Beneath the Surface

Previous | Next

Some would say that the nomination of Donald Trump for President puts a brand new face on the Republican Party. But is it really a new face, or just a façade masking some of the same old realities?

A common media narrative describes the Trump ascendancy as a takeover by a political outsider with some distinctly un-Republican ideas. Well, the political outsider part is true enough. Trump has less political experience than anyone else in the race, for better or for worse. As for un-Republican ideas, that applies primarily to his position on international trade. Republicans have generally regarded free global trade as a win-win for the participating countries, encouraging each country to create jobs doing what it can do most efficiently. Trump is deeply skeptical of that Republican orthodoxy, and apparently sympathetic to the American manufacturing workers who have been losing their jobs. Even here, however, it remains to be seen how much he would or could do for such workers. Unlike trade critics on the Democratic side, he has not to my knowledge called for making trade agreements conditional on stronger protections for wages and working conditions, or building a stronger safety net for displaced workers. Instead, he has promised to bring back old industrial jobs that most economists believe are irrevocably lost to global competition and new technologies.

Aside from a critical view of world trade, what is new about Donald Trump’s economic proposals? He seems to accept the fundamental Republican commitment to limited government when he advocates lower taxes and less regulation of business. He makes the familiar claim that lowering taxes and regulation on corporations and the wealthy will generate a new wave of job creation. This sounds like the same “trickle-down economics” that Republicans have been running on for years, without much to show for it in income growth for the majority of Americans. It has become a tough sell. Most people now oppose additional tax cuts for the wealthy, as well as any significant roll-back in the regulations protecting consumers, workers and the environment.

To win elections, Republicans have had to appeal to the electorate with something more popular and populist than a non-egalitarian economic message. For many years, Christian conservativism filled the bill pretty well. The appeal was to traditional religious values: pro-life, pro-family, pro-prayer in schools, etc. More recently, the support for the conservative side in the culture wars seems to be waning. Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land; laws against gay marriage have been struck down; and the younger generation is less interested in injecting religion into politics.

With old appeals losing their traction and the party at a crossroads, what Donald Trump offers is not so much a new economic policy as a new populist rationale for voting Republican. Part of that message is American nativism and strict immigration control. There he is only bringing to the forefront a position that was already a strong undercurrent in Republican thought. Congressional Republicans have been resisting immigration reform for years, despite the efforts of leaders who wanted to reach out to the growing Latino population.  The other message Trump delivered loud and clear at the convention was “law and order.” This isn’t new either, since Richard Nixon used it to great effect in the 1968 election. What he did, and what I think Donald Trump is doing too, is to shift attention away from the real grievances of protesting minorities, and toward the behavior of the protestors themselves, effectively blaming them for the conflicts in the land. “Law and order” then becomes a code word for resistance to the demands of the poor and minorities, a way of expressing one’s solidarity with the white majority. The disturbing attacks on police officers provided a perfect opportunity for Republicans to dissociate themselves from the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Unlike Christian conservatism, nativism and “law and order” appeal less to morality and more to fear. They introduce an uglier, more dangerous and divisive element into the campaign.

Can it work? Can a façade of “American First” trade policy, American nativism and “law and order” convince a large majority of older, white, blue-collar men that the Republican Party suddenly has their best interests at heart? (I say “older, white, blue-collar men” because Donald Trump’s prospects for winning a majority of women, Latinos, African-Americans, young people or the college-educated seem rather dim at this time.) Congressional leaders such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan apparently think it can work. They have been willing to endorse Donald Trump, ugly side and all, for a chance to remain in power and pursue their standard Republican economic agenda, tax cuts for the wealthy and benefit cuts for the rest of us.

But win or lose, the Republican Party has lost something. Gone is the optimism of “morning again in America” (Reagan), “a kinder, gentler America” (Bush 41), or “compassionate conservatism” (Bush 43). What was on full display this week in Cleveland was the pessimism of “vote for Us (or to be more precise, Me), if you want to be saved from Them.” Gone is the pretense of representing all of America, replaced by an appeal to an angry and frustrated slice of America. That appeal seems to be based on an equally dubious premise, that the Republican Party has suddenly transformed itself into the party of the working man, while the Democratic Party has taken its place as the party of Wall Street. Maybe Donald Trump is the perfect candidate to convey this new image of the Party: a casino with a beautiful brand-new façade and a bankruptcy in progress.

Previous | Next

Reading Brown Is the New White by Steve Phillips got me thinking about the general question of political party strategy. Should a party that wants more votes appeal to the center of the political spectrum, or should it focus on “firing up the base”? Phillips thinks that Democrats should do less of the former and more of the latter. Under what conditions is that good strategy?

To start with a simple conception of the electorate, imagine a bell-shaped curve with moderate, centrist voters outnumbering both distinct leftists and distinct rightists. Although opinions on single issues can be quite polarized, there are a lot of issues that can be used to classify voters on a liberal-to-conservative spectrum. People who are conservatives on abortion are not necessarily conservative on economics. If only voters who are consistently liberal or conservative score near the extremes, then the majority come out looking more moderate. If that’s the case, and assuming there are only two major parties, one could make a general case for appealing to the center, since that’s where the most votes are.

What that simple picture overlooks is that each party has its own political base, to which it must appeal in order to motivate its supporters to vote. Each party has its own distribution curve, one to the right of the other. Each curve will have its own peak, where the largest number of its supporters are found. In the simplest case, the two parties have the same number of voting members, both peaks are the same height, and the two peaks are equidistant from the national center. This sets up the classic dilemma. On the one hand, nominating someone a little more centrist than the typical party member might be good strategy, in the hope of getting all the votes of party members plus some support from more moderate swing voters. On the other hand, that strategy might lose some support from the party base. A “true conservative” or “true progressive” might really turn out the party faithful, which could be more crucial to victory than winning over a few swing voters. This, of course, is exactly Phillips’ point with regard to today’s Democratic Party.

Another variable affecting the outcome is party loyalty or discipline. If party loyalty is high, party members may turn out regularly in any case, so success may hinge on adding some swing voters as well. But if the base only votes when they are really excited about a candidate, a moderate candidate could be fatal. Democrats have long had a problem turning out minority and poor voters who lean Democratic but don’t make it to the polls.

Complicating matters further, there is no guarantee that the two parties are equally popular or equidistant from the national center to begin with. One party can be smaller and farther from the center, while the other is larger and closer to the center. This can easily happen because the center is a moving target as far as substantive issues are concerned. Today’s centrist may support policies that were once considered leftist, such as the Social Security system or the right of workers to bargain collectively. Sometimes the country changes, and a party is left behind. A party that finds itself in the minority may have no choice but to tack toward the center, while a majority party can be true to its base and still succeed. Phillips believes that the Democratic Party can now show its true progressive colors because, as his subtitle declares, “the demographic revolution has created a New American Majority.”

These considerations help us make sense out of the recent history of presidential elections. During the period of Democratic Party dominance from 1932 to 1964, Democrats could win the White House with frankly liberal candidates. Republicans were successful with the moderate war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, who accepted much of Roosevelt’s New Deal, but they lost badly with the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater.

Things changed after the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights and the War on Poverty. Democrats had to contend with White backlash, while at the same time dealing with an internal struggle over the Vietnam War. In 1968, the moderate conservative Richard Nixon narrowly defeated the liberal Hubert Humphrey, who lost votes both from young opponents of the war and blue-collar supporters of the southern segregationist George Wallace. When Democrats nominated the even more liberal George McGovern in 1972, Nixon won reelection in a landslide. In the aftermath of Watergate, Democrats elected a southern moderate, Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was marred by runaway inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis. Republicans then launched the “Reagan Revolution” with landslide wins in 1980 and 1984. They did so by appealing to the cultural and racial conservatism of White Southerners, blaming Big Government for the country’s economic problems, and interpreting the hostage crisis as a sign of military weakness.

The previously dominant Democratic Party had tried to keep moving to the left, but the country hadn’t gone with them. No wonder the conventional wisdom after 1980 was that the party had to strengthen its appeal to the center. The election of Bill Clinton, who conceded that the “era of Big Government is over,” marked the success of that strategy.

Now, however, the tables may be turning. Now it’s the Republican Party that keeps moving in one direction, but is having trouble getting the country to go along. This is partly because of the demographic revolution described by Phillips. But the Republican brand is also being damaged in other ways: loss of public confidence in free-market, “trickle-down” economics and waning public enthusiasm for conservative positions on social issues, notably gay rights. Republicans have now lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections (including Al Gore’s narrow victory in votes, but loss of the electoral college due to the Florida debacle and Supreme Court intervention). Instead of moderating their positions, they have doubled down on conservatism, offering unusual resistance to the nation’s first Black president, perhaps to please their White Southern base. The result is a legislative gridlock that doesn’t please anyone, but the Republican controlled Congress is getting the brunt of the criticism. Current unfavorable ratings are Congress 61%, Republican Party 60%, Democratic Party 43%.

The Republican Party may now be so far to the right of the typical voter that its ability to win national elections is seriously damaged. If so, it makes sense that it is fracturing over the dilemma that confronts any minority party, whether to tack to the center by nominating a moderate with some hope of winning, or to appeal to true believers by selecting someone more extreme who cannot. Republican primary voters seem to be choosing the latter option, since the two biggest vote getters are among the most conservative (and nationally unpopular) in the race. Donald Trump seems to be a throwback to the nationalists of the 1920s and 30s, wanting to blame the country’s problems on foreigners, immigrants and minorities. And Ted Cruz is an evangelical Tea Party conservative who denies that human activity is contributing to climate change, encourages states to ignore the Supreme Court ruling upholding same-sex marriage, and wants to eliminate many federal government departments (Energy, Education, Commerce, Housing & Urban Development, Internal Revenue Service).

If it is now safer for the Democratic Party to move to the left, while it is hazardous for the Republican Party to remain on the right, that’s a pretty good sign that the balance of power in the country is starting to shift. Of course, I may have to eat those words if the country actually elects a President Trump or President Cruz!