"The Republicans"
Aug. 2nd, 2020 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeur(Warning: long Sunday-morning armchair political opinion and long-term psychohistory ahead. No deep analysis here, just some thoughts that have been brewing. Not immediately important stuff. Take it or leave it as you see fit.)
I just skimmed past a blog article talking about "this will never happen because The Republicans don't think that way" (specifically the idea of them nominating Nikki Haley), and was struck by the fallacy at its heart -- it is seriously over-simplifying what that term "The Republicans" means. And that's never a good thing: over-simplifying leads to under-estimating, and in our current political moment (and over at least the next decade) it is important to be clear-eyed.
(I suspect many of you already know this, but I think some of my friends are prone to the same over-simplification, so it's worth breaking this down.)
The Republican Party consists of at least five main strands, all of them pretty distinct (and yes, I'm wildly over-simplifying here, so take this with a grain of salt):
First, there are what I now call The Trumpies. This is the unabashedly authoritarian wing. They are the ones likely to be most clearly racist -- actively nasty, as opposed to the more common sort of high-handedness. They are generally ferociously anti-immigrant (closely tied to the racism), loudly isolationist, statist, and nationalist. They're basically fans of right-wing fascist dictatorships, and some of them (notably Trump himself) don't hide that fact. They are significantly the most dangerous wing of the party, and they are currently in the ascendant. Frankly, Trump's sheer, mind-boggling incompetence is the only reason I am not terrified of this: he has done more to discredit this movement than I could have imagined. But they're still dangerous.
Then there are the Tea Partiers, which is a bit messy. Broadly speaking, these are people who bought into the premise of the Reagan years hook, line and sinker, turning its ideas -- especially the idea that Less Government is Better -- into a religion. In the beginning, the Tea Party was a very pure incarnation of the Lower Taxes Dammit movement, but it quickly got co-opted by various tribal-Republican leaders and turned into foot-soldiers of various sorts. This wing is hard to distinguish from the pure Trumpies these days, but you can still see the distinction in the attitude towards taxes and government spending.
The "traditional" Republicans are a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Here I'm talking about, essentially, the true Reaganites. While by no means left-wing, they're very different from the Trumpies -- they tend to be corporatist big-business sorts rather than statists, and as globalist as Trump is isolationist. They sometimes parrot a mild anti-immigrant stance, but their heart isn't in it because they know that the country runs on cheap immigrant labor to exploit. They tend to be a bit authoritarian (as the right wing usually is), but prefer backroom cabals instead of simple strongmen. This wing is more or less what Massachusetts tends to define as "Republican"; Baker and Romney are among the more prominent current incarnations of it. This faction is in deep retreat nowadays, and many of its thought leaders have been reduced to ineffectual blogging for now.
Then there are the true-believer culture warriors -- the ones who think that all social change since 1950 has been for the negative, that abortion is obviously evil, that gay/trans people need to be "cured", and other such nonsense. While they overlap with the other factions, that's often out of convenience: these are the ones most likely to be single-issue voters, who are courted by the other factions to beef up their votes. They are necessarily anti-progressive, which lumps them into the Republican Party, but they don't necessarily line up in any sort of straightforward way with one of the other factions.
And finally, there are the purely tribal Republicans, who believe in the Party and basically nothing else. This is a bigger grouping than you might think at first glance, and is frankly the only way to explain many of the political leadership, who pretty clearly don't believe in anything but the pre-eminence of the Party. And it accounts for a fairly large block of Republican voters, who vote Republican because they have always voted Republican, and have been taught that Democrats are evil demons from the shadow lands of
MordorBoston. While this sort of thinking exists in all political parties, this wing of the Republicans really got deliberately crystallized by Gingrich's Contract On America back in '94, and has steadily (and intentionally) solidified ever since. Mitch McConnell is the exemplar of this wing, standing for Us vs Them and absolutely nothing else.
None of these are simple either/or groupings, mind -- this is really a big Venn diagram, and people often fall into multiple groupings. (And really, these are many smaller factions, of which these are simplifications.) But note that some of these groups are basically mutually exclusive: in particular, it's hard to actually be both a Trumpie and a Reaganite, because the contradictions are just too deep.
So all of this is really fairly messy. The Trumpies and the tribalists play together pretty well, and both wings tend to be fairly fanatical, so they've set up a currently iron hold over the Party. But they've driven the Reaganites out -- some have gone Libertarian for the time being (eg, William Weld), a modest number have realized that they have more in common with the centrist wing of the Democrats than with the current Republican leadership, many are simply disengaging in disgust. And some of the more honest culture warriors, especially the genuinely religious, are looking uneasily at the naked insincerity of Trump, and are unsure what to do.
The point is, none of this is simple, and none of it is permanent. Assuming Trump loses in November (which is by no means assured, especially given how much voter suppression and possible vote-rigging we are facing by the Republican leadership), and assuming he actually leaves office (also not certain, although I don't see a straightforward way for him to hold onto power if he clearly loses the vote), things are going to get Very Interesting in the Republican Party.
The fascists are going to try to stay in the ascendant, but Trump himself will be a largely spent force, and let's get real -- while people will try to make his children into his successors, they're basically jokes except for Ivanka, and I haven't seen enough raw lust for power in her to think it likely. So it is likely that the purely fascist wing is going to fall into infighting for a fair while. They are going to remain dangerous, but will be weakened at least for a time.
As a result, I fully expect the Reaganites to make a moderate comeback; depending on the size of Trump's loss, that might even be easy. They want it desperately, and as the Democratic Party moves to the left, they will be seeking to drag the political center back their way. The sort of swing voters who could happily vote for both an Obama and a Reagan (and yes, there are a lot of such folks) are likely to be in play after Biden steps down, especially if the Democrats wind up with a relatively progressive candidate. (I am terribly, terribly curious about who Biden will nominate as his vice-presidential candidate. For all that I want Stacey Abrams, I'm cautious about her prospects in a still-pretty-racist country. And yes, I am assuming that Biden steps down in 2024 -- not by any means certain, but the Republicans will be portraying him as senile if he tries to stay on.)
So a hand-wave prediction: I would say that the likeliest course for 2024 is that the Republicans will be trying to reunite around a mildly authoritarian, center-right leader who oozes competence. They will be painting the Democrats as radical left-wingers (pretty much regardless of what Biden has done), and the race will be close, even if 2020 is (as seems at least possible, although it's too much to really hope for) a blowout win for Biden.
Thoughts? I'm curious whether anybody seriously disagrees with the above...
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-02 06:37 pm (UTC)The Tea Party faction is in a really interesting place right now, since they're ideologically extreme and numerous enough that the rest of the Republicans don't currently have a Senate majority without them. They're currently preventing the Senate from passing any sort of second relief bill without votes from the Democrats. Which seems to put McConnell in a very awkward position, since cascading economic failures will put Republicans in a really bad position electorally.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-02 07:09 pm (UTC)In terms of the voters, the difference is subtle, and many of them are squishily in the middle. But I generally observe the tribalists as mainly being defined in terms of what they are against, namely Democrats, whereas the Trumpies tend to be actively for "strong government" (that is, authoritarianism), explicit racism, and so on. I've seen enough tribalists who are more or less queasy about the Trumpies that I think the distinction is real.
Yep, and that's the clearest distinction between Trump and the Tea Party. Trump does not care in the slightest about running up the national debt: if he could prop up the economy and take credit for it (the credit being all he really cares about), he'd be entirely content to turn on the taps full force. But that's anathema to the Tea Party (and to some of his billionaire friends), so it's all a delicate dance.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-02 10:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-03 12:01 pm (UTC)Many years ago I remember watching some news story that revolved around the Senate Judiciary Committee, and commenting "Strom Thurmond is a conservative who happens to be Republican. Orrin Hatch is a Republican who happens to be conservative. I have more respect for the former category." Hatch appeared to be the more intelligent of the two, but also the slimier -- he seemed driven more by power than by principles. And of course today's McConnell makes Hatch look like a non-partisan patriot by comparison.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-03 02:19 pm (UTC)Like, I think that true blue religious conservatives like Rod Dreher would be reasonably comfortable with a black person and (possibly) even a Jew, as long as they opposed abortion rights and wanted to protect the ability of teachers and employers to discriminate against sexual and gender minorities, but wouldn't go anywhere near an atheist or a candidate who wreaks of secularism. And then there are the white supremacists who would probably be fine with an atheist as long as they weren't too loud about it and did the work to put racial and ethnic minorities "in their place".
On the one hand, as segments of the voting public go, I think the white Southern Baptists and other white fundamentalist Christian churches are the biggest institutional proponents of both of these, so maybe the distinction isn't so meaningful in practical terms.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-04 11:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-03 02:07 pm (UTC)Because I have liberatarian and liberatarian-leaning acquaintances who have used that word to refer to people who support things like the EPA, welfare, the FDA, consumer protection, and public schools. Basically the so-called "nanny state" that makes liberal democracies economically vibrant. And the Trumpies don't support any of that. In fact, I think it's pretty clear that when Trump promised to drain the swamp what he meant was that he would get rid of all of that.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-03 05:04 pm (UTC)I'm using it in the relatively formal economic sense, to mean that the state exerts strong and arbitrary control over the economy. Not quite communist central planning, but the notion that the government can openly boss companies around, with relatively weak rule of law.
Trump loves that sort of thing (as do most fascists), and freely brags about it in his speeches -- he likes to claim that he yells "Frog!" and companies all respond "How high?". It's not really true in the US: he has some limited power at the moment, but mostly his effectiveness depends on how much companies want to butter him up. But as far as I can tell, he totally believes that he has this sort of power, and quite wants it.
(Some libertarians misuse the term, to essentially claim that rule of law itself is statism when applied to the economic sphere -- that's the version you're talking about. This is basically extremist nonsense, but very convenient nonsense from their POV. I have no truck with that interpretation: a properly-functioning society always requires some legal constraints, although there is a reasonable debate about how much is appropriate.)
The semi-inverse is corporatism, where large companies have their tendrils deeply entwined in the government and tell it what to do. That one's somewhat more true in practice in the US, although there's a constant battle to reduce it -- it's generally considered straightforward corruption, although the laws against it are fairly weak.
In practice, both are affronts to anyone who believes in liberal democracy (in the classic sense), but they are always a problem.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-03 05:42 pm (UTC)Trump touting himself as having tight control over industry isn't rhetoric that I've been particularly exposed to (I generally feel pretty good about the fact that I've managed to avoid more exposure to his bullshit than most people seem to manage).
Just to muddy the waters even further, I think that I've also heard that the older European-style fascists (like from way back in the 2000s and earlier) were *also* generally favorable to the welfare state (i.e. actually "statist" in the pop libertarian sense of the term), as long as it selectively benefited their political base (generally less-educated heterosexual white people born in the country).
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-03 06:34 pm (UTC)It was more prominent earlier in his term: he loved to brag about "bringing jobs back to America" by strong-arming companies, and the like. It was mostly bullshit, but he talked it up a lot.
Oh, absolutely. Keep in mind that Nazi is short for "nationalist socialist". The lines are blurry...