(Or: ‘How the Republican Party became an insurgent outlier – Part 1’)

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” — Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

In It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the Politics of Extremism, Mann and Ornstein credit political scientist Stephen Skowronek with attaching the term ‘insurgent outlier’ to the GOP, while absolving him of the details of their analysis. By now, the increasing extremism of the Republican Party—long before Donald Trump’s ride down the escalator—has been widely (if not universally) acknowledged. As has a second element of Mann and Ornstein’s critique: that this GOP transformation is the first place to look to explain the highly dysfunctional state of the American political system.

While it’s easy to identify villains in this story—I’ve written multiple posts featuring Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, and William Barr, for instance—I’d like to sketch a structural explanation of how we got here. So, in today’s installment, I’ll begin with a look at the asymmetrical nature of the two political parties, inspired by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins’ book, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, and their account contrasting the Democratic Party, a coalition of social groups, and the GOP, the vehicle of an ideological movement.

The Democratic Party

‘President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s smashing victory in the 1936 presidential election revealed that the American political landscape had shifted. With FDR at its head, the Democratic Party put together a formidable coalition whose main components were lower-income groups in the great cities—African Americans, union members, and ethnic and religious minorities, many from recent immigrant groups—and the traditional source of Democratic strength, “the Solid South.”‘ — William E. Leuchtenburg  

The New Deal coalition, which dominated American politics from 1936 until the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, fractured with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. But while the composition of Democratic constituencies changed (most prominently with the loss of the Solid South), the fundamental structure of the Democratic Party did not.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of social groups. Because the groups, and their public policy agendas, are separate and distinct, what they bring to the table may generate conflict within the coalition. Indeed, Democrats have a reputation—going back to the 1930s—for dissension and discord. Unifying many groups with their own interests and ideas is challenge. The process of coming to agreement may be chaotic—and, over many decades, the picture hasn’t always been pretty.

• “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat,” Will Rogers remarked in an era when the New Deal Coalition prevailed.
• The 1968 Democratic Convention, when the New Deal Coalition was near its end, stands as the prime exemplar of Democratic disunity in my lifetime. (Both 1948 and 1972 were fractious years for Democrats, but neither are remembered for violent street clashes, while the first one, in any case, was before my birth.)
• A half century after 1968, “Democrats in Disarray,” remains a hoary meme (and click-bait), because disagreements are inevitable when many different interests are crowding under a single tent (and journalists need a hook). The Washington Monthly explored this topic in March, while Crooked / Pod Save America offered fifteen links on the topic last week. A simple Google search will virtually always find current examples of this genre.)

The perennial challenge for Democrats is crafting a coherent policy from the disparate views and interests of the various groups coalescing under the party banner.

Democrats pledge to represent ‘everyday Americans’ (‘the forgotten middle class,’ ‘the people,’ ‘the common man’) with a contrast (often explicit, sometimes implicit) to Republican commitments. The Democratic electoral base is comprised of groups that regard themselves as disadvantaged, and look to specific government policies and programs to provide a measure of social equity.

These constituencies have this in common: they believe that government can help people like themselves.  They believe that public policy is capable of solving problems, of offering benefits, of providing redress for injustices. That notion had little traction in Washington in the decades before FDR came into office. President Roosevelt, and the Democratic Party that he led, empowered government, expanding its role and responsibilities, to ensure that the economy benefited a majority of Americans.

Government can help make people’s lives better, Democrats agree. But because they’re a diverse bunch, their experiences of disadvantage—and specific public policy preferences—are different. How do we unify these groups and their program and policy preferences?

The Democratic Party’s solution is to wrap its arms around these groups, to acknowledge the disadvantages (problems, injustices) of each—and to embrace specific public policies to change things for the better.

The Democratic agenda—as represented in the party platform, political campaigning, legislative priorities, policymaking, and regulatory enforcement—is formed from the collective demands and appeals of the disparate social groups that comprise the coalition. 

Grossmann and Hopkins, who cite Dean Acheson (1955) and a trio of studies from political scientists (1966, 1976, and 1983) making similar observations, put it this way:

The coalitional composition of the Democratic Party has long encouraged party leaders to assemble a policy agenda from the aggregated preferences of the party’s numerous constituencies, courting the mass electorate with a large assortment of concrete benefits favoring targeted groups. Although the particular groups inside the Democratic “big tent”—as well as their specific programmatic demands—have evolved over time, the party’s foundational partisan character has remained constant for decades of electoral history.

This model has the great virtue of matching our familiar experience. A list of Democratic constituencies circa 2019 would include: women, African Americans, organized labor, voters under age 35, … and so on. Consider women, who are far and away the largest social group in the Democratic coalition. Clear majorities of women consistently vote Democratic and have done so for decades. (Discussion of the political gender gap began in the Reagan era. The gap has grown considerably since then, especially in our most recent electoral cycles.)

The Democratic Party is responsive to this voting constituency, as reflected in Democrats’ advocacy of specific policies and priorities to benefit women. Health care—salvaging the Affordable Care Act in response to efforts by Congressional Republicans, egged on by Donald Trump, to repeal it—was at the heart of Democratic campaigns in 2018. Women voters played the starring role in the Democratic victory to take back the House.

Accessibility to health care is high on the list of concerns of most women who vote (or may be tempted to vote) Democratic. Access to reproductive health coverage—and the right to choose to end a pregnancy—is a crucial element of health care. While abortion is fraught politically (particularly late-term abortions) in some quarters, the great majority of women—and especially those who identify as or lean Democratic—do not want to be denied the right to make this choice on their own. Ensuring this right is a Democratic priority.

Democrats embrace many other issues that resonate with women: the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay for equal work, gender discrimination in employment, family budget concerns more generally, and  sexual harassment and violence toward women are all issues that appeal to the largest group in the Democratic coalition.

The contrast with Donald Trump’s Republican Party couldn’t be clearer. Trump has boasted of sexual assault of women, repeatedly assessed women’s worth based on appearance and sexual attractiveness, and insulted women in misogynistic terms. This hostility has increased Democratic support among women, but that’s only part of the story with the contemporary GOP.

In swing districts and, in many instances, in previously stable Red districts that flipped in 2018, Democratic candidates often presented a clear contrast with Trump and Congressional Republicans vis-a-vis respectful discourse; regard for the rule of law, for democratic institutions, and for coming together—to compromise with the other side, as needed—to enact meaningful legislation to benefit the people that Congress and the President were elected to serve; and concern with the welfare of the nation as a whole, not only of the GOP base. These are hardly ‘women’s issues,’ but they resonated with the largest social group in the Democratic coalition. Women who feel threatened by Trump and the GOP have every reason to regard these issues as critical to their interests and well-being.

Wage Gap

Elizabeth Warren’s pledge last week to women of color at the Essence Festival illustrates how an injustice toward a social group prompts a policy response among Democrats. Begin with these facts: white women earn 77 cents for every dollar that white men earn, while black women earn 61 cents and Latinas, 53 cents. That, for Democrats, counts as a prima facie injustice.

In Warren’s words:

Black women are more likely to be breadwinners for their families and work more than almost any other set of women workers in America, including white women. Yet, Black women are paid less and they are less likely to be able to afford basic human rights like healthcare, childcare and housing.

And her response:

On day one of the Warren Administration I will take a set of executive actions to boost wages for women of color and open up new pathways to the leadership positions they deserve. I’ll start by putting tough new rules on companies that contract with the government — who collectively employ a quarter of the American workforce. Companies with a bad track record on equal pay and diversity in management won’t get new contracts — which gives them a big financial incentive to shape up. I will prohibit companies that want to get government contracts from forcing employees to sign away their rights with forced arbitration clauses and non-compete agreements — restrictions that are particularly hurtful to women of color. I will also take executive action to make the senior ranks of the federal government look like America and strengthen enforcement against systemic discrimination. We need to demand that companies and the government properly value the work of Black women — and hold them accountable if they don’t.

These executive actions are just a first step. . . .

We could inventory every social group/voting bloc that coalesces within the big tent of the Democratic Party and match emblematic concerns and priorities among group members, on the one hand, with commitments and programs that Democrats embrace, on the other, to show piece by piece how the Democratic agenda emerges.

Inevitably, there will be disagreements among the groups. Negotiation, forming alliances, and generating consensus—a give and take, the stuff of politics and practical compromise—will come into play. In this way, the party advances the interests of the groups in its coalition in a process that mostly plays out in the open.

Getting it right can be tricky. In addition to balancing the interests and preferences of multiple groups, the party must look ahead to competitive elections against the Republicans. In such an environment, not every group will be a winner (at least in equal measure with others in the coalition). Similarly, once in office, Democrats are unlikely to enact every item on their agenda; some programs and policies will win out, while others will not. (Barack Obama, the most recent Democratic president, put the expansion of health care at the top of his agenda, while choosing not to elevate criminal indictments of the financial sector executives who crashed the economy.)

While some preferences must be deferred, however, generally everyone with standing in the party is heard. Inclusion is a Democratic priority. There is an expectation that every group’s preferences will be reflected in some measure in the party’s agenda. As Jo Freeman put it (in an article surveying the cultural differences between the Democratic and Republican parties), “The word that would most aptly characterize what Democrats want is ‘fairness.’”

This picture of the Democratic Party (going back roughly eight decades) is more or less the traditional view of how politics works in the United States. It is not, however, the way things work in the contemporary Republican Party.

The Republican Party

The Republican Party is an altogether different beast than the Democratic Party. Ideology reigns supreme in the GOP, which serves as the vanguard of movement conservatism.  Republicans, and organizations within the party, self-identify as conservative. Fidelity to conservative ideology is the organizing principle of the Republican Party. This ideology motivates activists, generates campaign themes and pledges, sustains the demands of the base, and provides a rationale for the party’s governing agenda.

In contrast to Democrats—who, as we have seen, look to government for practical remedies on behalf of social groups experiencing disadvantage—Republicans view proposals in relation to abstract ideological doctrine. The question is not whether a proposal would be efficacious or cost-effective or fair, but instead: Would implementing the proposal be consistent with conservative ideology? As the Republican Party has moved further right in recent decades (and ideological hostility toward government has grown), the possibilities of getting to ‘Yes’ have diminished considerably, especially regarding any proposal offered by Democrats.

In governing, Democrats accept that group interests will conflict, that negotiation and compromise will take place, and that trade-offs and even half measures may result. And that’s okay much of the time: half a loaf is better than none.  Democrats reward leaders who get things done, often even when victories are only partial. Not so with Republicans. Their preference is often all or nothing. They are looking to leaders who will not stray from a rigid party line. The touchstone is conformity to the party’s ruling ideology.

The primacy of conservative doctrine has become increasingly more entrenched in recent years, as illustrated by an observation by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (in Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy):

As conservative activism has shifted toward national politics, it has also focused increasingly on the recruitment and certification of aspirants to elected office and the monitoring and punishment of politicians once they are elected. Ideological “box scores” are a revealing indicator of the trend. A few decades ago, only a handful of prominent conservative groups (notably, the American Conservative Union, or ACU) assembled ideological issue scores based on members of Congress’s recorded votes on hot-button topics. Today, the ACU’s scores compete with those of such conservative watchdogs as the National Tax Limitation Committee, Americans for Tax Reform, the National Taxpayers Union, Citizens Against Government Waste, the Republican Liberty Caucus, the Christian Coalition, the Eagle Forum, the Campaign for Working Families, the Family Research Council, and the subtly named Center for Reclaiming America. These groups range in size and clout. But even the smallest can often exert considerable power when it can credibly claim to be the arbiter of whether a candidate or elected official is a true believer in a central conservative cause.

Being “a true believer in a central conservative cause” often precludes getting anything done. Republican voters reward elected officials who uphold doctrinal purity, shunning compromise altogether. These voters carry out “punishment of politicians” who fail in this regard. Increasingly, these collaborators get primaried because Republican voters won’t stand for any ideological deviation or accommodation with Democrats. Moreover, often a symbolic ideological embrace, the conspicuous expression of fidelity to conservatism, matters more than the actual substantive outcome of their stance.

House Speaker John Boehner’s tenure was an extended case study of this dysfunctional dance as members of the Freedom Caucus repeatedly chose to one-up their conservative colleagues with expressive displays of ideological purity, even as they sabotaged Republican policy preferences. This self-defeating gamesmanship continued with the elevation of Paul Ryan to the Speakership, as Jonathan Bernstein related during one of the skirmishes:

Democrats only have leverage to negotiate a fairly good deal because Ryan’s Republican conference was split, with Ryan knowing he would never have the radicals’ votes on anything that could even get a simple majority in the Senate. That meant Ryan would eventually need Democratic votes, which meant everyone knew from the start that some Democratic priorities would wind up being fulfilled despite the large Republican majority in the House.

What the Freedom Caucus gets out of it is the chance to win in the Real Conservative game … at the cost of actual conservative policy preferences.

It wasn’t always this way in the GOP.

The Republican Party of the 1950s and 1960s was ideologically diverse in this sense: there were moderate Republicans and even liberal Republicans in the party. They were, like their conservative brethren, Republicans in good standing. No longer. The conservative movement, which seized the nominating apparatus of the Republican Party in 1964, by the Reagan era not only dominated debate and decision making within the party, it had begun to make the party inhospitable to moderate and liberal Republicans. In more recent decades, ritualistic purges through primary elections came to dominate Republican Party politics, but the seed was planted long before.

When William Buckley declared that his foe was “the Liberal Establishment,” Republicans were as much in his sights as Democrats. This included Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower, whose views on both domestic and foreign policies have no place in today’s Republican Party. In 2019, self-identification as conservative is required of all Republicans in good standing — elected officials, candidates, and nominees (at least on the national level).

Conservative Revolution

In the 1950s, Buckley and other intellectuals fused three strands of ideology into a central, overarching conception of conservatism (the ‘three-legged stool’). These beliefs included commitment to (i) free markets, (ii) traditional morality, and (iii) a combative foreign policy. The conservative movement embraced the fusion of this trinity, which came to represent Republicans’ reigning ideology.

I didn’t mention the word ‘liberal’ in my description of the Democratic Party. While liberal intellectuals are among the party’s constituencies, and many party activists and voters identify as liberal, most Democrats self-identify as moderate or conservative (though the number of self-identified liberals in the Democratic Party has grown in recent years). People regard themselves as Democrats because of social identity, group empathy, and specific issues embraced by the party. Regarding oneself as liberal is not a defining characteristic of Democrats.  

Republicans, in contrast, view politics through an ideological lens: political conflicts reveal a fundamental divide between conservatism and liberalism. And a visceral opposition to liberalism is embedded within conservative ideology.

While it’s possible to describe contemporary conservatism (and the three-legged stool) without appeal to liberalism, doing so would leave something out. Grossmann and Hopkins quote George Nash’s observation (in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945), regarding the fusion of three strands of ideology into one, that the free-market, foreign policy, and traditional morality conservatives were united by their opposition to liberalism:

To the libertarians, modern liberalism was the ideology of the ever-aggrandizing bureaucratic, welfare state. If unchecked, it would become a totalitarian state, destroying individual liberty and private property—the wellsprings of a prosperous society. To the traditionalists, liberalism was a disintegrative philosophy which, like an acid, was eating away at the ethical and institutional foundations of Western civilization, creating a vast spiritual void into which totalitarian false gods would enter. To the Cold War anti-Communists, modern liberalism—rationalistic, relativistic, secular, anti-traditional, quasi-socialist—was by its very nature incapable of vigorously resisting an enemy on its left.

The authors also quote Nicol Rae (The Decline and Fall of Liberal Republicans), who crisply characterizes conservative ideology in these words:

In a crude form, their ideology can be stated as follows: Something is rotten in the American body politic; that rottenness is due to liberalism; and only by returning to the economic, moral, and foreign policy precepts of America’s past can the promise of America be redeemed.

Conservative ideology at its heart begins with an unequivocal aversion to liberalism. This aversion is baked into the conservative movement. Although most Democrats have not embraced liberal ideology, Republicans view the Democrats as liberal standard-bearers. Republicans see political conflict as thoroughly ideological and their critique of Democrats is consistent with that stance.

Democrats have a practical, instrumental view of politics. The focus is not ideological, but pragmatic. But whether or not Democratic voters (and officials) identify as liberal, the Democratic Party looks to government to right wrongs and to offer a helping hand. The Republican view of Democrats as their ideological opponents is accurate insofar as Democrats seek public policy solutions to social problems, while Republicans harbor mistrust of government and oppose expanding its reach.

Having it both ways

Grossmann and Hopkins point to the contradictory views of voters as a reason the United States has settled into a dynamic with a fundamental asymmetry (which they characterize as a “foundational imbalance” and “mismatched nature”) between the two political parties. A majority of Americans can be found to affirm an ideological commitment to traditional American values (and suspicion of government) in agreement with conservative Republicans, while at the same time more than half support an array of specific domestic programs (aka left of center Democratic policies) that offer practical benefits. In other words, most Americans are at once ideologically conservative and operationally liberal. (One version of this inconsistency is to cling to cherished benefits, while casting shade on government, the source of the benefits: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”).

Both parties play to their strengths in political battles: Republicans sound abstract conservative themes, such as the virtue of limited government, while Democrats affirm the social identity of their coalition partners and tout an array of specific programs that benefit them.

Because most domestic policy programs are highly popular (especially big, expensive programs), while most voters also embrace conservative rhetorical sentiments (such as demanding limited government), the governing majority can shift back and forth, depending on how voters with these contradictory attitudes lean from one election to the next.  

The asymmetry between the Democratic and Republican parties results in a cascade of practical implications. I’ll explore various consequences in future posts.

(Image: Thomas Nast, Stranger things have happened.)