The Coming Separation Of Conservatives And The GOP

Martin Longman over at Washington Monthly points to an interesting interview with Samuel Goldman, a professor of political theory at George Washington University. In it Goldman puts forth an idea that, I think, does a wonderful job explaining Trump’s popularity as well understanding at least part of the reason for the total Republican obstruction in Congress over the last eight years. But it also makes clear why there is such anger at the Republican party among its own base.

In essence, Goldman says, there is around 30-40% of the country, “whites, generally older, generally less educated, although of course with exemptions for all of those generalization” that is large enough to think of itself as a majority but in actuality is just small enough to be a minority. To quote Goldman, “That’s a very uncomfortable place to be, politically, because smaller groups I think come to appreciate, not immediately but eventually, that they have to compromise and form coalitions. Larger groups can just win. But this group doesn’t seem small enough to compromise or big enough to win. That makes people very angry. I think some of that anger is reflected not just in Trump’s campaign but in the sort of rhetoric you see around the rallies. And everyone has seen footage of people who are just hopping mad in a way that I suspect is alien not just to the journalists who cover them but also to movement conservatives who have claimed to speak for them in the past.” That inability to compromise and the resulting anger from the Republican party’s inability to deliver on its promises because of that unwillingness to compromise in addition to the failure of its economic message is how the party ended up with Trump as its nominee. As Goldman points out, ” [I]t appeared not just to conservatives but to virtually everybody that a program of deregulation and free trade really did benefit almost everyone. For the last 10 or 15 years, that hasn’t seemed to have been the case. George W. Bush, as we all know, brought the country into two inconclusive and at least one unnecessary war. The economic package that was associated with conservatism stopped delivering the goods. Since conservative politicians and policies have stopped delivering peace and prosperity, I think it’s more or less inevitable that voters have become dissatisfied. It took a while, as these things always do, but that dissatisfaction has found a focus in Trump.”

Goldman is conservative and as a conservative he believes that the conservative movement may be dead, at least within the Republican party. He thinks that both conservatives and the party got complacent about believing each represented the other’s interests. Eventually, the voters in the party essentially took movement conservatives for granted. Says Goldman, “I think the great message of Trump is that there really are not that many movement conservatives. There is an infrastructure of journalists, intellectuals who are vested in a conventional combination of limited government, a relatively hawkish foreign policy, and a sort of religiously inflected public morality. There are a few hundred such people, and they all know each other. But it turned out that there aren’t that many voters who actually care about these things — or at least cared about them in quite that combination.” And what made the situation even more untenable is the direction the Republican party took over the last decade and a half. “The answer has to do with the adoption of a fairly exclusive vision of American nationalism — which sees America not only as a predominantly white country but also as a white Christian country and also as a white Christian provincial country. This is a conception of America that finds its home outside the cities, exurbs and rural areas, in what Sarah Palin called the real America. If you project yourself as a white Christian provincial party, you’re not going to get very many votes among people who are none of those things. That’s what’s happened over the last 10 or 15 years.”

The combination of becoming a white, Christian party that felt like it was a majority when it wasn’t is what led the Romney campaign to go searching for those “missing white voters” and delude itself into thinking the polls were skewed and that Romney would win the election. In addition, the belief that GOP voters have that they really are a majority makes it incredibly difficult for GOP politicians to make the necessary compromises. This manifests itself in the eternal complaint the their nominee was never really a “true conservative”. If Trump loses the election – it would be the third in a row for Republicans – you will probably see a major realignment of conservatives and the Republican party. What that will look like is anyone’s guess right now. Please read the whole interview here as I think it provides great insight into how the Republican party has ended up where it is right now.