This Week (Opinion)
By Ryan Cooper
September 9, 2015
Since
the late 1970s, when conservatives consolidated their grip over the
Republican Party, the GOP has become consistently more right-wing with
every election, making
the current House majority the most conservative in a century at least.
The Democrats have become more liberal as well (though not by nearly as
much), resulting in the most polarized Congress since possibly before
the Civil War.
This
raises the question: Where will the radicalization stop? Each new
election has presented a chance for the GOP to turn back towards the
center — or at least halt at
its extremely conservative position. But with each election, including
the one in 2014, relative moderates retired or were defeated, replaced
by loonier ultraconservatives.
With
the phenomenon of Donald Trump, that turning point may have been
reached. Paid-up, credentialed movement conservatives are in open
rebellion against Trumpism and
all it represents — a crack-up of the machine that has been
consistently pushing the GOP to the right.
First,
it's important to note the methodologies of these studies. The
political scientists who measure ideological polarization typically use a
technique called DW-NOMINATE,
a purely mathematical tool that measures how closely parties align
among themselves. They find that, most of the time, a single dimension
of difference is largely sufficient to explain the outcomes of political
events. Today, that's economic ideology — liberalism
versus conservatism — but in antebellum days it was slavery.
(Sometimes, a second dimension is needed to account for issue-splitters
like the Blue Dog Democrats, though such people are all but extinct
today.)
This
is to say that GOP extremism has thus far mostly been expressed in
economic policy tilted toward plutocrats, such as abolishing campaign
finance law and preserving
the carried interest loophole. But the weird thing about galloping
economic extremism in the GOP is that it seems to be fueled by forces
other than economic concerns. People have often remarked that Republican
elites whip their base into a frenzy over social
issues, but are far more reliable when it comes to delivering huge gobs
of money for the rich than they are at redressing social grievances.
Moreover,
when it comes to policy brass tacks, Republican base voters often do
not support the small government agenda of the party's elite and donor
class. Republicans
generally (and even Tea Party voters!) strongly oppose cuts to Medicare
and Social Security — probably the most left-wing programs in the
American state, which happen to be utterly loathed by the party elite.
What gives? Among Republican voters, social issue
politics have been channeled into pro-rich policy.
Donald
Trump totally blows up that relationship. On a whole slew of policy, he
is no extremist — on the contrary, his list of liberal heresies is a
mile long. His lead
in the polls, sustained in the face of multiple enormous gaffes and
even a brief assault from Fox News, illustrates what really drives a
substantial fraction of the Republican electorate: grievance politics
and racism.
As
society keeps evolving, beliefs that were once widely held (opposition
to gay marriage, or interracial marriage before that) have been firmly
labeled as bigoted. That
hatred of being judged is the root of grievance politics, leading many
to instinctively valorize anything that goes against the cultural elite.
Hence, Trump: It turns out that pissing off liberals, refusing to
submit to their cultural standards, and never
apologizing can inspire deep loyalty among a large swath of the
conservative electorate. Like Sarah Palin, a great deal of Trump's
popularity can be chalked up to the fact that he has the right enemies.
The fact that he is such an outrageous buffoon is a positive
good, simply because it inspires even more left-wing dislike.
Trump's
appeal to racists, meanwhile, is by now stone obvious. He makes
frequent reference to Mexican immigrants being criminals and rapists. He
says he will magically
deport 11 million undocumented workers and build a gigantic wall to
keep them from coming back. And now he's bringing back Nixon's
dog-whistle crime politics, talking about a "silent majority" that
supports his views. Put these things together — such as when
Trump contemptuously ejected a prominent liberal Latino journalist from
a press conference — and it's the political equivalent of a crack rock:
But
that's not the end of the race issue. Many Trump supporters are
outright white nationalists, open racists, and/or anti-Semites.
Full-blown, unapologetic bigotry, complete
with bizarre sexual hang-ups, is perhaps more visible now than at any
time in the last several decades.
Some
Republicans — like the GOP elites who are beside themselves at the
damage Trump is doing to the party brand — seem most upset that he's
throwing a wrench into their
plans to turn cultural resentment into more tax cuts. But others seem
genuinely stunned and horrified at the emergence of neo-Nazi and KKK
rhetoric in a Republican primary.
It's
hard to say where it will end. Trumpism could introduce to American
politics something similar to France's National Front — a party that is
very hard right on social
issues, particularly immigration, while cutting center-left on the
welfare state. If Trump runs as a third party, it could be a spoiler for
the 2016 presidential election, or mutate into a different kind of
primary challenge for House and Senate seats. Or
traditional Republicans could be so disgusted with the bigotry of
Trumpism that they purge his followers from the party — likely sapping
much of their base's fervent energy.
Either
way, this poses a real challenge to the mechanism that has ratcheted
the Republican Party economically rightward over the last four decades.
If that mechanism breaks
down, you can thank Trump.
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