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The GOP is facing major internal and dogmatic problems. (Long but good read.)
http://www.salon.com/2017/04/23/understanding-the-gops-health-care-failure-and-the-deeper-existential-crisis-of-conservative-politics/The Democrats are best understood as a coalition of social groups, and the Republicans are best understood as the agent of the conservative ideological movement.
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Health care is a particularly good example, and has to do with the fact that the American public collectively leans to the right in terms of its abstract ideological predispositions, but it also leans to the left with respect to specific policy views. So, when conservatives talk about shrinking government, or making sure that individual liberty is protected, they are speaking for a majority of Americans. But when liberals and Democrats are in favor of expanding health care access, and using the government to help regulate insurance companies, and provide insurance to people don’t have it, they’re also speaking for a majority of Americans.
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One aspect of party asymmetry is that Democratic policymakers tend to be mostly outcome-oriented. The structure of Obamacare is not something that comes out of liberal ideology. It’s something that comes out of the pragmatic attempt to achieve a goal of reducing the uninsured.
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Whereas for Republicans, as a party that’s more interested in staying true to a set of principles than to achieving a specific set of outcomes, government expansion of health care is problematic by definition. So the actual outcome is not necessarily what’s most important to them, it’s the fact that you’re using government in this particular fashion.
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One of the stories on health care is that the purist conservatives have been willing to oppose legislation that is been developed by the party leadership and supported by the rest of the party, on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough in achieving conservative aims.
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We could swap out one set of leaders for another set of leaders and the Republican Party would still behave more or less the same. The dynamics on this issue — between the purist conservative yearning for clean repeal or rollback of domestic social policy and the reality that achieving that would be politically risky, and probably invite serious electoral backlash — is a dilemma that has faced conservatives for decades.
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My sense is that a lot of the discussion of about repeal in the House is motivated more by the desire to pass something through the House and dump it in the Senate than to actually achieve something that would be enacted and go to the president to be signed.
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One of the lessons that Trump teaches us is that there is something of a crisis in the Republican Party. A fully healthy party is not really open to a Donald Trump coming along and walking away with this presidential nomination. I think we see a set of weaknesses in the party that he was able to exploit.
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Republicans just defined themselves essentially as a party that was against Obama, no matter what. To me it’s no accident that they ended up nominating someone who spent much of the Obama administration on television attacking Obama and even suggesting that Obama was not a real American, was not a real Christian.
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The conservative Republican leadership has long struggled with the gap between the American public’s preference for conservatism as an abstract principle and its decidedly weaker support for specific conservative policies. Trump’s solution to that dilemma during the campaign was to disassociate himself from specific conservative policies, especially on domestic economic matters.
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I think we should not expect much legislative productivity out of this Congress. The Republicans are really coming to terms with the difficulty of putting their ideological commitments into practice in terms of policymaking
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But of course the Democrats have problems winning elections, and in part we can trace that problem to the deficiencies or limitations of the Democratic Party, which defines itself as a coalition of social groups. The Democrats in this past election, I think, didn’t realize their coalition in order to be a majority needed to contain a lot of white working-class voters, especially in certain states.
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Another element of the position the Republicans are in now is the legacy of the George W. Bush years.
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Bush pursued a set of policies — in terms of tax policy, in terms of foreign policy, in terms of social and cultural policy — that were in some ways a fruition of many decades of conservative hopes for what would happen, and the results were ultimately poor. His presidency was ultimately a failure.
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So another part of the vacuum Trump has filled in the Republican Party has been, essentially, a product of the disorientation on the conservative side about where to go after Bush, and what the true lessons of the Bush administration were. For some conservatives, the lessons were that Bush himself wasn’t conservative enough.
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- The Conservatives care more about dogma than about results.
- Trump won the primary by being vague.
- The Republicans are confused that conservative politics failed during the GWB-years.
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