How to Break a Party
[Ross Douthat]
Ross Douthat FEB. 18, 2016
Beginning with the Tea Party wave and continuing through the not-Romney musical chairs of the 2012 Republican primary and the battles over debt limits and fiscal cliffs, most coverage of the Republican Party’s internal divisions during the Obama era fell into an easy groove: There was the establishment, and there was the base.
The establishment aspired to be mainstream and reasonable; the base took pride in being populist and angry. The establishment read The Wall Street Journal; the base loved talk radio and Glenn Beck. The establishment was merely conservative; the base was as far right as you could get.
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But as fiercely as their battles raged, the argument between the base and the establishment was very often about tactics more than ideology. There were exceptions, notably immigration reform, where there was a real policy dispute, and there were times when the base seemed to be groping its way toward a more substantive sort of populism. But mostly the party’s divisions were about how to oppose President Obama, what kind of procedural moves to use against him, which theories to entertain about his motivations and when — if ever — to accept that a policy defeat really was defeat.
Which means that for all the talk about Republican civil war throughout Obama’s presidency, the ideological stakes were often relatively low. No matter which faction was in control, the G.O.P. was officially united against Obama’s programs, and every other argument could wait.
But in the 2016 primary, the wait is over, and we can see the deeper divisions within the party.
These divisions are not new ones. As far back as 2005, when George W. Bush was still the president and not yet the last hope of his brother’s struggling campaign, the Pew Research Center put together a “political typology” that identified three major right-of-center voting blocs. The first, which Pew called “Enterprisers,” were “highly patriotic and strongly pro-business,” hawkish and opposed to social welfare programs. Their political views basically tracked with the party’s official commitments, and certainly tracked with the views of its leadership and donor class.
But Enterprisers were only about a third of the Republican coalition. Another third were “Social Conservatives” — more religious than the Enterprisers, more anxious about mass immigration and more skeptical of business, and more supportive of an active government. The final third was what Pew called “Pro-Government Conservatives” — more financially stressed than the other groups, and even more likely than the Social Conservatives to be supportive of government regulations and a stronger safety net.
Like any classification scheme, this one had its limits, and Pew has updated it repeatedly with different breakdowns in the decade since. But the 2005 edition captured a crucial point that’s been brought home by Donald Trump’s success in 2016: The Republican coalition, its authors wrote, “now includes more lower-income voters than it once did, and many of these voters favor an activist government to help working class people.”
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The 2005 Pew typology also suggested a useful way of looking at that coalition as a whole — not as a simple establishment-plus-base pyramid, but as a complicated partnership among business-friendly conservatives, social conservatives and a more inchoate populist cohort, for whom liberalism seems like an enemy but “big government” is not necessarily a dirty word.
In this alliance, most observers of the Republican Party would agree, the business-friendly conservatives (Pew’s Enterprisers) are clearly the senior partners, religious conservatives are the junior partners and the pro-government populists get deficit-funded spending in boom times and table scraps when things get tight.
But the Enterprisers’ hold on policy making is vulnerable, should religious conservatives and populists both rise against them — which is what many primary-season insurgencies have tried to do. From Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996 to Mike Huckabee in 2008 to Rick Santorum four years ago, various would-be outsiders have effectively sought to rally a united front of religious conservatives and populists, in hopes of renegotiating the terms of the coalition’s partnership.
They all failed. In 2016, though, something new is happening. A united front isn’t being forged; instead, we have both a religious conservative and a populist insurgency, the former led by Ted Cruz and the latter by that most unlikely populist, Mr. Trump.
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Recent Comments
eric cunningham 1 day ago
Let's all agglutinate into a cohesive neoplasm!
Kilroy 1 day ago
Sounds as if the two less prosperous divisions ought to give Bernie a listen. They've come halfway to understanding that they've been duped...
Rob 1 day ago
BOTH parties are broken and have been for over 10 years. The DNC moves farther left each election cycle and to offset it the RNC moves...
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In theory this should keep the coalition’s weaker partners divided. But Trump is such a phenomenon that he’s winning enough Enterprisers and enough evangelicals to break out of the Buchananite box, while Cruz has a level of funding and organization that no religious conservative candidate has enjoyed before.
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Their joint strength has left less than half of the vote available to the candidates running Republican campaigns — and since there are still three of those candidates, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and John Kasich, we have a strange logjam in which no candidate favored by the party’s normal senior partners can seem to claim more than 20 percent of the vote.
That dynamic may come to an end this weekend in South Carolina; the Enterprisers, donors and party leadership may finally find their candidate.
Whether they do or not, they will still face a sustained two-front rebellion against Republican politics as we have known it since the 1980s. If they’re wise, that rebellion’s strength will inspire concessions and changes, a renegotiation of the conservative coalition’s basic terms.
If they’re not — well, now that we see the real fault lines clearly, it’s also clear how the whole thing could be shattered.
