Ezra Klein, writing in the NYT, suggests Three Reasons the Republican Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams. As usual, I have gripes about the headline, as, ultimately the party isn’t coming apart at the seams, insofar as it does control one of two chamber of Congress and recently held the White House. Still, it is clear, as McCarthy’s messy bid to obtain the Speaker’s gavel illustrates, that there are serious factions within the party.
In other words, I agree that the GOP is a bit of a mess internally. But, and this is more than a little important, it isn’t going anywhere. Indeed, it can continue to be fractious and messy and still find itself in control of the government. First, as I constantly note, our system produces only two viable choices, and that has a profound impact on voter behavior. Second, structural conditions in the EC keep the party competitive for the presidency, the structure of the Senate is wholly in their favor, and the general conditions of our electoral system give them a decent chance of controlling the House every two years.
I stress these points because no matter what else may be true about the Republican Party, it isn’t going away as long as the institutional parameters of American politics remain the same. Moreover, they are going to be in a position to control parts of the federal government for the foreseeable future.
Still, it is worth asking why they are having the problems they are having.
One of Klein’s three reasons for GOP messiness is as follows:
For decades, the Republican Party has been an awkward alliance between a donor class that wants deregulation and corporate tax breaks and entitlement cuts and guest workers and an ethnonationalist grass roots that resents the way the country is diversifying, urbanizing, liberalizing and secularizing. The Republican Party, as an organization, mediates between these two wings, choosing candidates and policies and messages that keep the coalition from blowing apart.
I think this is correct and, further, suggestive that there are at least two parties within the GOP but that our institutions make it almost impossible to incentivize the party to break into more coherent collectives.
There is, however, nowhere viable for either wing to defect to, save oblivion. So they are going to stay together.
I think that this internal fracturing is at the core of the problem for the GOP. The business wing really does need something different than the ethnonationalist wing. As Klein notes in the piece, this can be seen on the immigration issue, where the Chamber of Commerce types want a cheap labor pool, but that not only can have profound impacts on rural economies, it runs right up against folks who distrust non-whites with different cultural backgrounds. Likewise, free trade and neoliberal economics create a clear division. And while both sides think deregulation and tax cuts are mutually beneficial, the reality is those things are far more useful to the business wing.
The other two issues Klein raises are anti-establishment sentiments in some parts of the coalition and the GOP’s need for an enemy. I find these to be more squishy and stylistic than the clear cleavage noted above.
I think the “enemy” thing is as much a product of our binary party structure and the notion of “negative partisanship” (i.e., as much voting against the other party as for one’s own side) is a well-known phenomenon. And I think it is less about enemies as it is about how the Cold War specifically calibrated our politics for roughly half of the last century.
So, I think his point about the Cold War is correct, but with some added caveats.
The defining consensus of the midcentury Republican Party was its opposition to the Soviet Union. “The Cold War was the engine driving the mainstream Republican Party to the left,” Gary Gerstle writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order.” “Its imperatives forced a political party that loathed a large centralized state and the extensive management of private enterprise in the public interest to accept these very policies as the governing principles of American life.”
I think we need to note that the Cold War was also a shared area of agreement between the parties, even if any given presidential candidate may have had different approaches. As I alluded to in a comment thread recently, there was less anti-immigration rhetoric in the Cold War period by Republicans because the idea that a bunch of people wanted out of Communist countries (or, really, anywhere) and into the home of the free fit the ideological narrative.
Now there is no such impulse and nativism, which existed prior to the Cold War as a major part of American politics, has reemerged. So, the shared goals of the Cold War helped there be some amount of common ground in American politics. The fact that the USSR truly did pose an existential threat to the USA meant that at least some parts of our politics were based on shared self-interest. So, the Cold War affect more than just the GOP.
Still, I think that Klein’s citation of Gerstle does hold some GOP-specific significance as well.
Gerstle’s point here is subtle. Anti-Communism made Republicans more than a purely anti-government party. Liberals sometimes frame this as hypocrisy on the part of Ronald Reagan and other self-styled conservatives — how can you hate government but love the military? — but in Gerstle’s view, fighting Communism kept Republicans committed to a positive vision of the role of government in modern life. It turned tax cuts and deregulation into questions of freedom. It turned highway construction into a question of national defense.
And so it’s no surprise that you first see today’s Republican Party — complete with government shutdowns, doomed impeachment efforts, bizarre investigations and vicious congressional infighting — in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union had fallen. Then came George W. Bush, and his initially listless administration, which was revived by Al Qaeda — another external enemy that lent focus and coherence to the Republican agenda. But that faded, too. And as that faded, the trends of the Gingrich era took hold. The enemies, again, became Democrats, the government and other Republicans.
And, of course, if government is the problem, it makes being a party serious about governing a hard thing to accomplish.
I do recommend the entire column.
