Republican Party factions

Former U.S. Congressman Bill Bradley describes the factions of the Republican Party in his book, A New American Story:

corporatists – seek control of government to enhance their profits and pockets. Had favored protective tariffs in the early 1900s. Now seek to reduce their taxes. Support government programs that give them money. Oppose government regulation. Tend to favor free trade now.

fundamentalists – Christians who believe in the literal truth of the Bible. The world is good and evil. Suspicious of science. (Creationism vs. evolution) Anyone who disagrees with them is ignorant or evil. Reluctant to negotiate or cooperate. Want to control government to impose their morality on society. Culture is coarse. The media have a liberal bias.

libertarians – want to abolish government interference in private lives. Pro-choice. Legalize drugs. Against military interventions. Favor lower taxes, free trade, free speech. Worried about privacy. (Oppose large government databases.) Free market advocates. (Example: Ron Paul)

supply-siders – believe tax cuts solve everything from urban decay and economic downturns to third-world development. Deficits are unimportant. Think tax cuts promote economic growth. Repeat JFK´s “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Little interest in defense policy or foreign affairs.

subsidists – primarily westerners (where the federal government owns up to 90% of the area´s land). Want to end most regulation and oversight of public resources. But want to increase federal subsidies to timber, mining, grazing, and agriculture.

Main Streeters – small-town virtures. Church-goers, but don´t impose their values on others. Support local civic organizations, give to the United Way, serve on the school board. Do not seek federal subsidies. Favor less government spending and a balanced budget.

messianists (also called neoconservatives or neocons) – believe in U.S. destiny. Seek to liberate the world for democracy. Believe the U.S. government is the world´s best and our economy the most important. Little to be learned from other nations. Want to impose our systems and thinking on other countries. Favor a strong military and use it to pursue our goals.

realists – combine post World War II optimism with post-Vietnam pessimism. Hesitant to commit troops abroad. Oppose nation-building. (Doubt it is doable.) Insist on an exit strategy before going to war.

crime busters – believe the death penalty is the all-purpose answer to violence and pathology. Favor giving more authority to police. Question the validity of the right to legal counsel before questioning. Favor the war on drugs.

liberals – Believe in government regulation and helping the poor. Seek bipartisan solutions. Favor civil rights and protection of the environment. (Example: Barry Goldwater)

racemongers – maintain prejudice. Oppose affirmative action. Want to reduce or cut funding for programs that benefit blacks and Hispanics. Oppose immigration.

The corporatists seem to be the most dominant faction of the current Republican Party. The supply-siders have successfully made tax cuts a Republican mantra, to the dismay of the Main Streeters who favor personal responsibility and balanced budgets. The fundamentalists are much more influential than the libertarians and convince many middle and lower-income Americans to advocate policies that hurt them economically. The messianists (neocons) now dominate foreign policy discussions and drown out realist voices. Liberals have almost disappeared from the party.

Crank Politics

Jonathan Chait is the author of the 2007 book, THE BIG CON: The true story of how Washington got hoodwinked and hijacked by crackpot economics. In the September 11, 2007 article "Crank Politics," Paul Krugman responded:

There’s only one word to describe Jon Chait’s book: shrill. I mean, how can Chait say that “American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists”? The cocktail-party circuit knows better. As Peter Beinart, the then editor of The New Republic, wrote in his review of my 2003 book The Great Unraveling, “guest lists that cross ideological lines can help liberals understand the conservatives they write about. And many Washington conservatives genuinely don't see the Bush administration as radical: they see it as having ratified a big-spending, culturally liberal status quo.”

OK, end snark. Obviously I agree with just about everything that’s in Jon’s book. I cover some of the same ground in my own forthcoming book, The Conscience of a Liberal, though in much less detail. I’d like to take this conversation in a slightly different direction by talking about the second part of the book, on the political environment that lets crackpot economics flourish; Jon’s description is correct, but, I think, somewhat incomplete.

First, supply-side quackery is only one of the gambits used to sell tax cuts.

There are other, older versions – notably the claim that government is wasting your money on vast armies of useless bureaucrats. Way back in 1964, in his famous speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Reagan talked about how crazy it was that the federal government employed 2.5 million civilian workers; nobody pointed out that two-thirds of those civilians worked either for the Pentagon or for the post office.

Second, Jon talks at some length about the media, and in particular about the Republican ability to get journalists to harp endlessly on supposed character flaws of Democrats, while their own candidates get a free pass. He emphasizes the right-wing echo chamber, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also – as I can report from my own experience – a result of asymmetrical intimidation. Quite simply, if you point out character flaws in a conservative, there will be an all-out effort, involving major media as well as blogs and talk radio, to discredit and ruin you, personally. This just doesn’t happen on the other side.

So journalists feel that it’s safe to ridicule Democrats, even if the supposed character-defining episode never happened; they choke up and shy away when it comes to Republicans. That’s why even the most grotesque stuff, like Giuliani’s claim that he’s a rescue worker too, or Romney’s remark that his sons are serving the country by helping him become president, doesn’t get picked up.

Third, I’m surprised that Jon doesn’t talk at all about the key political role of race in the political shift in this country. Reagan didn’t start as a supply-sider: he started as the enemy of welfare queens in their welfare Cadillacs. And what I’ve learned from Larry Bartels, Tom Schaller, and other political scientists is that race is really central to the whole thing. Here’s a preview quote from my own book:

“The overwhelming importance of the Southern switch suggests an almost embarrassingly simple story about the political success of movement conservatism. It goes like this: thanks to their organization, the interlocking institutions that constitute the reality of the vast right-wing conspiracy, movement conservatives were able to take over the Republican Party, and move its domestic policies sharply to the right. In most of the country, this rightward shift alienated voters, who gradually moved toward the Democrats. But Republicans were nonetheless able to win presidential elections, and eventually gain control of Congress, because they were able to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. End of story.”