A man who has never answered to a town council, a parish board, or a school board — who lives in Miami, who watches election returns snacking on stone crab — has spent forty million dollars deciding what the Republican Party will stand for after the man currently in the White House is gone. John McCormick reports in the Wall Street Journal that Ken Griffin, billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel, has already poured roughly $40 million into this year’s midterm races, with the total expected to double by November — $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, $6.5 million to groups backing individual Senate candidates, nothing for Ken Paxton in Texas. Local control, to the movement that invokes it loudest, now means the right of a man from Miami to sort Republican Senate candidates into worthy and unworthy piles without ever attending a county-party meeting where his judgment might be questioned.
The steelman is straightforward. Griffin backed Nikki Haley when the rest of the donor class folded early. He voted for Trump but said it was “not with a smile on my face.” He has criticized tariffs and challenged the politicization of the Federal Reserve. Those familiar with his giving say he supports candidates who put policy and principles such as personal freedom and fiscal discipline over personalities and partisanship. There is a version of this that is genuinely admirable — a man using his wealth to resist a personality cult and steer a party toward something resembling a governing philosophy. Alex Latcham, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, told the Journal that Griffin is “into the details of these races in a way that a lot of donors are not.”
But here is what that admirable version leaves out: the details of the races are the only details he is into. The man who lives in Miami has never sat in a county courthouse and wondered whether the hospital can keep its night-shift nurse. The man who decides whether Susan Collins gets his next check has never attended a school-board meeting where someone argued whether the children of the town would have a music teacher next year. The man who tells John Thune how the Senate should be run has never had to explain to a parish council why the diocese shuttered the church his great-grandparents built. His “principles over personality” is the principle of a man whose only relationship to a community is the check he writes to the organization that claims to speak for it.
Subsidiarity — the principle that decisions belong to the smallest competent authority — is the philosophical spine of the conservative social tradition. It runs from Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” through Russell Kirk’s reverence for local custom to Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, which declared it “a grave evil” to assign to higher bodies what lesser organizations can do. A party that genuinely believed this principle would build its direction from the bottom up: from county committees, from local activists, from the people whose lives are shaped by the policies the party enacts. It would have asked its Texas county chairs whether they wanted Ken Paxton before a hedge-fund manager decided for them. It would have let Iowa precinct captains argue over whether Ashley Hinson earned their support, rather than routing the decision through a donor’s conference call with the Senate majority leader. The distance between those two models is the distance between a movement and a marketplace. It would not wait for a man worth fifty billion dollars to tell it who should run for the Senate and who should be abandoned.
But the Republican Party long ago chose a different organizing principle. It chose the check. Griffin is not an aberration; he is the operating model. The donor class sets the terms. The candidates audition. The Senate Leadership Fund exists not to represent a coalition of voters but to route the preferences of men like Griffin into the machinery of governance. Others here have traced the same shift from principled conservatism to a movement organized around whoever commands the largest audience — or, in Griffin’s case, the largest checkbook. When a party’s direction is shaped by one man’s single $10 million check, that is not subsidiarity. That is the thing subsidiarity was built to prevent.
The counter-model already exists. It sits in a modest office on East Lake Street in the village of Friendship, Wisconsin: the Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, the largest rural electric co-op in the state, governed by a board of seven people elected by its thirty-one thousand member-owners across twelve counties. One member, one vote. No single check overrides the rest. The co-op exists because in 1936 Congress decided that rural families deserved electricity even though the market judged them unprofitable — and the form that decision took was not a government bureau but a member-owned cooperative, self-governing, locally rooted, answerable to the people it served. That is what conservative institutions look like when they mean what they say about distributed power.
Ken Griffin’s forty million dollars buys more influence over the Republican Party than those thirty-one thousand members will exercise in their lifetimes. The arithmetic is the indictment: one man’s checkbook outweighs a community’s voice. But the arithmetic is not the whole story, because the co-op still exists, the parish still holds its services, the school board still meets, and the people of Adams County still govern what they can govern. They do it with less money and less attention and less access to the men who run the party. They do it anyway. That is subsidiarity in practice — not the theory Griffin invokes when he talks about principles over personality, but the real thing: power close enough to the ground that the people who live under it can look the people who wield it in the eye.
A man who lives in Miami and has never set foot in their county will never understand this. But the movement he claims to be saving will not be saved by his checkbook. It will be saved, if it is saved at all, by the parish councils and the co-op boards and the school committees — by every institution in which one person gets one vote and the man who writes the check does not get the only voice in the room. That is the conservatism worth conserving. The rest is just a market for political influence, and the price is whatever the richest man in the room says it is.