you really have an interesting take and I wish more conservatives were talking the way you talk.