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Go Home On the Republicans Being Nuts

JONATHAN COHN JANUARY 4, 2011

On the Republicans Being Nuts

BY JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

Paul Waldman says:

I doubt anyone would deny that at the moment, the Republican Party takes a harsher view of apostasy than their Democratic counterparts. 

You know, I think I might be tempted to deny it. 

Now, I’ll agree in one set of cases: primary elections in inhospitable states or districts. There, I think we can see a real difference; Democrats in GOP-leaning districts generally try to find a candidate who can win even if she won’t be a reliable vote in Congress, while Republicans tend to prefer to lose with a purist than to win with a moderate.

At the presidential level, though...well, it’s no more likely that Democrats would nominate a pro-life candidate than that Republicans would nominate someone who was pro-choice. If you look at the three leading Democratic candidates in 2008, there was very little room between them on issues, and in fact that’s true for the second tier (Richardson, Dodd, Biden) as well. Waldman notes that much of the field in 2004 (and Hillary Clinton in 2008) had supported the Iraq war, but the only candidate to really still support it in 2004, Joe Lieberman, was treated as a crank in his presidential campaign and then promptly defeated in a primary for re-election to the Senate.

Suppose Barack Obama chooses not to run tomorrow. In the ensuing scramble for the Democratic nomination, would any candidate have a chance if she opposed a public option on health care? Card check? Some sort of serious action on climate? No way.

And focusing on small differences, including differences in how the current orthodox views were arrived at, is a normal consequence of primary election battles. Democrats do it too.

There is a difference between the parties right now, at least in my view, but that difference isn’t about “view of apostasy” (great phrase, though), at least at the presidential level.

No, the difference between the parties is how well party dogma is aligned with reality. Budget reality: Republicans are required to believe in balancing budgets by cutting taxes. Political reality: while both parties have their share of relatively unpopular issue positions, Republicans have far more of these, are farther from the median voter on them, and have less leeway to downplay unpopular stances. And reality reality: Republicans are required to be skeptical of evolution, to deny climate change, pretend missile defense works, and otherwise ignore real-world evidence. 

Moreover, and perhaps less subjectively, I think there’s a real difference between the parties in the way that positions on public policy come to be required. I believe, but do not know as a fact, that this has to do with what my brother calls the “movement conservative marketplace.” Basically, the argument would be that while normally parties take positions based on a mix of what party-aligned groups demand, where the median voter is, and what party-aligned idealists want, the Republican Party right now is also affected by a large group of consumers eager to shell out money to the harshest, purist, and most extreme version of “conservative” out there—which means that the producers of such things are constantly trying to differentiate themselves from moderates. This doesn’t dictate all GOP policy positions, but call it a fourth element that has little grounding in any of the factors that normally keep a party firmly tied to reality. Especially if we stretch it and consider purist idealism a form of ideological reality, which at least in my opinion is also missing from a lot of GOP policy positions (that is, they are “conservative” in the sense of being aligned with what Rush or Beck says, but not in the sense of being aligned with ideological conservatism. 

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12 comments

Rethuglicans don't care about the average voter. Theirs is a religion, not a means of governance, and so the fervor of the belief system is what's paramount. Tax cuts are always good, free-market principles are to be defended at the cost of pragmatism, even though the truly free market doesn't exist and hasn't for some time in this country. Those who aren't fervent enough are simply apostate.

- desertdog

January 4, 2011 at 1:06pm

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If the Republicans are so far from the "median voter," how come they just whipped the Democrats' asses in the midterm? It's like a football team beats another team 28-14, and then an MIT professor writes a 250-page treatise on how the losing team is "really" better, if you divide total yardage by pass attempt by blah blah blah. For a party that's out of touch with "political reality," the GOP seems to be doing rather well.

- tomsca67

January 4, 2011 at 1:34pm

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"If the Republicans are so far from the "median voter," how come they just whipped the Democrats' asses in the midterm?" It's the economy, stupid.

- ReganaD

January 4, 2011 at 1:42pm

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"[P]urist idealism a form of ideological reality". Sort of like piety as a form (or measure) of faith. One can envision a future absent any commonly-accepted truths, at least truths in the sense understood by the founders and others of the enlightenment. A new dark age in which the distance between superstition and science is reduced to zero, and spirits and not reason determine our path. Ironic that fear of one religion would make us all captive of another.

- rayward

January 4, 2011 at 1:48pm

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Of the recent election, this magazine did a statistical breakdown and found that only 35% of eligible voters actually voted. Of that turnout, 52% voted Republican. That means that 18.2% (52 percent of 35 percent) of the eligible electorate elected the incoming House of Representatives. Hardly a representative majority. These were almost all fired-up, Tea Party types who fervently believe the supply-side religion of the right. Not at all representative of the average voter or citizen. The average Joe is too busy trying to keep his job, find a new one, pay his bills or fight with his health insurance company to keep his insurance and/or pay his existing bills. It is the economy, stupid.

- desertdog

January 4, 2011 at 1:54pm

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It's interesting that the most far-out Tea-Party candidates, the ones most reflective of this new "Republicans Rule!" idea, lost. Namely in Delaware and Nevada. And the most moderate Republicans, the ones willing to compromise to vote for things that Republicans USED to be for before Obama was elected, were FINALLY allowed to vote for those things in the Lame Duck Congress. And 'desertdog' has it correct -- the "huge Republican landslide" consisted of 1/2 of the 35% of voters who came out. Bottom line, it's a victory of propaganda motivating the base, over an economic reality that wasn't very good. But we must not rule by propaganda, that's how the CDO crisis happened in the first place.

- AllanL5

January 4, 2011 at 2:04pm

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It's simply a fact that there are far more pro-life Democrats in office than pro-choice Republicans, and this includes people in leadership positions, such as several governors and the Senate majority leader, and many from states or districts, such as Nevada, that are at least as likely to elect a pro-choice Democrat. But that's just picking nits. The important point is that there is no equivalent ideological movement on the left against which a Democrat can be measured. There is a basket of establishment policy positions, sure, but they're based on interest groups and demographics and policy inertia. If a candidate comes along who rejects key elements of party orthodoxy, such as, say, government-funded healthcare for the uninsured, or obedience to the teachers' unions, he absolutely can win the Democratic presidential nomination. We know this, because Barack Obama did so in 2008. It may be true that Democrats have certain litmus tests for presidential candidates, but the litmus tests are an inchoate miasma of unrelated programs, and they're subject to bending and fudging and change. What Republicans have is an ideology. Not a basket of competing commitments, not a set of inherited interest-group pressures, but an actual, unifying and unified, ideology. A Democrat can favor merit pay for teachers or concealed-carry gun permits or corporate tax cuts without being regarded as a traitor to the entire political left, because the various elements of the Democratic coalition share no single ideological framework. Not so on the right, where apostasy on any single issue is widely regarded as total betrayal. As several conservative think-tank staffers learned in 2009, and as a good number of soon-to-be-former Republican members of Congress learned in 2010. A Democrat who opposes card-check will have a hard time winning the nomination simply because union support is important to organizing Democratic campaigns. If he could mobilize sufficient numbers of non-union supporters, he could still win the nomination. It's a matter of logistics, not ideology. A Republican who opposes tax cuts will have a hard time winning the nomination because all conservatives will regard him as a traitor to the cause. You're either with conservatives or you're against them; there is no difference between a tax-raiser and a gun-grabber or a baby-killer. The equivalency Bernstein projects here is shocking. It is as if he observed that the Spanish Inquisition dealt with agnosticism by burning heretics at the stake, and the local Boy Scouts troop also had a procedure for quietly expelling avowed atheists, and then argued that the Inquisition therefore didn't take any harsher view of apostates than the Boy Scouts. Bad enough the failure to recognize the simple, factual differences in degree, but far worse the failure to appreciate the differences in kind that produce those differences in degree.

- rhubarbs

January 4, 2011 at 2:29pm

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"It's like a football team beats another team 28-14, and then an MIT professor writes a 250-page treatise on how the losing team is "really" better, if you divide total yardage by pass attempt by blah blah blah." A better sports analogy would be a diving competition in which only a couple of the dozens of judges were paying attention during the dive, so everyone else judged based on the divers' own descriptions of each others' efforts. Then most of the judges failed to raise their score cards anyway, because they were off at the beer and pretzel stand. Not a great way to determine the best diver or political representative.

- Fishpeddler

January 4, 2011 at 2:50pm

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This site http://elections.gmu.edu/Turnout_2010G.html says that 40% voted. Surely a large majority came from the upper 50% of the income distribution. Obama's bailout of the UAW and his passage of health care convinced a large mass of the upper 50% that he was taking their tax money and giving it to the poor and lazy. Obama put the welfare monkey back on the back of the Democratic Party. Obama particularly offended retired voters, who traditionally have looked to the Democratic Party to protect SS and Medicare, by cutting Medicare to provide for the uninsured. Lower-income voters didn't turn out much because they didn't see that Obama had benefited them. The uninsured weren't getting the health care Obama promised in the campaign, and, in any event, many didn't want coverage if they actually had to pay for it. Those struggling with heavy health expenses didn't get the 50% reduction that Obama had promised in the campaign. On every aspect of the economy, Obama overpromised and underperformed.

- AlanVann

January 4, 2011 at 3:06pm

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I think politics is dominated by raising money and Republican politicians feel that they can capture large contributions by opposing high taxes on the wealthy and the estate tax. Similarly with contributions from moneyed interests that oppose Heath Care Reform. That explains the bulk of their positions.

- Nusholtz

January 4, 2011 at 3:46pm

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Agreed, many GOP positions approach religion. They are just about as rational. However, As AlanVann and Nusholtz also point out, there's nothing irrational about rich white folks flocking to the polls to support people who support them. Similarly, Democrats, liberals, progressives, young people, poor people stayed home in droves - shamefully. 40% is lousy. Maybe Obama doesn't walk on water but people should have realized how bad the alternative really is.

- Sophia

January 4, 2011 at 6:19pm

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Sophia, I was referring to the ramifications of Citizens United

- Nusholtz

January 4, 2011 at 8:12pm

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