Conservative Ideology Doesn't Matter Anymore

What I got wrong about Brooke Rollins.

One way I know Matt Yglesias has never read my blog (unlike Scott Alexander) is that two months ago, he said: “nobody knows or cares what Brooke Rollins [Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Agriculture] thinks about agricultural policy.”

Well, I do.¹ And if you’re a longtime reader of United States of Exception, you’d know that.

My first article on Substack — long before I ever wrote about fish sex or Riverdale — was an analysis of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s policies on factory farming. I reposted this two days before the election as my closing argument for Harris. Then, after Harris lost, I made the case that Rollins’s nomination for USDA was a “splendid little W.A.R.” for animal welfare — a “win above replacement” relative to the median Republican agricultural policy expert.

I thought Rollins was an above-replacement-level nominee because she’s a Reagan-Bush-style movement conservative whose apparent core ideological commitments are to federalism, free trade, and free markets, as opposed to defending the interests of big agribusiness.² I concluded that she would be unlikely to support the EATS Act, which threatens to overturn more than 1,000 state and local laws and regulations protecting farmed animals; and unlikely to authorize bailouts to factory farmers negatively affected by Trump’s trade wars.

I was wrong on both counts. At her confirmation hearing on Thursday, Rollins told members of the Senate Agriculture Committee that she supports federal efforts to overturn California’s Proposition 12 (despite claiming to be a “federalism believer”) and plans on disbursing billions of dollars in federal bailout funds to farmers who stand to be hurt by Trump’s trade wars. She also confirmed that she’s spoken about the subsidy issue with Trump’s first USDA Secretary, Sonny Perdue, who authorized $61 billion in farmer bailouts.

Lewis Bollard, Farm Animal Welfare Program Director at Open Philanthropy, remarked:

Today Trump’s USDA nominee, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she will force states to allow the sale of pork from crated pigs.

States banned these sales to stop animal cruelty. The conservative Supreme Court upheld those bans.

Only pork industry lobbyists want this change.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on myself, since it’s unlikely that any of the other names on Trump’s USDA shortlist — with the possible exception of libertarian Republican Congressman Thomas Massie — would have opposed EATS or bailouts.³ Multiple other candidates (that’s three separate links, by the way) had already urged Congress to overturn Prop 12 before Trump won the election.

But I still think I made a serious error in saying Rollins was a significantly above-replacement-level nominee. Most other commentators at the time who (contra Yglesias) cared what Brooke Rollins thinks about agricultural policy paid little attention to Rollins’s putative ideological predilections but instead observed that she was a Republican partisan who had ingratiated herself with Trump and concluded that she would go along with whatever pro-corporate policies the administration supported. The assumption was that in modern Republican politics, ideology doesn’t matter a lot, but incentives do.

This was a reasonable assumption. Over the past 20 years, Richard Hanania has pointed out, the overriding priority and key elite litmus test of the Republican Party has gone from supporting the Iraq War, to shrinking the federal budget, to keeping immigrants out of the country and trans women out of women’s sports. There’s no obvious ideological throughline between these issues — in fact, many of the most ardent neoconservative ideologues who backed the Iraq War, like Bill Kristol, have now left the Republican Party — but the people in charge of the party remain largely the same. This wouldn’t make sense if Republican elites were strongly committed to their ideological priors.

There’s a popular political science book that argues the opposite, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, by Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins. They say the Republican Party is a vehicle for the conservative movement, and Republican voters and policymakers conceive of themselves in ideological terms, self-describing as supporters of small government and traditional social values. By contrast, the Democratic Party represents a diverse coalition of economic and social interest groups, with Democrats self-identifying as advocates of the working and middle class rather than left-wing ideologues. I think this is what I was implicitly assuming when I predicted Rollins would stick to her federalist and free market principles if confirmed to the USDA.

There are three problems with using this model, however.

First is that complex ideologies do not always lead to particular policy prescriptions in particular contexts. Rollins likely thinks of herself as a fiscal conservative and a “federalism believer.” But she also likely thinks of herself as a social conservative and a champion of American farm communities, or an American nationalist and a funhouse-mirror-Randian champion of handouts to big business. If conservative ideology is sufficiently vague or broad enough that it can sometimes lend itself to multiple competing policy prescriptions, and it can’t be determined ex ante which identity is going to prevail in any particular context, it can’t be known with certainty what policies a “conservative” ought to support and when they ought to support them. Even two core conservative principles commonly associated with each other — support for free markets and support for federalism — come to loggerheads over the EATS Act. A federalist conservative might oppose the bill for infringing on states’ rights, but a free-market conservative might support it for deregulating industry.

The second problem is that Republicans are not immune to interest group politics. In fact, they’re likely more susceptible to corrupt bargains than Democrats, since their voter base mostly just cares about aesthetic things like how patriotic they think policymakers are. True, there are powerful conservative lobbies like the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, the National Rifle Association, and the Chamber of Commerce. But these groups don’t have a particularly strong interest in limiting government spending, much less spending on agricultural subsidies. In fact, business interests typically want the opposite. Since conservative politicians can placate their base just by looking conservative, and most of the ideological lobbies are weak, they don’t actually have to conserve anything besides pro-life judges, gun rights, and high-income and business interests. They’re entirely free to buy votes on the side by doing things like expand Medicare and the Department of Education, bail out farmers, and grow government at an unprecedented rate.

The final problem is that Grossmann and Hopkins’s book was published before the 2016 election. They don’t think that Trump poses a challenge to their theory, however, because similar to previous Republicans, Trump also runs largely on aesthetics. As Grossmann put it in an interview in October 2016:

Trump is running a campaign that, like most Republican campaigns, emphasizes broad themes rather than a long list of individual policies. He talks a lot about American nationalism, about “making America great again” and returning to a particular vision of America and American strength. He’s not someone who gets caught up in the details of exactly what he’s going to do in office or how he’s going to do it. In that way, he is consistent with the usual Republican approach of stressing the big picture rather than specifics.

Indeed. But the “big picture” that Trump is emphasizing is hardly defined by its ideological conservatism. Rather, Trump’s movement has come to resemble the coalition-of-interest-groups model that Grossmann and Hopkins say defines the Democrats. In 2024, Trump’s coalition grew to include an unprecedented number of racial minorities, young men, waitresses and other interest groups won over by transparent acts of pandering like “no tax on tips,” and Gribbles and former Democrats like Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard. Long gone was the party of small government; here was the party of “Real Americans.” And, of course, “Real Americans” referred to the people who had something Trump wanted — votes or money — that could be acquired by promising something in return.

Problems one and two explain why, in a policy domain like agriculture, you shouldn’t expect a Republican elite to take the anti-bailout, pro-federalist (pro-animal) position unless they have strong ideological priors that point specifically to those policies — Vivek Ramaswamy, for example. Even if Trump wasn’t in the picture and the Republican Party was still an ideological vehicle for movement conservatism, it’s likely that policymakers would still just follow the lead of their special interests and then adopt whatever conservative identity they would need to adopt — fiscal, social, national, etc. — to justify their position to the base.

Problem three tells us why you shouldn’t expect any form of principled conservatism to win out in many policy domains in the second Trump administration. The Republican Party doesn’t just believe different things now than it did in the past; it barely believes anything at all. There’s the unifying principle of hating foreigners, but besides that, nothing. If you’re a cabinet secretary, you do whatever Trump wants or thinks is going to make him look best at a particular moment or generate the most money through petty corruption. (As it happens, one of Trump’s largest donors is Ron Cameron, owner of the fourth-largest chicken producer in the United States — and Midwestern farmers possibly put him over the top in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania during the last election — so if you’re the USDA Secretary, you probably know which side your bread is buttered!)

At least, that’s my best explanation for why I got Brooke Rollins so wrong. You can basically boil it down to “Republicans are corporate shills” (corporate in the sense of corpus, not corporation), but I like it better the way I said it.

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1. It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.

2. One name on Trump’s shortlist, former USDA official Ray Starling, is possibly the country’s most outspoken defender of factory farming — up there with Tim Hsiao. He literally wrote the book on it, and he remarked at an industry conference in 2023 that it is “absurd” and “ridiculous” to say that “billions of animals and thousands of humans suffer behind the walls of factory farms.”

3. Which is probably a big reason why Massie didn’t get the job.