Victory Before Vanity

How conservative infighting has squandered power before—and why the midterms call for unity, discipline, and a battle of ideas.

Lars Møller | October 13, 2026

From Wikimedia Commons: Election Day in Philadelphia (John Lewis Krimmel, 1815)

The GOP has recently experienced highly publicized internal division playing out across two main fronts: a widening rift between President Trump and Senate leadership, and sharp legislative gridlock between House and Senate Republicans.

Yet the approaching midterm elections present the conservative movement with a test of character that transcends ordinary partisan calculation. At stake stands not merely control of one chamber of Congress or the marginal adjustment of tax rates, but the capacity of a free people to transmit ordered liberty to successive generations. The gravity of this moment demands that personal vanity, factional score-settling, and the cheap pleasures of sarcasm directed at one’s own comrades be set aside. Failure to do so risks repeating a pattern whose historical costs have been measured in lost presidencies, shattered congressional majorities, and decades of progressive institutional capture.

The GOP’s record supplies three unambiguous illustrations of the price exacted by internal fracture. In 1912, the rupture between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft split the Republican vote almost evenly: Roosevelt’s Progressive Party claimed 27.4% of the popular vote while Taft retained 23.2%. Woodrow Wilson, with only 41.8%, secured 435 electoral votes and delivered both houses of Congress to the Democrats for the first time in twenty years. The progressive wing’s decision to bolt rather than subordinate its ambitions to party continuity handed the White House to a president whose subsequent domestic and international policies reshaped the American state in ways still felt today. 

Half a century later, the 1964 contest revealed a different form of self-inflicted damage. Barry Goldwater’s nomination after a bruising primary battle produced open abstention and public repudiation by significant segments of the northeastern moderate establishment. The resulting spectacle of disunity allowed Lyndon Johnson to sweep forty-four states and to install filibuster-proof Democrat majorities in........

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