Political Dysfunction
Last week, Ezra Klein had a
fascinating column in the New York Times titled “Three Reasons the Republican
Party Keeps Coming Apart at the Seams.” After a brief introduction and a
comparison of the state of the two major parties at the present moment, he
says, “So why has the Republican Party repeatedly turned on itself in a way the
Democratic Party hasn’t? There’s no one explanation, so here are three.” I found
his three explanations rather insightful into the question of why the GOP has
become such a politically dysfunctional mess.
His first reason is that Republicans
are caught between money and the media. As Klein puts it, “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.” This split can be
seen in the ongoing GOP effort to cut taxes, deregulate corporate misbehavior,
and decrease Medicare and Social Security benefits while at the same time
stoking racism and attempting to drastically curtail immigration. It succeeded
at this balancing act for many years, but since Trump’s arrival on the
political scene (and maybe before), this strategy has not worked. As Theda
Skopol, professor of government and sociology at Harvard, puts it, “Elected
Republicans were following agendas that just weren’t popular, not even with
their own voters.”
The GOP is a senior-heavy party,
especially seniors who are less wealthy, and these voters certainly do not want
politicians messing with their Social Security checks or Medicare coverage. Voters
are also not supportive of losing jobs to low-wage countries, something GOP
free-trade policies hastened. And nobody except the wealthy like to see tax
cuts that benefit primarily the top 10 percent of households. But the corporate-dictated
GOP policy agenda also alienated the grass roots, who were influenced by Rush
Limbaugh and his imitators who pushed a white-nationalist, white-grievance
message.
So, as Klein summarizes his first
explanation for what has happened to the GOP, “It’s caught between a powerful
business wing that drives its agenda and an antagonistic media that speaks for
its ethnonationalist base, and it can’t reconcile the two.”
The second explanation is that we
have the illusion that in each era, the GOP is composed of the same people, but
it’s not. It is the same party, but with different voters. “A
few decades ago, the anti-institutional strain in American politics was more
mixed between the parties. Democrats generally trusted government and
universities and scientists and social workers, Republicans had more faith in
corporations and the military and churches. But now you’ll find Fox News
attacking the ‘extremely woke’ military and the American Conservative
Union insisting that any Republican seeking a congressional leadership
post sign onto ‘a new shared strategy to reprimand corporations that have gone
woke.’”
Republicans have turned against
institutions, including their own party, which is an institution, or at least
used to be. Republicans also increasingly do not have college degrees. According
to author Matt Continetti, “When Mitt Romney got the nomination in 2012, the G.O.P.
was basically split between college and non-college whites. That’s gone. The
Republicans have just lost a huge chunk of professional, college-educated
voters.” As the GOP becomes more anti-establishment, it loses voters who trust
institutions and gains voters who mistrust them. What this also means is that
Republicans are losing voters in the suburbs, the real heart of America, and are
becoming a largely rural, non-college-educated party. This can be seen in the
voting patterns of recent elections. But what kind of government can a party that
is against institutions provide. As we’ve seen recently, it is a patently dysfunctional
government.
And this brings us to Klein’s
third explanation: Republicans need an enemy. The GOP does not really
have an identity of its own anymore. As President Biden put it, What are they
for? A party that has no platform is simply rudderless. Klein says, “When I
asked Michael Brendan Dougherty, a senior writer at National Review, what the
modern Republican Party was, he replied, ‘it’s not the Democratic Party.’ His
point was that not much unites the various factions of the Republican
coalition, save opposition to the Democratic Party.” But even this is not quite
right. As I’ve explained before on this blog, the Republicans have gone from
being the anti-Democratic party to being the anti-democratic party. Their anti-institutional
bent has turned them against democracy, as we can see in both their embrace of
a corrupt, authoritarian leader (Trump) and their refusal to condemn the
insurrection of January 6, 2021, that he stoked.
Sam Rosenfeld, author of The
Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, described the
difference between the two parties as follows: “The anchor of Democratic Party
politics is an orientation toward certain public policy goals. The conservative
movement is oriented more around anti-liberalism than positive goals, and so
the issues and fights they choose to pursue are more plastic. What that ends up
doing is it gives them permission to open their movement to extremist
influences and makes it very difficult to police boundaries.”
Says Klein, “There is an
irresolvable contradiction between a party organized around opposition to
government and Democrats and being a party that has to run the government in
cooperation with Democrats.” This reminds me of P. J. O’Rourke’s quip that is
more pertinent today than it was in 1991 when he wrote it: “The Democrats are
the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and
remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says
government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
Klein concludes his analysis with
this assessment Kevin McCarthy, who needed 15 votes to finally win the House
Speaker’s gavel: “He apparently agreed to spending caps and budgetary
guarantees that will commit House Republicans to the kinds of brutal cuts and
dangerous showdowns that make them look like a party of arsonists, not
legislators.” The next couple of months should be particularly ugly, and maybe
devastating to the country, the global financial system, and the GOP base.
Many Latter-day Saints are
died-in-the-wool Republicans, but they don’t realize what their party has become.
It is the definition of dysfunction, and this did not start with Donald Trump,
although he certainly hastened it. The GOP has internal conflicts that it
simply cannot resolve. Unfortunately, it is moving in the direction of chaos,
extremism, anti-institutionalism, anti-education, racism, nationalism, and
white grievance. This is not a party any Latter-day Saint should embrace.
