course correction or collision course?
Expert on Congressional politics and history Norm Ornstein has a new piece up at The Atlantic about the divisions within the Republican Party. It isn’t long, so go read the whole thing. He sees a GOP divided into five factions. The differences between these factions are driven by the different constituencies they represent and institutional pressures to which they are subjected. Here’s how Ornstein describes the five factions:
There is a House party, a Senate party, and a presidential party, of course. But there is also a Southern party and a non-Southern one. The two driving forces dominating today’s GOP are the House party and the Southern one — and they will not be moved or shaped by another presidential loss. If anything, they might double down on their worldviews and strategies. […]
The South has gone from being a trace element of the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s to becoming the solid base and largest element of today’s GOP — and its driving force on social and economic issues. […]
So here’s the Republican dilemma: The House and Southern Republican parties are more concerned with ideological purity and tribal politics than they are with building a durable, competitive national party base to win presidential and Senate majorities. In most cases, they are in no danger of losing their House seats or their hegemony in their states. They will be resistant to changes in social policy that reflect broad national opinion; resistant to any policies or rhetoric, including but not limited to immigration, that would appeal to Hispanics, African-Americans, or Asian-Americans; and resistant to policies like Medicaid expansion or Head Start that would ameliorate the plight of the poor. They also will be more inclined to use voter-suppression methods to reduce the share of votes cast by those population groups than to find ways to appeal to them. I see little or nothing, including a potential loss in 2016, that will change this set of dynamics anytime soon.
Ornstein argues that when a party is stuck in an ideological cul-de-sac, it typically takes losing three presidential elections in a row for them to attempt a serious course correction — rather than blame bad candidates and tactical failures or simply call for better “outreach.” In other words, it takes about a decade for reality to burst the ideological bubble.
We think there are three structural factors keeping the Republican Party from evolving toward a more electorally sustainable ideological posture. The first is the one Ornstein identifies: redistricting. Gerrymandering didn’t cause the right’s radicalism, but it does perpetuate it by allowing the Republican Party’s most extreme members to win seats in non-competitive districts and hang on to power for years or even decades. The only real threat these members face is a challenge from further to the right, which forces them to tack to the extremes. The US House of Representatives was so thoroughly gerrymandered in 2010 and 2011 to protect Republican incumbents that it would take a massive Democratic victory in the Congressional popular vote just to dislodge their majority. As a result, House Republicans can simply sit on their hands until the next round of redistricting in 2020 and 2021 without making any real changes.
The very recent emergence of a Republican compromise caucus in the Senate — but not in the House — demonstrates the power of gerrymandering to provide political cover. Because Senators represent entire states, whose lines cannot be redrawn, they are more exposed to the kinds of political pressures that can trump their own ideological commitments. The compromises they make reflect not an ideological shift, but a tactical-political one. Neither the beliefs nor the core commitments held by the Republican members of this caucus have changed. What changed was Democratic behavior (in the case of the nominations/filibuster fight) and Republican perceptions about the attitudes and behaviors of Hispanic voters in national politics. In both cases, leaders on the right recognized the extreme danger that total obstruction posed to their own goals. Their beliefs and goals didn’t change: the politics did. Republicans have admitted as much themselves.
The fault lines that produced the compromise caucus in the Senate appear to be regional. The six Republicans who voted to overcome a filibuster blocking future Labor Secretary Tom Perez — arguably the most controversial nomination — were Senators John McCain (AZ), Bob Corker (TN), Lamar Alexander (TN), Susan Collins (ME), Mark Kirk (IL) and Lisa Murkowski (AK). None of them are from the Deep South. (As Colin Woodard, author of American Nations has pointed out, Tennessee is culturally more Appalachian than Southern.) Like Ornstein, we expect the regional differences within the Republican Party to persist, but these differences will do nothing to diminish the ideological fervor of the far right. If anything, these intra-party tensions will aggravate the far right even more.
The second major factor standing in the way of an ideological evolution has been fittingly dubbed the GOP’s “ideological double-bind” by Matthew Continetti. The gist of the problem is simple: Republican politicians can’t take positions that will appeal to new voters without alienating the voters they already have, but sticking with their current positions means alienating voters they will eventually need to win majorities and national elections (particularly after 2020). Continetti explains:
The domestic proposals that have the greatest chance of making the Republican party attractive to the “coalition of the ascendantâ€â€‹â€”​immigrants, members of the millennial generation, single white women​—​involve far more government intervention in the economy than the GOP coalition​—​married white people, Wall Street, the Tea Party​—​will allow. And we haven’t even mentioned changing the GOP approach to social issues, which would drive the Republican base of religious conservatives out of the party. Pursuing such proposals would break the coalition that puts Republicans close to a majority.
On the other hand, sticking with the policies that glue this so-close-to-a-majority coalition together would foreclose the possibility of expanding the GOP vote. And it would limit the vote Republicans pull from disaffected voters who used to support the GOP but have turned away for various reasons.
There’s more. Trying to appeal to the coalition of the ascendant and the Reagan coalition simultaneously would give the party a severe case of political schizophrenia. The GOP would bewilder its historic base of support while disappointing newcomers, leading to confusion, disillusionment, apathy, and perhaps (ultimately) dissolution.
The Republicans, like feminists, can’t have it all. They are trapped in the double bind.
Faced with this double-bind, Republicans will have been forced to adopt anti-democratic policies and strategies to sustain their political power. As we have written about before, conservatives and Republicans are well aware of their looming demographic and ideological winter — and have adopted a strategy designed to subvert the emerging majority’s influence and ability to govern. When given power, they launch direct attacks on the institutional pillars and voters of the Democratic Party, subvert, rig, and abuse governing processes, sabotage Democratic attempts to govern, and have been willing to destroy the very foundations of representative government to stay in power. These anti-democratic actions are not just wholly and completely rational, they are the only viable political strategy available to a party faced with the kind of double-bind Continetti describes…short of accepting defeat.Â
Until generational die-off weakens the far right to the point that Republicans have room to maneuver themselves ideologically, these anti-democratic tactics will continue, aided in no small part by an aggressively activist conservative Supreme Court. That is why the third major factor preventing the GOP’s ideological change is generational. A large part of what drives change in political parties is generational die-off and replacement. The modern Republican Party depends on the votes of the aging Silent (b. 1925 – 1942) and Baby Boomer (b. 1943 – 1960) generations, who are deeply invested in traditional values, the culture war, and conservative views on the economy, the role of government, and foreign policy. Republicans cannot simply toss these voters overboard in a bid for new ones; Continetti’s double-bind is generational as much as it is ideological.
We believe that the Republican Party will eventually change, but not until a large number of Silent Generation and Baby Boomer voters have shuffled off this mortal coil, passing power to the younger Generation X and Millennial Generation leaders. Our own unpublished research at First Person Politics suggests that Boomer influence in Congress will peak around 2020, give or take a few years. And we won’t see a real ideological shift in the Republican Party until after that influence begins to recede. Until that happens, the rising crop of Republican Generation X leaders will behave in ways that are at least as stridently ideological and partisan as their Baby Boomer elders. Cases in point: Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan. When change comes, it will not happen evenly or simultaneously across the country. Republicans campaigning to represent younger, more demographically diverse constituencies will be the first to moderate.
Baby Boomers — especially conservative Boomers — are behind the radicalization of the Republican Party and growing dysfunction in American politics. While Boomers did not initiate the sorting of the parties into increasingly homogenous ideological camps, they have and will continue to push that process to its extremes. Even if there are lines that some Senate Republicans won’t cross, hard line conservatives are still capable of doing lasting damage to the Republican Party, the country, and the planet. In our judgment, the right remains on a collision course with America’s changing demography.
Categorized in: Fixing Politics, Ideology, Partisanship, Political Analysis, Political Psychology
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