It is becoming genuinely difficult, even embarrassing, to defend the Republican Party. Not because the Left is correct about its diagnosis of America, but because Republicans seem to have forgotten why we exist. Increasingly, the party behaves as though its purpose begins and ends with winning elections, with no corresponding interest in governing, reforming, or repairing the structural failures crushing ordinary Americans.
Meanwhile, three pillars of normal life—college, housing, and healthcare—have all slipped into near-unreachable territory. These are not luxuries, or whimsical indulgences of the Left. These are foundational elements of a stable society. And the reasons for their skyrocketing costs are neither mysterious nor unsolvable. They are obvious, identifiable, and correctable. Yet Republicans, who now control the levers of government, are doing essentially nothing. Later, we will stare blankly when voters punish us, as though the connection were somehow opaque.
It should embarrass Republicans. It should shame them. C.S. Lewis once wrote that every Christian should feel a kind of holy embarrassment that he is not performing miracles. Republicans are not being asked for miracles. They are being asked to do the things they promised to do. They are not even attempting it.
Take higher education. College shouldn’t require massive student loans the size of mortgages. The explosion of tuition is well documented by the Congressional Budget Office. So here’s a solution: no college or university that accepts federal money of any kind—including federally backed student loans—should be allowed to charge tuition above something like, pick a number, $8,000 per year. If community colleges can educate people at or below that level, then the elite institutions with billion-dollar endowments can learn to operate with some measure of fiscal adulthood. Instead, universities are subsidized from every direction—front end, back end, and side door—with zero price discipline, and Republicans, after decades of promising to address higher-ed bloat, have done nothing.
The housing crisis is no less obvious. We have spent years suffering from chronic under-supply as shown by federal construction data and a decade of artificially low interest rates that inflated home prices far beyond reach for the average young family. The Federal Reserve’s own policy history shows how distorted the market became. There are practical ways to fix this without detonating the larger economy. One option is to offer a separate, lower interest rate exclusively for homebuyers, allowing general interest rates to remain high enough to control inflation in other sectors, while opening a doorway into the housing market. Another is to allow homeowners to automatically refinance into a lower rate after five years of continuous ownership and residence. Either approach would improve access without restarting an inflation spiral. Yet Republicans offer slogans and posturing instead of solutions.
Healthcare is similarly broken. The fundamental flaw of Obamacare—the distortion of insurance pools by forcing young, healthy people to subsidize older, sicker individuals—has been obvious from the beginning. Even centrist policy institutes acknowledge the imbalance. The honest fix is not complicated: allow insurers to sell policies across state lines, remove high-risk individuals and those with preexisting conditions from the private insurance pools, cover them through Medicare or Medicaid, and fund that separate pool through a transparent one- or two-percent national sales tax. Premiums would fall. High-risk patients would finally get consistent care. And the nation would stop pretending these costs can be hidden inside someone else’s premium. Republicans know this too, but they refuse to act, because all they know is how to get elected by wearing a MAGA hat.
Well, are we going to Make America Great Again or what? What do those words mean if not addressing these three areas?
Let us be clear: this is not merely a policy failure. It is a moral one. Congress behaves as though governing is someone else’s responsibility, as if its role is to observe rather than legislate, while the President substitutes executive orders for actual lawmaking. Nothing structural ever gets fixed, and Americans live with the consequences.
And this failure is creating a vacuum that is becoming genuinely dangerous. When people see college costs explode, housing vanish from reach, and healthcare drift into dysfunction, they do not say, “Republicans have refused to implement conservative reforms.” They say, “Capitalism is failing. Conservatism is failing. Maybe America itself is failing, and fundamental changes are needed.” But capitalism is not failing; conservatism is not failing. What is failing is the Republican Party’s will to govern. Politics punishes vacuums. If the party tasked with defending free markets refuses to fix markets that are breaking, do not be surprised when voters turn to liberal Democrats who stand ready, with delight, to take a hatchet to the entire system.
It will soon become nearly impossible to defend limited government or free-market principles when the politicians associated with those principles preside over a landscape of dysfunction and refuse to repair it. People do not care about ideological mascots. They care about results. They want the people in power to fix the situation. And right now, Republicans are not even pretending to try. Instead, we get social-media theatrics: speedboats being blown up for clicks, or footage of immigrants who have lived here for twenty years sobbing as they’re marched away in handcuffs. None of this solves tuition. None of this creates housing. None of this lowers premiums. It is performance in place of policy, a hollow spectacle that advertises impotence as though it were decisiveness.
If Republicans continue down this path, we won’t merely lose. We will deserve to lose. And the tragedy is that the country will suffer the consequences of a failure that could have been avoided if the people elected to govern had simply done their jobs.
