Opinion | The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours

A few years back, the online right became enamored of a new epithet for liberals NPC short for non-player character. Non-playable non-player character. But you don’t know about this. Do I get to tell you the NPC meme. Yes, this is the most important meme of our lifetime. The term was lifted from video games, where an NPC refers to the computer controlled characters that populate the game while you, the live player, make actual decisions. NPCs don’t have minds of their own. They don’t have agency. They are automatons. You might have seen these memes featureless gray faces, sometimes surrounded by liberal icons. Elon Musk loved posting them. Liberals in this story thought what they were allowed to think, said what they were allowed to say. And once you identify it, it’s like the Matrix. Like you see Agent Smith everywhere. Believe all women. Refugees welcome. I anticipate that’s going to be the new NPC. Download or install that entire script. Like any good insult, the NPC meme served a dual purpose. It contains a kernel of truth about its target. We liberals can be conformist. We can be too afraid to offend. We can be overly deferential to institutions. We can be cowed by the in-group policing that we inflict on ourselves, and a little quick to take up whatever the cause of the moment is. But the real purpose of the NPC insult was self-congratulation. The right was full of live players. You could see it in their willingness to offend. What is a woman. Can you tell me that. I’ll say what I want to say. And if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it. Their mistrust of institutions. Are you a conspiracy theorist. That is a pejorative, Senator. That’s applied to me mainly to keep me from asking difficult questions of powerful interests. I’ll say it again. Do your own research. Their eagerness to debate what liberals would not even say out loud. It depends on what you mean by equality. Just shut up and obey. I just reject that completely. This became part of the Trumpist right’s self-definition. They were the non-conformists. We are now the party of freedom and the party of speech. The coalition that wasn’t made of automatons. In fact, we are just the party. And that’s what America needed. Live players. And here we are in 2025. And at this point, I’m willing to concede at least half the argument. American politics does have an NPC problem, possibly a lethal one, but it’s not on the left. I can make a generous case for a lot of what the Trump administration is on some level trying to do, or at least saying they’re trying to do. Government is too gummed up by process and protocol. It is too hard to hire and fire in the Civil Service. Even if I agree with the goals of many DEI programs, and I do, many of them don’t achieve those goals. Some of them make the problems they seek to fix worse. There hasn’t been rigor at looking at, which and getting rid of the bad ones. There is actually a good argument for auditing U.S.A.I.D. We probably should convert more of what that agency spends to cash grants and direct public health support. And Yes, how the government manages software procurement and builds and maintains digital services is hopelessly cumbersome. I was saying all this before the election, too. All of it is well known, including among liberals. Many liberals have spent a lot of time trying to think about how to fix these problems, and so it is a genuine failure of Democrats that they did not put more energy into making the government faster and better and more responsive when they were in charge. How the hell did the Biden administration pass $42 billion for broadband in 2021? “Let us agree. In the 21st century in America, high speed internet is not a luxury. It is a necessity.” And have basically nothing to show for it by November of 2024? “That is a Wawa station back there behind me. They recently got $733,000 to build an EV charging station. Unfortunately, you see right now our gas pumps, though.” How did they get $7.5 billion for electric vehicle chargers, but only build a few hundred of them by the end of their term. It seems that everything is going a little slower than anybody thought. Why is it all so slow. Democrats became champions of a government that often didn’t work, and that’s part of the reason Trump won. Not the only reason, not the biggest reason. It’s not as important as the price of eggs. But when people feel the government isn’t working, the party promising change beats a party rallying in defense. When Elon Musk says that the election gave Republicans a mandate for reform, he’s not totally wrong. You couldn’t ask for a stronger mandate from the public to have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump won the House. We won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. But look at how Musk justifies that mandate. The proof is that Republicans control the House and the Senate, so why not write some bills. Sure, Republican majorities are narrow, but bipartisanship here, it wasn’t out of the question. Democrats were defeated and ready to deal their own voters wanted them to deal. A January poll by CBS and YouGov found that 54 percent of Democrats wanted their congressional representatives to work with the Trump administration. One month later, February and now 65 percent want all out opposition. That is a lot of political capital. The Trump administration burned in just one month. And for what. I’ve covered Washington for decades now. There’s gray in the spirit. If this was about policy, Trump and his team would have gone through Congress. They could have crafted much larger reforms using a intercept of powers, and they wouldn’t be facing down the courts in the way they are now. But what they wanted wasn’t policy. They didn’t want to go line by line through USAID and figure out what worked and what didn’t. They didn’t want to think through New civil service regulations, balancing ethics and independence and responsiveness. What they wanted was power. What Donald Trump wanted was power. And so they were trying to remake our system of government, not our laws. And they’ve identified a weak point in the system. And now they’re trying to drive a flaming Cybertruck through it. That weak point is Congress, and the reason the Trump administration might succeed in taking Congress’s power is that they have turned congressional Republicans into NPCs. The vulnerability in the system here goes way back in Federalist 51, James Madison set out the challenge he and his colleagues faced in writing the Constitution. He said in framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men. The great difficulty lies in this you must first enable the government to control the governed, and the next place oblige it to control itself. So how does a government control itself. The founders idea was that it controls itself through internal competition between independent branches, each of which wants to protect its own power. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition, Madison wrote, but one branch was unquestionably designed to be stronger than the others. Congress controls the money. Congress can overturn presidential vetoes. Congress can impeach federal judges, cabinet officers, and the president. Why was Congress made so strong. Because Congress reflects a second, and in some ways, the more important and enduring form of fracture. The founders imagined our political system was designed to fracture power by place. Senators are elected by states. The house is sliced up into geographically bound districts. That ultimately is what members of Congress are supposed to represent. The particular needs of a particular group of voters in a particular place. And so power would be fractured. It can never nationalize into just one force. The framers of the Constitution got a lot right, but they got a lot wrong. And one of the big things they got wrong was visible almost immediately. The founders imagined a political system free of political parties. But for much of American history, their second assumption held. Geography kept. American politics fractured. It kept power fractured because it kept America’s political parties fractured. Yes, we’ve had Republicans and Democrats for a long time. But in the 20th century, that two party system was really a four party system. The Democrats were split between the Liberals we know today and the Southern Dixiecrats, a internal party whose primary goal was upholding segregation. The Republicans were split between conservatives as we know them today and Northern liberals. It is astonishing from our vantage point to really wrap your mind around this, but it is true for much of the 20th century to say you were a Republican or a Democrat didn’t reveal whether you were a liberal or conservative. In 1973, Senator Joe Biden opposed the Roe v Wade decision. Around that same time, President Richard Nixon proposed a universal health care bill and created the Environmental Protection Agency. The time has come for man to make his peace with nature. Politics was different then. The parties were different then, because parties had contained so many different places and ideologies could not act in lockstep. And so bipartisanship was common as warm applause from members of both parties, as the president sets to work the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yes, it was pushed by a Democratic president, but congressional Republicans were crucial to its passage. Souvenirs go to Republican leader Everett Dirksen and Democratic whip Hubert Humphrey. When Nixon was refusing to spend money that Congress had appropriated a policy known as impoundment, Congress acted to protect its power. Republicans and Democrats alike. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 passed the House with only 6 No votes. Only six. It passed the Senate without a single vote in opposition. When Watergate began coming to light. Good evening. I want to talk to you tonight from my heart. It was ultimately a delegation of congressional Republicans that persuaded Nixon to resign. Senator Scott and I have just concluded a visit with the president. He invited us down this afternoon to disclose to him what we feel the actual conditions in the House and the Senate are relative to his situation. But that was then here in 2025. President Trump is impounding money that Congress has appropriated in clear defiance of that impoundment bill that passed nearly unanimously. He is trying to erase agencies that Congress created. And while the courts are standing in his way, Congress is doing nothing while Trump takes away their power. The reason USAID is going to ceasefire to exist, as it did before, is because it should. At the end of the day, though, he’s got to freeze everything in order to get his arms around it. Just give him a little time. We don’t see this as a threat to Article I at all. We see this as an active, engaged, committed executive branch authority doing what the executive branch should do. It’s astonishing. Republicans in Congress could demand that Trump cut them in. They won this election too. This is their job. It is their job to write these bills. Agreeing with Trump’s policy aims need not mean agreeing with his power grab, the most powerful branch of government. The branch with the power to check the others is supine. It is not that it can’t act to protect its power, it’s that it will not act to protect its power. This is a non-player Congress. What we are seeing is a collapse of the constitutional structure and the nationalization of the two parties. If Democrats controlled Congress right now yeah, Congress would be a check on Donald Trump. Since Republicans control it, it is not. What matters is which party controls it and how that party acts. It is parties that now compete with each other, not branches. Parties are institutions. They can be more or less responsible. They can themselves be a check on abuses, even on their own side. I already talked about how Republicans were a check on Nixon in 2005, President George W Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. I asked the Senate to review her qualifications thoroughly and fairly and to vote on her nomination promptly, and she had to withdraw because the Republican controlled Senate found her unqualified and ideologically unreliable. The fact that Bush wanted her on the court, that wasn’t enough. Congressional Republicans had their own views. In 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Tom Daschle to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Tom Daschle is one of America’s foremost health care experts only to see Daschle withdraw. Daschle, who was a former Majority Leader of the US Senate, was found to owe back taxes, and he thought his own nomination might fail to make it through a Senate filled with his former colleagues. But this Republican Party is no check on Trump. That’s been the message of Trump’s nominations. RFK Jr. Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth. These were tests Senate Republicans know these nominees are unqualified. You could see it in the hearings. Again, let’s make it very clear for everyone here today. As Secretary of Defense, will you support women continuing to have the opportunity to serve in combat roles as the leader of the intelligence community. How would you think you would be received based on some of these past actions to support or even to pardon Edward Snowden. I’m a doc. Convince me that you will become the public health advocate, but not just churn old information. So that there’s never a conclusion Senate Republicans don’t want to vote for these nominees. Not one of them got into politics to confirm Robert F Kennedy Jr. who ran for president in 2023, two years ago as a pro-choice Democrat. As Secretary of Health and Human Services. But Trump knows what he’s doing. You force people into submission early, and soon it becomes a habit. Congressional Republicans have their reasons for bowing to him. Washington is aflame with talk of the primary challenges that Elon Musk will fund against any Republican who makes trouble for Trump. All of them fear that Trump will personally weigh in against them in a primary. What an unbelievably strange life to rise as far as they have in politics, to wield as much power as they could and to be as afraid as they are. The NPC critique got something right. There are real dangers to conformity. Political parties, even presidential administrations, are stronger when they can hear contrary voices. Musk using his billions to scare congressional Republicans into supporting everything Trump does. Yet it makes Trump look stronger now. It might make him and the country a whole lot weaker later if those same nominees fail and he is blamed for the disaster, or if the Treasury payment system breaks and he is blamed for the chaos in the short term. Having unanimity makes you look strong in the long term. Success is what makes you strong. It would be good right now. Good for their party. Good for the country. If Republicans displayed the values they once claimed to prize, a willingness to offend their own side, a mistrust of institutional authority, an eagerness to debate the questions of those in power do not wish to see debated. But we are seeing none of that. This is the NPC problem we actually face. A non-player Congress driven by Republicans who serve Trump’s ambitions first. Congressional Republicans who have gone quiet. We are left relying on the courts. And yeah, that may work. But this is not the system working. It’s a system failing.