The Review Goes to CPAC 2023: Populist But Not Popular

The past year has been difficult for America’s conservatives. The party has suffered further division between moderate and more extreme Republicans with notable members such as Liz Cheney being essentially forced out in disgrace. Worse still, the November midterm elections were largely a disappointment. The party failed to take control of the Senate and only just regained the House. The ensuing leadership contest generated further embarrassment and schadenfreude for the Democrats. This defeat only further inflamed the Republican base, with many looking for someone to blame for the party’s apparent inability to capitalize on an unpopular administration. 

In this atmosphere of disappointment and failure, the Conservative Political Action Conference held its 2023 convention. Two of us from The Review, truly among the paper’s most dedicated and disciplined reporters, descended upon DC to discern the direction of the party and perhaps gauge its future.

We arrived in DC on Tuesday night, and Wednesday had very little in the way of events to attend. We thus made the obvious decision—at the encouragement of a college student whom we met from another university—to walk around Congressional offices and try to meet members of Congress. We started with New Hampshire’s Representatives and Senators, all Democrats, and succeeded only in getting a photo inside the offices of one and not actually meeting any. Apparently, their own constituents aren’t important enough for them to spend five minutes of their time shaking hands and taking photos. Next, we moved on to notable Republicans from other states and had similarly poor luck. George Santos, a noted Vietnam War veteran and hero of the republic, was apparently in meetings until 5:00 pm. Marjorie Taylor Greene was similarly occupied and so were all other Congressmen on whose doors we knocked. Even the noted champion of the plebes AOC was busy, proving that, regardless of rhetoric, neither party really wants to touch the smelly hands of the unwashed masses. Distraught, we skulked back to our hotel room to await the next day and the start of the actual conference. 

CPAC got off to a rocky start with the circulation of allegations that Matt Schlapp, chair and organizer of CPAC, sexually assaulted an employee. To the discredit of the Republican Party, this horrible and reprehensible news was almost entirely ignored at the convention.

Checking into CPAC was an ordeal in and of itself. Our names had not been added to the registry of student attendees, forcing us to stand in a long line and ultimately rely on the trust of two event workers who thought we looked like students and just gave us badges. Nevertheless, the show had to go on, and the next day we arrived at the venue, a gargantuan complex called the Gaylord Hotel (a bit on the nose there, don’t you think?), midway through the morning on Thursday for the actual event. 

The convention opened with several lesser-known speakers who focused on boilerplate Republican issues. Many decried the pervasive spread of “critical race theory” and “woke culture” while exhorting “common-sense values” and “patriotism.” The most common focus for the attack was of course the Biden administration. The current president was called all manner of age-related jeers and criticized for his lack of cognition and apparent failure on all fronts as president. While some speeches were passionate calls to action that used the standard buzzwords to relatively good effect, others were muddled and drawn-out ramblings that tried and failed to replicate the speech patterns of Donald Trump. The speakers would become more notable and more passionate over the following days, but for now, boredom and repetition forced us to look elsewhere. 

We ventured down a level into the convention center. The large rectangular room held dozens of booths hawking merch and pamphlets from various conservative organizations. These groups ranged from the relatively normal to the rather outlandish to several identical stores selling everything Trump-related, from snowglobes to sunglasses to adult diapers if you asked them nicely. The less conventional groups included Atheists for Liberty, a group of nonreligious conservatives with meme sunglasses, and an ardently pro-CO2 organization. Perhaps the most concerning was a group defending the nuclear family. This seemed fairly normal until we read the second part of their booth sign, which declared that the greatest threat to the nuclear family is domestic abuse legislation that makes it too easy to get a restraining order against a violent spouse. We walked from booth to booth, asking staff about their organizations and attempting to weave together the different interest groups of the party into a cohesive narrative. There was obvious factionalism among the groups, with corporate interests sitting uneasily next to social conservatives and the groups entirely focused on devotion to Trump. Walking between the booths were Trump staffers, encouraging attendees to vote in Trump’s favor in a presidential straw poll and promising entry into a raffle to win a picture with the former president and 2024 candidate. The atmosphere was chaotic—a mixture of confusion, excitement, and enthusiasm. At times, events verged upon the surreal as one’s conscious mind receded away, forced back by slogans from all the conflicting poles that make up the big tent of the Republican Party. 

Yet, it was the crowd itself, which filled the halls outside the speakers’ ballroom and the inside of the hotel, that told the most honest story of the state of the party. For one, it was small. In fact, to say that it filled the halls is an overstatement. The crowd filled one hall, roughly a quarter to a half of the ballroom, and lightly populated the adjoining restaurants and atriums. The attendees were enthusiastic and mostly Trump supporters. Many wore MAGA hats and shirts and several sported loud costumes to further emphasize their enthusiasm. When asked, they would gladly talk about just how amazing their president is and how horrible the current administration is running the country. Their enthusiasm, if not their originality, must be commended. The few DeSantis supporters offered timid arguments for their candidate, but they clearly lacked both the enthusiasm and the numbers to challenge MAGA as the dominant ideological current of the conference. Of course, the vigor of the MAGA supporters only partially made up for their small numbers. No matter how strongly they believe in their cause, if Trump’s supporters can’t muster enough true believers to fill seats in a ballroom, can they really turn out the numbers needed to win in 2024? 

Friday featured more famous speakers, including the likes of Nigel Farage, Mike Pompeo, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Steve Bannon. Bannon propagated many of the original ideas that formed the basis for Trump’s support, and he did not hold back with his bellicose attacks against Republicans who have sought compromise with Democrats on divisive social issues. He extolled Trump and called for unity around him as the nation heads toward a final conflict. Whether he meant a real or a metaphorical conflict depends on whether or not the listener is one of those who hope for a second civil war. 

Next, Nigel Farage delivered perhaps the cleverest speech of them all, bringing British wit to a convention of straightforward diatribes. The opening was somewhat awkward—he commended Matt Schlapp, the aforementioned, accused staffer-groper—but he quickly got back on track with conservative arguments packaged in dry, biting remarks. He praised Trump and his policies and attacked lockdowns. Digressing into a vent about his personal grievances for a few minutes, he moaned about lockdowns preventing him from visiting a pub on his last night of quarantine. While hardly a supporter of lockdowns or a hat-er of pubs, this writer thinks that perhaps the entire crowd doesn’t need to hear about how you weren’t able to indulge your functional alcoholism in a group setting. Perhaps if it had been funny, the digression would have been forgivable; it was not. He tied the anecdote back into his speech by claiming that if any government tried to take his liberties, especially his bars, away from him again he would be a rebel from day one. Perhaps I underestimate him, but a skinny, middle-aged British man claiming that one oppression he could handle but two would make him upset would not make me reconsider my malicious plans were I an evil, power-hungry bureaucrat. He ended by touting conservative victories in Europe, with politicians like Giorgia Meloni giving him hope for the future. While her victory was a piece of good news for conservatism worldwide, it is disheartening that Conservatives must look abroad for hope when there is so little at home. Regardless, the speech was well-delivered, and helped to make up for the weather forcing us to miss Trump’s speech the next day.

CPAC offered little in the way of dinner at the convention itself. There was a ballroom dinner that one had to pay several hundred dollars to attend, but that was out of reach of our modest budgets. So, both days we ventured into the planned community beyond the grand hotel. On the way, we saw conference attendees outside of their natural habitat in CPAC itself. While still earnest and unabashed, they looked a little out of place. One man in full-body Trump gear inside a Trump-bedazzled pickup truck looked very confused while figuring out whether or not to turn left at the intersection next to the town’s fifteenth Starbucks. We overheard snippets of confused conversation as true believers tried to figure out why exactly their favorite speaker’s event had been canceled; the weather and Mr. Schlapp’s “incident” likely contributed to the half dozen or so cancellations and the numerous schedule changes throughout the three days.

All in all, CPAC was a disappointing if insightful experience. The Republican Party certainly has devoted members and authoritative leaders, but it seems to lack organizational know-how and real numbers. It failed to successfully organize its biggest and most important event of the year, gathering even a lower number of attendees than it did last year. CPAC began with scandal and ended with cancellations. Throughout, it was full of infighting, which failed to resolve tensions and only heightened a sense of division and apprehension for the future. If the Republican Party is to rebound from its failure in the 2022 midterms, it will need either truly inept opponents or a complete re-vamp in its organization and a new unity of purpose. Otherwise, I fear the Trump supporter’s will have bought their extravagant costumes for nothing.