The basic contradiction that could split the Republican party
Polling shows that larger shares of Republican voters said they believed that the federal government should be doing more to provide “support for the poor, disabled, needy” and “medical care for those who need help affording insurance” and to sustain Social Security and Medicare. To pay for this, majority of self-described conservative Republicans strongly or somewhat supported raising taxes on Americans making $400,000 or more a year.
Same old policies
But good luck finding evidence of this populist transformation in the party’s current policy proposals. Consider, for instance, the latest budget proposal from the Republican Study Committee, the caucus that claims about 80% of Republican representatives as members.
The document makes the same general pledges that the party’s conservatives have made for decades, from the era of Newt Gingrich to the years of Paul Ryan: It wants to make the Trump-era tax cuts permanent, it calls for “extending and improving” tax cuts for corporations and abolishing the estate tax, and it wants to pay for its tax cuts by reducing what the government spends on Medicaid, Obamacare and old-age entitlements.
This mismatch existed already in the Gingrich era and in the Ryan years, but the gap has clearly widened. There’s often been an assumption that at some point, the basic commitments of the median Republican politician will have to shift to match the increasing populism of constituents.
Instead, every time a Republican leader tried to forge a less libertarian agenda — as George W. Bush did with “compassionate conservatism” and the “ownership society” and as Donald Trump did by running directly against the party’s small-government wing in 2016 — the pendulum swung back again as soon as the party was out of power.
What sustains this contradictory-seeming arrangement? Here are a few explanations.
The Republican arrangement
The modified Thomas Frank
thesis. This argument comes from “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” the Bush-era bestseller in which Frank argued that Republican politicians and the conservative media complex were essentially tricking middle-American voters into voting against their own economic interests — whipping up moral panics and culture-war excitement on television while in their legislation they were building a plutocracy.
The postmaterialism argument. This explanation gives more credit to conservative voters: They aren’t being tricked or deceived into supporting libertarian politicians; they just don’t care enough about economic policy to force some big change in the GOP. Throw them back into the Depression era, and they probably wouldn’t vote Republican. But in a rich society, it can be perfectly rational to prioritize cultural issues over economic ones, values over crude materialism.
Then, too, it makes a difference that the current Republican Party is pretty obviously held together by negative polarization. Republicans shared a desire not to be governed by contemporary progressivism, but for different reasons.
There isn’t a coherent right in America so much as a fractious anti-left. It’s not surprising that Republican economic policy would often be handed over to the faction that most objects to progressive economics — the limited government types — while other right-ofcenter factions focus on other issues, threats and grievances.
The “small-government conservatism is fake” theory. Workingvoters may not love limited-government conservatism, but neither do they fear it, because years of experience have taught them that it never succeeds in making the kind of big spending cuts that it claims to want. A vote for Republican governance has never really been a vote for austerity or big entitlement cuts; it’s just a vote for the free lunch of deficit-financed tax cuts.
The “Trump holds it together” theory. This final explanation notes that whatever House Republicans propose, they aren’t in charge of the party these days; Trump is. And he didn’t run a primary campaign promising to cut entitlements, nor has he come out guns blazing in favor of budgetary austerity. Instead, his most recent policy intervention was a pledge to make Obamacare “better, stronger, and less expensive.”
True, while he was president, he deferred to Ryan and Mitch McConnell in the design of his tax cuts and never delivered on some of his “worker’s party” promises. But he abandoned the right’s zeal for entitlement reform and hard money, he ran a hot pre-pandemic economy that was good for working-class wages, and he never really tried to carry out the budget proposals that his administration’s nerds produced.
The contradiction can get worse
This theory also implies that without a Trump figure as its leader, the contradiction within the GOP, the tension between populist voters and libertarian elites, could come more sharply to the fore. Even with Trump, the tension may matter more in a potential second term than in his first one.
If elected, he’ll face a very different fiscal and economic landscape than in 2017, in which the shadow of inflation will make a stronger policy case for austerity than eight years ago, with a party whose elites still hate tax increases and whose voters may be more hostile than ever to serious spending cuts.
Those pressures could force a second Trump administration to resolve the libertarian-populist tension. Or more likely, they could just undermine its policymaking and unravel its coalition.