I think the issue here is there *are* things Republican voters want, but they’re mostly things that cannot be achieved through legislation.
What Republican voters want is a more conservative culture. They want Evangelical propaganda movies to get Oscars. They want kid’s cartoons and TV ads to stop featuring positive portrayals of gay people. They want there to be fewer accommodations for non-English speakers. They want people to stop talking about certain negative aspects of American history like slavery or genocide against Native Americans. They want contraception to be considered shameful instead of widely accepted. They want zero acceptance in society of religious groups other than Christians and Jews.
You can’t deliver much on those except on the margins through a President or Congress. But they’re real things that motivate conservatives and their main tool to try to express that is by voting. So they vote for trolls who will “fight” for those cultural values.
But the actual policy is mostly handled by the people who have easily delivered goals, which is the business community that wants low taxes and less regulation.
That being said, there are two areas where rank and file conservatives want concrete policy change: immigration and abortion.
My comparison for the Trump years is the Carter presidency. Trump is no Carter (he does not even have the ounce of good character). But, I think he represents a disastrous current state that will require a return to "normality" in the future.
I believe the bleeding of the suburbs will end up being instrumental in the 12-16 year wilderness Republicans are walking into. The old donors will leave the scene. The "rising stars" are do-nothing maniacs like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Much more interested in prosecuting fictional deep-state wars than governing. They will lose purple districts. Because incumbent, moderate politicians will get primaried. Meanwhile, the bench will get crazier and crazier. This will repel donors, and the vicious cycle continues.
In 2032, they'll be ready for a Larry Hogan / Charlie Baker like figure to do their version of a Clintonian pivot and win back the suburbs. You can't run a party on a downwardly-mobile base and the most reactionary billionaire types. You are going to need a bench of mid-level elites (i.e. well-educated people, sub-ten-millionaires) to drive substantive agenda items.
There is so much conversation about the "working class future" of the GOP. But it will have no chance if they can't get some actual elite firepower from Nassau County and Northern Virginia. The working class voters will be lower propensity when they have to vote for personality-bankrupt cowards like Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton. Trump is an ignorant, lazy fool of the highest order. But at least he knows how to play the hits. His successors are as exciting as the warm ham sandwiches they eat for lunch. This "coalition" will have a short life.
For the Democrats: Support "broadly popular" policies. Display competence in governing. Have a strategy for how to handle the known tradeoffs that come with a broad coalition. If they can do this, the next 16 years belong to them.
I think that for GOP to go whole hog populism they have to start to find ways to send out the checks, and also to find some way of financing them. Deficit financing works for a while, but at some point you need revenue as well. One possibility is to go after tech money, as there is a lot of it and it is typically associated with social liberals. The GOP has a real conundrum, as you can be fake populist for a while, but you need to deliver. In some ways the pandemic has given them breathing space, as they can claim CARES and the latest stimulus. But Trump has shown that although celebrity and fake populism don’t quite cut it at the polls, populism has real legs as a vote getter.
Democrats have the problem of having good policies with a shit brand. Celebrity would probably be all it takes for them to be dominant. Obama is kind of proof of concept. He can’t be reduced to celebrity only, but it was a big part of his appeal, no question. Even the Nobel committee fell for it.
I think an analysis like this isn’t complete without taking an outside look at the movement of Democratic policy proposals. Bernie and crew have absolutely been successful at pushing the Overton Window dramatically left. This gives Republicans a huge advantage- they don’t have to propose doing anything because a wide range of voters just want them to fill a seat and vote No on everything coming from the left. If you look at the GA senate campaign, the GOP slogan is “Save America.” They have framed this as an existential battle for preventing America’s “descent” into Venezuelan-style socialism. When the Dems move boldly left and brush off any concerns as racist, the right doesn’t have to propose doing jack except standing in the way.
"I see a lot of people “predicting” future GOP election theft or a slip back into a Jim Crow-esque collapse of democracy primarily as a way of expressing the normative view that what Republicans are doing is bad."
These kinds of predictions in popular media make the thing they're predicting less likely to happen. Then when it starts happening reporters report on it and scuttle the plan before it executes.
This has happened multiple times over the past 4 years and some people use that as evidence that Trump isn't as bad as the media claim and others rightly point out that he only stopped because he was caught.
I've wondered how much of the "edge" in both parties seems to be like everyone is losing.
Economic liberals have watched inequality rise and almost all economic gains for the last generation be captured by the top 10%.
Social Liberals have had the most success in changing culture and law, but felt like they had (and still have) the most distance to go to equality and justice.
Economic conservatives have watched government at almost all levels grow larger and more intrusive for a generation.
Social conservatives have seen their views go from being mainstream to being considered outrageous and illegitimate.
Ezra Klein describes part of the current problem as people being unable to actually accomplish their policy aims, but change is happening, its just not the change that the majority wants.
I haven’t done the research nationwide, but, living in a red state with a Republican-controlled legislature, I don’t get the sense that the Republicans are less policy focused. There is still anti-abortion legislation, anti-renewable energy legislation, anti-LGBT policy, ect.
I think you’re being duped a bit by the nature and discipline of conservative media and the obvious lack of Republican policy making in Democrat-controlled states.
I agree with Corey Robin that The Republican Party do not have policy ambitions because Reaganism have already won on the Political-economy. A good example of this is Joe Biden's policy of not raising income taxes of people making less than $400,000, which is to the right of Obama's policy of not raising income taxes of people making less than $250,000. America is the only country I am aware of where it is considered progressive to oppose raising the taxes on a person making $399,000. America is a very right-wing country.
Democrats can win the Whitehouse in 2024, but it will largely depend on how voters see us and not our policies. Even the “trans rights” issue is being framed as conservatives being against “trans rights”. In reality they are speaking about biological sex and sports, as well as minor children medically transitioning. The argument for gay marriage was that it affected no outside the marriage, just like heterosexual marriage. Republican politicians don’t actually care about the trans debates, but voters in AZ and WI do. It becomes a wedge issue, because democrats make it so and this time the science is not on their side.
The immigration issue is more difficult. Democrats should back eliminating chain migration for extended family, support universal use of e-verify, and immigration limits. We also should help Mexico protect their border. I don’t mean say this openly, but actually create legislation and give house members a vote on it. Send it to Mitch McConnell
I Would like to see legislation on nuclear energy, increase in pell grants and income levels that qualify, expansion of Obamacare and expansion of internet in rural areas. Democrat seem to always pivot to the most unpopular issues coastal elites support.
At the risk of engaging in motivated reasoning, is it possible that the Republican Party has fallen below a critical mass of policy professionals willing to work for them and lack the institutional capacity to coordinate a comprehensive policy agenda anymore? It’s clearly not *zero* capacity yet to be fair but the combination of the professional class’s liberalism, traditional conservatives’ belief that governing should be a part-time civic service rather than a lifelong career, and the base’s demand for Republicans to constantly engage with media-driven outrages that are probably pretty limited in their policy implications all seem like they’d be driving potential serious-reformer officeholders, staffers, and non-hack pundits away. That’s got to have some kind of effect.
I don't think the current state of politics is comprehensible without looking at our information environment, which is, to put it mildly, polluted.
(Inevitable plug or the Social Dilemma - I do think it's one of the most coherent descriptions of how social media contributed to now. https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/)
In the 50s: public discourse was coherent and narrow - the really important question was which candidate was really going to contain communism. Secretly, behind closed doors, the CIA was giving people LSD without their consent to develop mind control.
Now: public discourse is incoherent and unconstrained - there's a secret pedo ring, the Earth is flat, and Hugo Chavez rigged the voting machines. Secretly, behind closed doors, the parties work together to move toward greener energy production.
Re: the Republicans moving to the left, I view this as a "shadow" of two other phenomena:
- Not doing stuff. The lack of Republicans doing stuff from 2016-2018 is kind of amazing, but I'd be nervous about calling it the new normal until it happens without Trump. Trump is uniquely bad at doing executive things, and this may have really impacted the process.
- Movement away from neoliberalism. I see this as orthogonal to a simple left-right axis, so parts of it seem like being more conservative (harsher on immigration) and parts of it seem more liberal (welfare spending isn't evil). Again, we need to see it without Trump, as the things Republicans voted on from 2016-2018 looked more conventional than the things that came out of Trump's mouth.
It might be true that within the GOP there are no big legislative things that make up an agenda. From within my agency, it looked to me like the Trump administration was making sweeping changes via regulatory, budget, and workplace decisions. Many pieces of that project stand partially complete today, and four more years would have seen many more pieces of that finished.
Basically, a phenomenon called "polarized pluralism" (coined to describe Italian politics in the 60-80s) is creating a four-way dynamic with the more extreme wings of the parties fighting endless wars over ideology or culture, while the moderate factions focus on stable governance, with minimal disruption to prevent the extremes from getting power. But we'll see whether this is as true of the Democrats as it is of the Republicans.
Great article, thanks Matt. It's all a little crazy making. I wish I knew what real conservatives think, but when I talk to them everything is whataboutism's. Even when you're purely asking. It's almost impossible for a conservative to stake a claim in anything right now, except immigration. I loved that point bc I see it anecdotally all over.
I think the issue here is there *are* things Republican voters want, but they’re mostly things that cannot be achieved through legislation.
What Republican voters want is a more conservative culture. They want Evangelical propaganda movies to get Oscars. They want kid’s cartoons and TV ads to stop featuring positive portrayals of gay people. They want there to be fewer accommodations for non-English speakers. They want people to stop talking about certain negative aspects of American history like slavery or genocide against Native Americans. They want contraception to be considered shameful instead of widely accepted. They want zero acceptance in society of religious groups other than Christians and Jews.
You can’t deliver much on those except on the margins through a President or Congress. But they’re real things that motivate conservatives and their main tool to try to express that is by voting. So they vote for trolls who will “fight” for those cultural values.
But the actual policy is mostly handled by the people who have easily delivered goals, which is the business community that wants low taxes and less regulation.
That being said, there are two areas where rank and file conservatives want concrete policy change: immigration and abortion.
"Banana Republicans" what a brilliant formulation! It deserves to become very widespread.
My comparison for the Trump years is the Carter presidency. Trump is no Carter (he does not even have the ounce of good character). But, I think he represents a disastrous current state that will require a return to "normality" in the future.
I believe the bleeding of the suburbs will end up being instrumental in the 12-16 year wilderness Republicans are walking into. The old donors will leave the scene. The "rising stars" are do-nothing maniacs like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Much more interested in prosecuting fictional deep-state wars than governing. They will lose purple districts. Because incumbent, moderate politicians will get primaried. Meanwhile, the bench will get crazier and crazier. This will repel donors, and the vicious cycle continues.
In 2032, they'll be ready for a Larry Hogan / Charlie Baker like figure to do their version of a Clintonian pivot and win back the suburbs. You can't run a party on a downwardly-mobile base and the most reactionary billionaire types. You are going to need a bench of mid-level elites (i.e. well-educated people, sub-ten-millionaires) to drive substantive agenda items.
There is so much conversation about the "working class future" of the GOP. But it will have no chance if they can't get some actual elite firepower from Nassau County and Northern Virginia. The working class voters will be lower propensity when they have to vote for personality-bankrupt cowards like Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton. Trump is an ignorant, lazy fool of the highest order. But at least he knows how to play the hits. His successors are as exciting as the warm ham sandwiches they eat for lunch. This "coalition" will have a short life.
For the Democrats: Support "broadly popular" policies. Display competence in governing. Have a strategy for how to handle the known tradeoffs that come with a broad coalition. If they can do this, the next 16 years belong to them.
I think that for GOP to go whole hog populism they have to start to find ways to send out the checks, and also to find some way of financing them. Deficit financing works for a while, but at some point you need revenue as well. One possibility is to go after tech money, as there is a lot of it and it is typically associated with social liberals. The GOP has a real conundrum, as you can be fake populist for a while, but you need to deliver. In some ways the pandemic has given them breathing space, as they can claim CARES and the latest stimulus. But Trump has shown that although celebrity and fake populism don’t quite cut it at the polls, populism has real legs as a vote getter.
Democrats have the problem of having good policies with a shit brand. Celebrity would probably be all it takes for them to be dominant. Obama is kind of proof of concept. He can’t be reduced to celebrity only, but it was a big part of his appeal, no question. Even the Nobel committee fell for it.
I think an analysis like this isn’t complete without taking an outside look at the movement of Democratic policy proposals. Bernie and crew have absolutely been successful at pushing the Overton Window dramatically left. This gives Republicans a huge advantage- they don’t have to propose doing anything because a wide range of voters just want them to fill a seat and vote No on everything coming from the left. If you look at the GA senate campaign, the GOP slogan is “Save America.” They have framed this as an existential battle for preventing America’s “descent” into Venezuelan-style socialism. When the Dems move boldly left and brush off any concerns as racist, the right doesn’t have to propose doing jack except standing in the way.
"I see a lot of people “predicting” future GOP election theft or a slip back into a Jim Crow-esque collapse of democracy primarily as a way of expressing the normative view that what Republicans are doing is bad."
These kinds of predictions in popular media make the thing they're predicting less likely to happen. Then when it starts happening reporters report on it and scuttle the plan before it executes.
This has happened multiple times over the past 4 years and some people use that as evidence that Trump isn't as bad as the media claim and others rightly point out that he only stopped because he was caught.
I've wondered how much of the "edge" in both parties seems to be like everyone is losing.
Economic liberals have watched inequality rise and almost all economic gains for the last generation be captured by the top 10%.
Social Liberals have had the most success in changing culture and law, but felt like they had (and still have) the most distance to go to equality and justice.
Economic conservatives have watched government at almost all levels grow larger and more intrusive for a generation.
Social conservatives have seen their views go from being mainstream to being considered outrageous and illegitimate.
Ezra Klein describes part of the current problem as people being unable to actually accomplish their policy aims, but change is happening, its just not the change that the majority wants.
I haven’t done the research nationwide, but, living in a red state with a Republican-controlled legislature, I don’t get the sense that the Republicans are less policy focused. There is still anti-abortion legislation, anti-renewable energy legislation, anti-LGBT policy, ect.
I think you’re being duped a bit by the nature and discipline of conservative media and the obvious lack of Republican policy making in Democrat-controlled states.
I agree with Corey Robin that The Republican Party do not have policy ambitions because Reaganism have already won on the Political-economy. A good example of this is Joe Biden's policy of not raising income taxes of people making less than $400,000, which is to the right of Obama's policy of not raising income taxes of people making less than $250,000. America is the only country I am aware of where it is considered progressive to oppose raising the taxes on a person making $399,000. America is a very right-wing country.
Democrats can win the Whitehouse in 2024, but it will largely depend on how voters see us and not our policies. Even the “trans rights” issue is being framed as conservatives being against “trans rights”. In reality they are speaking about biological sex and sports, as well as minor children medically transitioning. The argument for gay marriage was that it affected no outside the marriage, just like heterosexual marriage. Republican politicians don’t actually care about the trans debates, but voters in AZ and WI do. It becomes a wedge issue, because democrats make it so and this time the science is not on their side.
The immigration issue is more difficult. Democrats should back eliminating chain migration for extended family, support universal use of e-verify, and immigration limits. We also should help Mexico protect their border. I don’t mean say this openly, but actually create legislation and give house members a vote on it. Send it to Mitch McConnell
I Would like to see legislation on nuclear energy, increase in pell grants and income levels that qualify, expansion of Obamacare and expansion of internet in rural areas. Democrat seem to always pivot to the most unpopular issues coastal elites support.
At the risk of engaging in motivated reasoning, is it possible that the Republican Party has fallen below a critical mass of policy professionals willing to work for them and lack the institutional capacity to coordinate a comprehensive policy agenda anymore? It’s clearly not *zero* capacity yet to be fair but the combination of the professional class’s liberalism, traditional conservatives’ belief that governing should be a part-time civic service rather than a lifelong career, and the base’s demand for Republicans to constantly engage with media-driven outrages that are probably pretty limited in their policy implications all seem like they’d be driving potential serious-reformer officeholders, staffers, and non-hack pundits away. That’s got to have some kind of effect.
Matt - the Strong Towns podcast link is broken, it links to the NYT instead.
I don't think the current state of politics is comprehensible without looking at our information environment, which is, to put it mildly, polluted.
(Inevitable plug or the Social Dilemma - I do think it's one of the most coherent descriptions of how social media contributed to now. https://www.thesocialdilemma.com/)
In the 50s: public discourse was coherent and narrow - the really important question was which candidate was really going to contain communism. Secretly, behind closed doors, the CIA was giving people LSD without their consent to develop mind control.
Now: public discourse is incoherent and unconstrained - there's a secret pedo ring, the Earth is flat, and Hugo Chavez rigged the voting machines. Secretly, behind closed doors, the parties work together to move toward greener energy production.
Re: the Republicans moving to the left, I view this as a "shadow" of two other phenomena:
- Not doing stuff. The lack of Republicans doing stuff from 2016-2018 is kind of amazing, but I'd be nervous about calling it the new normal until it happens without Trump. Trump is uniquely bad at doing executive things, and this may have really impacted the process.
- Movement away from neoliberalism. I see this as orthogonal to a simple left-right axis, so parts of it seem like being more conservative (harsher on immigration) and parts of it seem more liberal (welfare spending isn't evil). Again, we need to see it without Trump, as the things Republicans voted on from 2016-2018 looked more conventional than the things that came out of Trump's mouth.
It might be true that within the GOP there are no big legislative things that make up an agenda. From within my agency, it looked to me like the Trump administration was making sweeping changes via regulatory, budget, and workplace decisions. Many pieces of that project stand partially complete today, and four more years would have seen many more pieces of that finished.
Here is a great analysis on what is happening: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/29/quiet-dangerous-u-s-politics-becoming-europeanized-polarized-pluralism/
Basically, a phenomenon called "polarized pluralism" (coined to describe Italian politics in the 60-80s) is creating a four-way dynamic with the more extreme wings of the parties fighting endless wars over ideology or culture, while the moderate factions focus on stable governance, with minimal disruption to prevent the extremes from getting power. But we'll see whether this is as true of the Democrats as it is of the Republicans.
Great article, thanks Matt. It's all a little crazy making. I wish I knew what real conservatives think, but when I talk to them everything is whataboutism's. Even when you're purely asking. It's almost impossible for a conservative to stake a claim in anything right now, except immigration. I loved that point bc I see it anecdotally all over.