Washington Post (Opinion)
By Fareed Zakaria
January 28, 2016
To
understand why the current conservative crack-up so confounds the
Republican establishment, you have to recognize that the party is facing
two separate but simultaneous
revolts: one led by Ted Cruz, the other by Donald Trump.
The
first is well described by E.J. Dionne Jr. in his important new book,
“Why the Right Went Wrong.” For six decades, he explains, conservatives
promised their voters
that they were going to roll back big government. In the 1950s and
early ’60s, they ran against the New Deal (Social Security). Then they
railed against the Great Society (Medicare). Today it is Obamacare.
But
they never actually did anything. Despite nominating Goldwater and
electing Nixon, Reagan and two Bushes, despite a congressional
revolution led by Newt Gingrich,
these programs endured, and new ones were created.
The
simple reason for this is that while Americans might oppose the welfare
state in theory, in practice they like it. And the bulk of government
spending is on the middle
class, not the poor. Social Security and Medicare take up more than
twice as much of the federal budget as all non-defense discretionary
spending . One middle-class tax exemption — for employer-based health
care — costs the federal government more than three
times the total for the food stamp program.
Whatever
the reality, Republicans kept promising something to their base but
never delivered. This has led to what Dionne calls the “great betrayal.”
Party activists are
enraged, feel hoodwinked and view those in Washington as a bunch of
corrupt compromisers. They want someone who will finally deliver on the
promise of repeal and rollback.
Enter
Cruz. How did a first-term senator, despised within his party both in
Washington and Texas, get so far so fast? By promising to take on the
party elites and finally
throttle big government. Cruz has said that he will repeal Obamacare,
abolish the IRS and propose a constitutional amendment to balance the
budget — which would mean hundreds of billions of dollars in spending
cuts.
Trump’s
supporters, on the other hand, are old-fashioned economic liberals. In a
powerful analysis, drawing on recent survey data from the Rand Corp.,
Michael Tesler shows
that the Trump voter is very different from the Cruz voter. “Cruz
outperforms Trump by about 15 percentage points among the most
economically conservative Republicans,” he writes. “But Cruz loses to
Trump by over 30 points among the quarter of Republicans
who hold progressive positions on health care, taxes, the minimum wage
and unions.” Trump is well aware of this fact, which explains why he has
said repeatedly he won’t touch Social Security or Medicare, spoke
fondly of the Canadian single-payer system, denounces
high chief executive salaries, promises to build infrastructure and
opposes free-trade deals.
Trump’s
voters reflect an entirely different revolt. Since the 1960s, some
members of the United States’ white middle and working classes have felt
uncomfortable with
the changes afoot in the country. They were uneasy with the social
revolutions of the 1960s, dismayed by black protests and urban violence,
and enraged by the increasing tide of immigrants, many of them
Hispanic. In recent years, they have expressed hostility
toward Muslims. It is this group of Americans — many of them registered
Democrats and independents — who make up the core of support for Trump.
(Obviously there are overlaps between the two candidates’ supporters,
but the divergences are striking.)
In
his analysis, Tesler shows that, statistically, “Trump performs best
among Americans who express more resentment toward African Americans and
immigrants and who tend
to evaluate whites more favorably than minority groups.” The New York
Times’s Nate Cohn points out that Trump’s support geographically is
almost the opposite of that of the last major populist businessman to
run for president, Ross Perot. Perot did well in
the West and New England, but poorly in the South and industrial North.
Trump’s support follows a different but familiar pattern. Cohn writes:
“It is similar to a map of the tendency toward racism by region.” To be
clear, many people back Trump for reasons
entirely unrelated to race, religion or ethnicity, but the correlations
shown by scholars are striking.
Could
these revolts have been prevented? Perhaps, if the Republican Party had
been honest with its voters and explained that the welfare state was
here to stay, that free
markets need government regulation, and that the empowerment of
minorities and women was inevitable and beneficial. Its role was to
manage these changes so that they develop organically, are not excessive
and preserve enduring American values. But that is
the role for a party that is genuinely conservative, rather than
radical.
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