I certainly have trouble discerning any sort of coherent ideological plan in the last eight years. Jon Henke and Patrick Ruffini are trying to change that.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Lost its moorings?
Hardly.
Seems like business as usual to me.
Both parties compete to grow the government. The last eight years have proven that beyond any doubt. The only present hope is divided government. Give either party complete control, and you get even greater growth in government. It leads to tyranny and, eventually, revolution.
When I first started paying attention to politics, back in the early 50's, the primary mission of the Republican party was to represent the economic interests of the more affluent members of society. It still is. I also don't think Republican catering to social conservatism is anything new. McCarthyism, Goldwater's southern strategy, and reliance on the religious right is standard Republican stuff. So is Bush's ultra-nationalism. And what's new about his willingness to run up massive budget deficits? Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who taught us that deficits don't matter? So I don't understand the premise of this post. The Republican ideological plan seems coherent to me.
The Republicans haven't had a strong purpose since the Soviets collapsed and marginal tax rates came down in the '80's. They have had any purpose other than power at any cost since they went all in for that despicable Clinton impeachment stuff in the '90s.
Even as a progressive I can see that this is a real problem for the country - in the long run the only way to get good policies is to have a real debate, have your ideas challenged by an honest and intelligent adversary. This is hard to do when your adversary is mired in corruption and total incompetence.
But, the link Megan provided, while calling for a new beginning, also has a big Ann Coulter ad. I know they don't pick their ads, but it still shows what a long way they have to go before "Republican thought" becomes anything but a ridiculous oxymoron.
"When I first started paying attention to politics, back in the early 50's, the primary mission of the Republican party was to represent the economic interests of the more affluent members of society. It still is."-Stan
Stan, I don't see how one could sqaure this thesis with the fact that affluent voters are leaning toward the Democratic Party. See here, for instance.
The Economist was not far off when it called the Democratic Party the party of "the very rich and the very poor." That is most evident in Obama's coalition, which seems to consist chiefly of poor black people and rich white people.
Republican support comes chiefly from the middle classes. It might well once have been true that the Republican Party was the party of the rich, but it is true no longer.
Parties don't have moorings. They're just vehicles for aggregating individuals. They can give the appearance of having mooorings to the extent that the way they aggregate individual preferences does not depart too substantially from the preference set of a rational individual. But the preferences of social conservatives, economic conservatives, and rich people have become so different that the republican party can only come across as an ad hoc coalition formed for the purpose of trying to win elections.
"Has the Republican Party lost its moorings?"
Absafreakenlutely!
Contract with America was a good start. It contained a lot of good ideas that most Republicans (and Americans) could agree on. Unfortunately, shortly after most of the items in it failed to become law, the GOP became refocused on winning for the sake of winning, social scapegoating, pork barrel spending and basically business as usual for D.C.
rwe, The presidential vote in 2004 is unreliable as an indicator of the effect of income on voting because of a) the Iraq War, then still popular, and b) the different campaigning abilities of George Bush and John Kerry. Looking instead at voting for the House of Representatives, as analyzed here,
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.0.html
I find that people making less than 100K voted for the Democrats by 51% to 48%, and people with incomes equal to or greater than 100K voted for the Republicans 57% to 42%. I stand by my contention that the primary purpose of the Republican party is to help the affluent, and I think the majority of the American public feels the same way.
When I see an actual election where college graduates and/or people earning over $100,000 break Democratic, then I'll believe that the Republicans are "unmoored." In the meantime, tax cuts, protection of business interests, which includes support for free trade, muscular unilateralism abroad, which includes support for Israel, no matter how much the Europeans disagree, and social conservatism constitute a perfectly coherent agenda, in the sense of reflecting the beliefs of a large number of Americans.
If by a coherent ideological plan you mean something that will help you sleep with a female college student, like philosophically pure libertarianism or Teddy Kennedy-style liberalism, then no, the Republicans don't have that. But if you mean something you can advocate at the country club or the church coffee hour, then sure they do.
The Republicans have no coherent agenda other than maintaining power. Let's think about some of the major legislation over the past 7 years:
* Tax cuts
* Farm bill
* No child left behind
* Medicare/aid drug prescription benefit
* Energy bill
* CAFTA and bilaterial FTAs
* Sarbanes-Oxley
* Patriot Act
* Creation of DHS
Of these, which are truly conservative? I think that most people on the right can agree with the virtues of tax cuts (especially when combined with spending cuts) and free trade, but the rest?
A genuine free-market conservative shouldn't believe in the need for ANY farm or energy bills (why do we need more government here?), an expansion of the federal role in education (remember how back in the 90s Republicans talked about abolishing the DoE?), SOX (the market punished Enron plenty by demolishing its stock), or the prescription drug benefit (more government in medicine).
The patriot act and DHS creation are more difficult to categorize, given that support was very broad (overwhelming passage) with opposition limited to the left and libertarian wing of the right.
So if you equate Republicans with right-wing thought, then Republicans are clearly unmoored. If you equate Republicans simply with an entity that is engaged in self-preservation it makes far more sense. (how many of those bills that passed involved tough choices or clear losers outside of free trade? for most there were distinct winners with the pain in the form of higher government expenditures dispersed among the taxpayers)
Stan, I still disagree. As George Mason economist Bryan Caplan has reported, the (ceteris paribus) effect of income on party affiliation is very weak (indeed, statistically no different from zero). This means that the kind of linear relationship (an increase in income makes one significantly more likely to be a Republican, other things being equal) just doesn't exist.
But to the extent there is a relationship between income and party affiliation, it isn't the one you're suggesting. This Pew Study suggests that those with household incomes over $150,000 a year are leaning toward Democrats, while those with incomes between $75,000 and $150,000 are tending toward the Republicans.
Moreover, while Republicans do poorly with households with income below $40,000, once income rises above that threshold, higher income voters are no more likely to support Republicans than lower income ones. For example, 32% of those with households incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 support Republicans and 31% of those above $150,000 in household income support Republicans.
So it just doesn't seem right to say that Republicans are the party of the wealthy. They might be the party of the countryside, of churchgoers, of military families, of white men--but they seem clearly not to be the party of the rich.
Colin:
Just because the creation of the DHS and the passing of the Patriot Act were passed overwhelmingly doesn't make them good ideas. In fact, real conservatives should be appalled. Do we really need more government?
Ironically enough, it took being outcast for folks like Henke to figure this out. Before the going got rough, very few people were making any significant ideological stands. You know, 9/11 changed everything, we have to toe the party line because the democrats are worse. Heck, Henke was even the designated blogger for the Republican candidate during 2006 senate race.
My question: How can you expect someone to take you seriously now?
We should no longer use the terms "Conservative" and "Liberal". They only confuse matters.
Is "free trade" conservative or liberal? Well, it depends on who you ask. For instance, is Pat Buchanan conservative or liberal? Is he for free trade or against it? Now what about Ralph Nader?
The sooner we stop generalizing, the sooner we can get back to some sanity in politics.
Stan, rather than characterizing Republican policies as designed to help the affluent, I’d say it’s more fair to characterize them as favoring self-made successes, e.g., small businessmen. Such people are sensitive to taxes because a tax increase substantially affects their financial standing. Furthermore, the individualism that characterizes Republican perspectives resonates with small businessmen.
Democratic policies, on the other hand, exert their greatest appeal to those either a) aren’t successful, or b) didn’t make their success but came by it through, e.g., inheritance. These people are not concerned about tax increases, because group a) effectively doesn’t pay taxes, but stands to benefit from government handouts made possible by tax increases, and group b) has enough money that a tax increase doesn’t materially change their financial status (and their CPAs can probably get around paying any increase anyway). These groups also favor collectivism because group a) figures it’ll be lumped upwards, whereas group b) feels guilty about unearned wealth, and figures that the (for them) imperceptibly larger tax bite makes up for being born on third base (e.g., Kennedy) or ruthlessly and brutally shaking down the poor to become wealthy (e.g., Soros and Thailand).
To Nelson's point, a better classification is collectivist or individualist, the basic philosophical divide on which entity - the collective or the individual - gets pride of place.
That taxonomy avoids the linguistic Moebius strip situations of, say, describing a hard core Marxist trying to revive the USSR as "conservative."
If Republicans are the party of conservatism (?), and if Russell Kirk was right that conservatism “is the negation of ideology,” then we should hope that Republicans have no “coherent ideological plan.” Republicans excessive reliance on a few well worn ideological warhorses (tax cuts, aggressive foreign policy, social policy, tax cuts), instead of practicing a genuine conservatism of seeking to implement good policy based on what has worked in the past and what is working today, has been their undoing.
Of course, this is mostly a semantic disagreement, if you said Republicans seem to lack a coherent, principled strategy of governance, It would be hard to disagree.
Lost its moorings the last eight years? How about, they never had much in the way of moorings to begin with. The Republican Party economic policy since Reagan is cut taxes (and don't pay for them with spending cuts) and then call for balanced budgets without actually doing anything about it. This, 25-400 billion dollar annual deficits for every year a Republican has been in office since 1981.
On foreign policy, other than taking credit for the collapse of communism (which is ludicrous) Republicans have gone from condemning nation building and liberal interventionism to taking it to extremes no Democratic president had contemplated before. The last Republican president who governed half-way decently was Nixon.
"Democratic policies, on the other hand, exert their greatest appeal to those either a) aren’t successful, or b) didn’t make their success but came by it through, e.g., inheritance."
Occam's Beard, I said that Republican policies are aimed at helping the well-off because of objective reality: tax cuts that largely benefit the well-off, opposition to social security and medicare in the past and to universal medical coverage in the present, eagerness to bail out banks rather than individuals hurt by the mortgage mess, gross favoritism to the credit card industry, and willful negligence in regulating air and water pollution.
By contrast, your statement is based on nothing but your personal prejudice. And by the way, I think the way you use "successful" speaks volumes.
Stan, Republican policies are directed at not hurting the successful (and yes, the way I use it speaks volumes), which you interpret as helping them. To put the shoe on the opposite ideological foot, Democrats' policies are directed toward hurting the successful, to benefit the unsuccessful (i.e., the losers).
Tax cuts exert their greatest effect on the middle class. A decrease in taxes materially affects the finances of a small business man; it doesn't materially affect the finances of the indigent, because they don't pay taxes in the first place, nor does it affect those of the wealthy. So Bill Gates, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, or George Soros has a few extra million to play with. Does that mean any of these worthies can move up from Hamburger Helper to steak?
Opposition to social security, medicare, and universal medical coverage is philosophical, not financial. The conservative philosophy is that individuals should do everything that individuals can to look after themselves. The government exists to do things that individuals cannot, viz., build roads, defend the nation, that sort of thing.
As for mortgages, I'd be happy to let banks founder if I were convinced that the impact would not extend to the entire financial system. As for individuals who were stupid enough to take out adjustable rate loans they could barely service at historic low interest rates, I believe Chuck Darwin published some trenchant observations that apply.
Gross favoritism to the credit card industry? Where does that come from, anyway?
Wilful negligence in regulating pollution? You mean, such as establishing the EPA, the handicraft of that well-known Democrat, Richard Nixon?
The point is that there's a tradeoff between environmental and economic concerns. Go to a Democrat-dominated union hall some Friday night, and tell them how jobs will have to be sacrificed to save the spotted owl. Just make sure your health insurance is paid up.
Re: So is Bush's ultra-nationalism
Bush is not a nationalist. He just plays at being one, the way Marie Antoinette played at being a shepherdess. A true nationalist would not mortgage the country to a major rival, nor shrug his shoulders over American factories closing and jobs going overseas. Compare Bush with Pat Buchanan, a hard-core nationalist in every sense of the word.
On foreign policy, other than taking credit for the collapse of communism (which is ludicrous) Republicans have gone from condemning nation building and liberal interventionism to taking it to extremes no Democratic president had contemplated before.
Of course Republicans were responsible for precipitating the collapse of communism. Communism/socialism/collectivism generally all collapse, given time, but Reagan put the pin to the communist balloon by requiring the USSR to either call or fold economically.
As for the transformation from condemning nation building to taking it to extremes, did any small event, any trifle perchance intervene that may have changed the situation, perhaps intrude upon your consciousness? Anything at all?