By Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of many books and articles, including Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. Cross posted from Alternet
The father of the Investment Theory of Politics reveals what pundits miss in the GOP’s failure to lead its own electorate and its evangelical problem.
Election night in Iowa was a heavenly moment for Rick Santorum. As he marveled over the late breaking tidal wave of support that in just weeks had swept him from nowhere into a virtual tie with Mitt Romney for first place in the state’s Republican caucuses, the former Pennsylvania Senator gushed to supporters about the secret of his campaign’s success: “I’ve survived the challenges so far by the daily grace that comes from God. . . . I offer a public thanks to God.’’
But it was not God who saved Rick Santorum. He survived Iowa rather like a blind mole rat might someday outlive a nuclear exchange – by simply burrowing underground while Romney’s Super Pac incinerated Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, and while Perry tried to demolish Ron Paul, whom he considered a more dangerous rival. In a state where 60% of those attending the 2008 GOP caucuses described themselves as “born again” or evangelicals, Santorum was the only ultra-conservative left for resigned evangelical leaders to swing behind.
Now, as the wall of Super Money comes down on him like a ton of gold bricks, Santorum is likely fated, like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Perry himself, to flame out after a brief moment of glory and go back to working with the energy and health care enterprises that helped make him a millionaire after leaving the Senate.
But this leaves a larger question: Why does this curious “shooting star” pattern of flare ups and flame outs distinguish the quest of hopefuls for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination? The answer lies in the party’s tricky long-term strategy to steer ordinary voters into focusing on wedge issues rather than the economic policies. The party establishment wants Romney, but its voters have been so thoroughly trained to focus on gays and abortion that they cannot sit still behind a candidate who concentrates on business and economic growth.
A Party Built for the 1 Percent
Beginning in the Nixon era, and then with ever greater determination and force after Reagan, GOP leaders have carefully built out a very special party structure. But at what should by all rights be a moment of easy triumph, thanks to the combination of the Great Recession and the Obama administration’s repeated economic policy blunders, the GOP is on the verge of chaos. The carefully elaborated structure of primaries, group appeals, and elaborately layered leadership structures is coming apart. Republican leaders now find themselves superlatively prepared to fight exactly the wrong war.
Their dilemma is easy to understand, if one tears oneself away from media talking heads and the endless election chatter that now fills the US press. As perhaps most painstakingly documented by Larry Bartels, in his ‘Unequal Democracy,’ Republican policies are stunningly orientated toward making the richest Americans richer and they have consistently done exactly that, by comparison with Democratic regimes.
This is not to say the Democrats do not also cater to segments of the rich – Bartels, like nearly everyone else writing about American politics, jumped too quickly to the conclusion that the partisan differences he detected followed immediately from the direct influence of mass constituencies rather than the choices different blocs of investors made as they appealed to different segments of the electorate while competing to control the parties. But as far as it goes, his point is true and important.
To summarize and retranslate into the language of my investment theory of political parties: Republicans historically secure the incomes of upper income Americans, whatever else they do. By contrast, Democrats typically compete by offering something – and these days, not much at all – to more of the 99%, even as they go whole hog for financial deregulation amid a raft of money from Vampire Squids, telecom monopolists, and other dark forces.
Republican leaders from Nixon, through Reagan, Gingrich, and the Bushes all understood their situation. They knew that to win consistently, they needed to do two things. First, they had to discourage as many poorer Americans from voting as possible. A succession of Republican administrations, sometimes abetted by conservative Democrats, have worked overtime at this. Once centered on punitive registration requirements, such efforts nowadays focus more on state measures to curtail early voting and, especially, add demands for photo ids.
No less important were the implications for GOP campaigns and political rhetoric. Once GOP leaders got past bromides about encouraging economic growth, to have any chance of appealing to the normal Americans their policies were first to squeeze, and over a generation, to impoverish, the party needed to change the subject from economics when campaigning. Fast.
Wedge Issues: the Weapon That Backfired
Thus it was that Republican leaders tried out one wedge issue after another, looking for anything that would stick. Nixon, Helms, and nearly the whole party played the race card for a long time; some still do. In the eighties, conservative Republicans built alliances with evangelicals and attacked gays. Many also attacked immigrants, while, of course, virtually everyone talked up defense, national security, and guns 24/7. After 9/11, with much help from Fox News and the other networks, they kept Americans on high alert for low reasons, to the point that Republicans in Oklahoma and other states sometimes run against the threat of Islamic law with a straight face. The party also looked with benign neglect at the rise of a libertarian right, though Ron Paul’s current challenge is a bit more than the party establishment, which lives and dies by the Federal Reserve and the Department of Defense, bargained for.
This brings us to the conflicts that are now chewing up the GOP. Most Americans, if they think about electorates at all, probably think of the American voting universe as a natural fact, akin to the tides or the moon. But as Walter Dean Burnham and I have never stopped emphasizing, that is not true. Electorates are like Japanese gardens. They have to be cultivated over long periods if they are to flourish. A host of rules, institutional practices, and careful appeals mobilize some blocs and demobilize others, including decisions about where to spend money to encourage turnout or make sure enough voting machines are available.
In 2012, history has dealt the GOP a hand it hadn’t counted on. The Democrats should be hopelessly vulnerable on the economy just now. The Obama administration’s failure to stimulate the economy sufficiently and address the mortgage problem, along with its single-minded focus on rescuing the financial sector, has left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Americans on both the left and the right. The opportunity for the Republicans is so huge that that the GOP establishment can almost taste it. As Haley Barbour, a former chair of the Republican National Committee who is also one of the most closely connected of all Republican leaders to big business observed recently, “If the 2012 election is about President Obama’s policies and the negative results of those policies, he won’t be reelected; so if I were campaigning, I’d talk about how his policies have made economic growth and job creation harder.”
So the party establishment rallied quickly behind Mitt Romney, though he is the first choice of comparatively few and mistrusted still by many.
The establishment’s problem, however, is that the electorate it so laboriously built over the last generation still has all those wedge issues on their minds. This doesn’t mean they don’t think also about economic issues – the Iowa polls, for example, show plainly that they do. But many GOP voters are in the party now because of the earlier recruiting efforts and habits that reflected their other deep interests. They aren’t going away. Nor are they going to stop caring about those issues, whether the GOP establishment likes it or not.
So the Republican leaders have a problem. A huge percentage – in Iowa it was three quarters – of the electorate that it presides over doesn’t want to follow its lead. In 1953, after riots broke out in the self-styled worker’s paradise of East Germany, Bertolt Brecht famously suggested that the government should dissolve the people and go find another one. That prospect is not open to the GOP establishment. It will need them in the general election, especially if the economy were to improve. So all it can do right now is to unroll its mighty bankroll and bulldoze through its opponents, hoping that none of those being squashed defects to some third party.
But it might just take divine intervention to make this strategy work.
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I wouldn’t be too eager to discount the political potential of cultivating stupidiy and ignorance. Republicans have controlled things since 1968, and the only Democratic presidential candidates who managed to get themselves elected have been closet Republicans. It remains unclear why anyone really cares which one of these cartoon characters wins. I used to think it mattered for prestige reasons if we elected a genuine ignoramus, or a moron, but there doesn’t seem to have been any operational difference if you ignore the fatuous press conferences.
I think a cardboard cutout of Romney could actually poll higher than Romney himself.
I’m confused. I thought Romney WAS a cardboard cutout yet you now infer that he is not.
Is there a Turing Test for cardboard vs flesh-and-blood?
@Praedor: “you now infer that he is not.”
uh, grammar nazi here: he/she implies, you infer….please dont’ let it happen again….or…..you know.
….and yes, sadly, I have nothing better to do with my time.
I, for one, appreciate free grammar lessons at someone’s else’s expense.
Thanks!
From one Nazi to another . . . your “correction” is not quite correct.
Moreover, your comment leaves the impression that a distinction can be made between the verbs “to infer” and “to imply” based on their use in either the second person (you) versus the third person (he/she/they).
In fact, the distinction to be made here is one that only the author can clarify based on intended meaning:
“You now rationally conclude that he is not.”
OR
“You now suggest that he is not.”
Since the original “suggestion” that Romney is a cut-out was fairly explicit, one might argue that the first option above as to that previously stated deduction is more sensible.
I’m glad to reappear
From time to time
To ponder English use
Or make a rhyme.
Strike the “either” in my post —
Yours, E.D. (as fallible as most).
You can watch this interview at Real News Network:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=74&jumival=7789
Without the culture war, the GOP still has the prospect for real war with Iran, which they seem to view as a positive event. However, Ron Paul undercuts war with Iran and the culture war. That makes him the most dangerous candidate and I think that is why he is drawing the most fire at the debates now.
Steve
“Most Americans … probably think of the American voting universe as a natural fact, akin to the tides or the moon. But as Walter Dean Burnham and I have never stopped emphasizing, that is not true. Electorates … have to be cultivated over long periods if they are to flourish. A host of rules, institutional practices, and careful appeals mobilize some blocs and demobilize others, including decisions about where to spend money to encourage turnout or make sure enough voting machines are available.”
The tidal aspect of the voting universe is unmistakeable, in when voters vote, who votes, and how they vote. This is the binary aspect: greater turnout presidential years, lower in off years, lowest of all in primaries; low turnout elections attracting a higher concentration of older voters and party activist; lately, as the electorate has grown more desperate to see our problems addressed, the mallet swings from one party to another in our basically binary party choices.
But, of course, you and Burnham are right: the composition and nature of the people who actually cast votes is much more dynamic than merely tidal. In addition to the vote suppression efforts of ID cards, challenges and intentionally long lines in the “wrong neighborhoods,” there is also motor voter, registration drives and early field work by some Democratic state Parties and candidates working in the opposite direction.
Operating within this dynamic are the choices that parties and candidates make. For example, it made a huge difference in the world-view of the Republican Party when choices and social forces transformed the foot-soldiers of the Republican Party from stay-at-home college educated women to evangelicals, most of whom had been Democrats. The shift of the Democratic Party to the right has been deeply influenced by that Party’s slowly-unwinding abandonment of American consumer manufacturing, and the working class generally and labor unions specifically, culminating in the fairly successful Clintonite strategy of grabbing Wall Street support from the Republicans.
These choices have very real consequences. Simply because our awful political media understand almost none of this and has chosen to render itself useless by its cult of pseudo-objectivity – another way of saying they will never inform voters about where our interests lie – does not mean the phenomena are not real and do not have real consequences. It merely makes our elections one more piece of “deep politics” – vitally important political decisions the nature and importance of which is concealed from the allegedly-sovereign people.
romney the flip floped with become romney the panderer
he will offer the evangelicals/American taliban jihadists the vp slot to former senator anus as a bone
one heartbeat away from the presidency
depending on how close the polls are obama may throw biden under the bus
ironic since biden is one of the few adults in the room and far more qualified to be president than obama
but then its mostly about saving himself
so he may be forced to put clinton on as his vp given santorum’s threat to women
Remember, too, that many places the election is not a count of citizen’s choices but the choice of the people running the voting machines.
Greg Palast’s continuing work on stealing elections shows, if nothing else, this is important this election and the wave of the future.
What the leadership of both parties need from their electorates is not votes but affirmation. Their violent reaction to the Occupy movement shows how insecure they are and how little they can depend on people outside their circle.
The Republican supporters live in an alternate reality, one crafted by evangelists and lobbyists, a drama where they’re constantly menaced by The Enemy. The Democratic supporters live in an alternate reality of a Creative Class marooned in a nation of boobocracy. This makes election results contradicting provable support numbers reasonable to the Dems and necessary tactics to the Repubs.
Honest election would cause the electorate to drift toward reality from both directions.
“Electorates are like Japanese gardens. They have to be cultivated over long periods if they are to flourish.”
So true. Compare FDR’s and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”
Great article. Please use more punctuation though.
“Bartels, like nearly everyone else writing about American politics, jumped too quickly to the conclusion that the partisan differences he detected followed immediately from the direct influence of mass constituencies rather than the choices different blocs of investors made as they appealed to different segments of the electorate while competing to control the parties.”
The question to ask any partisan politician’s followers is:
“How will your candidate’s policies directly improve your
life and the economic fortunes of your friends and neighbors?”
Hitting below the belt:
I ask all my Republican friends “How will having a Republican in the White House make your health care
more affordable or give you longer hours at work or more pay?”
“Republican policies are stunningly orientated toward making the richest Americans richer and they have consistently done exactly that, by comparison with Democratic regimes.”
Glass Steagall was dissolved under Clinton.
Democrats = Communism
Republicans = Fascism
Ron Paul = Liberty, Justice, and Freedom
Calling my shot: RP is hopey change, 2012, from the right.
* * *
Can somebody get me a link to RP calling for the banksters to be prosecuted for accounting control fraud?
Also, a gold standard is a traditional tool of banker oppression and RP is for government recognition of gold (and other PMs) as money.
But still, I may vote for RP if he gets the nomination. At worst it should be very interesting.
On second thought:
http://tarpley.net/2012/01/05/ron-pauls-1-trillion-of-austerity-cuts-would-ravage-us/
Nope. I WON’T be voting for RP.
BDog, I’m glad you defined things so clearly.
Let’s see, of the three, I’ll stay home.
Or in general economic terms:
Republicans: the 1%, many not paying a fair share of taxes
Democrats: the 47% who pay nothing in taxes
Libertarians: the 52% who do most of the work and have been paying more than their fair share.
Not according to Jeff, above. According to Jeff they want to work more.
“L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.”
Eh.
The “47% who pay no taxes” actually pay more taxes (in terms of percentage of income) than the others do. Just not federal income taxes.
Good point. Anyone who buys anything in the US pays tax even if not directly.
Besides, the poor are especially taxed by the banking system whose theft of purchasing power falls disproportionaly on them.
…And the 52%, as your post amply demonstrates, continue to be duped by the 1% (who invent crap like libertarianism) that they (the 1%) are their friends and the 47% their enemies, and everyone (except the 1%, shhh!) loses.
Re the “Wedge Issue” of immigration…as though it were some chimera created out of thin air and emotion…
Try telling that to all my friends who work in the trades;
carpenters, plumbers, painters, landscapers, electricians,
dry-wallers etc.
Where once they could demand and got a
liveable wage from contractors and their union, they now
have to “compete” with an endless river of mostly illegal peons from Central America that work for slightly above
minimum wage, do crappy work but are so cheap the redos are part of the race to the bottom package.
The Democrats have abandoned the White Working Class and
they then lament how they have become Fox-listening right wing reactionaries. Granted the Republicans are a fraud for the working class as well but the Democratic Party has driven them right into the Republicans propaganda pit.
And, frankly, there’s not much middle ground here.
The winners are a small group of rentiers who, in the short term, get more and pay less. The losers are the rest of us, with wage earners and salaried technicals bearing the immediate brunt. Very much the zero sum game.
Globalization is more emotional when it’s in your face, but no less true than when it’s confined to the West Coast ports. The Republican solution of bombing Muslims vs the Democratic solution of striking a pose of indifference is no choice. Definitely time for solutions the insiders can’t take seriously.
From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
Nice book, good writing but the same kind of people
that push this book also promote more illegals and open borders.
They help to cause a problem and then semantically
try to excuse the reaction to the fruits of their labors
as someone else’s plot. Just like my original commentary
on the hypocrisy of “wedge issues”.
How sad that what Zinn says is even more the case now than it was when he wrote it.
Why don’t you American’s forego elections all together and just allow the Kleptocracy to just get on with it.
As in the UK, you have no ‘real choice’ under the present system, and thus to call it a democracy seems absurd – given one requires more than one point of view/ opinion if a democracy is to exists.
Now, given Obama the coconut has done all the bidding his rich Republican and Democratic Masters have asked for – including the unthinkable of even outdoing Bush Jrn in removing Liberties, its seems absurd to waste more than US$ 1 billion on this nonsense.
About the only person offering real change, but of the wrong kind in my opinion, is Ron Paul, and to put it bluntly, he’s a lunatic, an honest lunatic, but lunatic nonetheless.
So, stop the charade, don’t have Primaries, and don’t have a Presidential election, the Kleptocracy’s man is already in place and will do his Masters bidding until his two terms is exhausted.
I can write much the same about the state of Politics in the UK, so please do not think I’m being rather anti-American, quite the reverse, one is just telling it as it actually is!!!!
Sad…
But probably true. We need to go through the motions for two reasons, however. (1) to keep the machinery of representative democracy from totally grinding to a halt- we will need it one day, and (2) so that the current generation can put their hears and souls into this election and come out disillusioned. Kind-of a first step in kicking a drug habit- getting over the denial.
I’m pretty sure many of the enthusiastic Obama crowd, who were so happy 4 years ago to attend fundraising concerts and plaster the walls with alternating “Hope” and “Change” posters, pretty sure a lot of these guys are waking up to reality- that Obama is just another face for the same old unjust wealth-extracting machine.
Not sure what it would take to “wake up” republican voters, since they’ve chewed on probably even more vicious lies than the Democrats, but one day . . . Reality will catch up.
That is when it would be nice to still have that machinery of representative democracy around…
The wake up to reality call comes one family or one person at a time: the job loss, the medical emergency that can’t or won’t be covered by insurance, the unwanted pregnancy …
Election day would be a wonderful day for another event; the special day for people to transfer their money from banks to credit unions. Isn’t that a wonderful way to vote?
I am plain sick of Reps vs Dems, Left vs Right, Lib vs Cons and Blue vs red among all the commentaries and blogs.
The fact is both parties are controlled by CORPORATOCRACY which also controls 90 of MSM. Add to this rampant functional illiteracy, poorly informed electorate with ‘rational ignorance’ is at the mercy of demagogues promising heaven and free lunch.
Our leaders are reflection of the society who voted FOR them. We have seen the enemy. Look in the mirror!
We have seen the enemy. Look in the mirror! Don’t GS me please!
Why? Is there a banker behind me?
There is a BANKSTER behind every ACTION of the Govt/regulators/lawmakers in this country ever since March 2009!
Is your/Banker’s mission: Privatize the profit and socialize the DEBT? Then the answer for your question is YES!
Yes, there is a banker behind you but he doesn’t cast a reflection…
That is what Pogo said.
I believe one of th Pogo charactors said ” We have seen the enemy and it is us.”
I Go Pogo!
I just realized how much effect Walt Kelly had on my life. The Pogo comics led me to pay attention to politics (at about the age of 10), and Walt Kelly’s style led me to a higher level of sarcasm.
I think that we must drop, Religion, abortion and the issue of immigration reform from our precess of selecting members of our Government.
Religion is a personal issue not the Governments, Abortion is a medical issue and enforcement of existing immigration laws will do nicely.
Thank You Tom, finally some one that talks about politics with same quality of research and reasoning that is usually to devoted to the strong suit of NC, the capital markets, banking, currency and econ in general. The ridiculous comments on politics here will take forever to inform with enough substance to make a difference. Politics is just as important a field to understand as economics, just as difficult. It is important to understand that the social order did not just fall out the sky like rain, or come off an assembly line in Detroit. Organized power of networks of individuals produced the nations we inhabit today, and how they are perpetuated, administered and changed is a complex task of knowledge, not reduced to to vulgar phrases of fascism, corruption or the way of all flesh. Our society functions in accordance with real causes that can be accounted for as well as the balance sheets of banks and the current accounts of nations.
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” HL Mencken
His cynicism re: “the booboisie” has been raised to an axiom.
Unfortunately, “the booboisie” votes reliably Republican, and why do you think a Santorum, Backmann, Perry, et al, remain “serious” candidates
Personally as an outsider I look at the political agendas for most of the republican party and feel very dissappointed (I was going to put sick, but decided that would be inflammatory). There are very little resemblances to conservative politics outside the US with perhaps a few exceptions like Iran. There again you can say pretty much the same for the Democrat party and socialist parties outside the US with perhaps a few exception like Russia.
It appears that each party has to have policies that are aligned with core voters, even though those policies are repugnant to a large part of the rest of the voters. You end up with the vast majority of voters not really liking either set of policies and yet the system is rigged so that new politics can not take off.
Here is a link to a quick roundup of the differences in the republican candidates as seen from outside the US.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/3194/what-s-the-difference-between-mitt-romney-rick-santorum-and-ron-paul-foreign-policy
The linked to picture in the article of syrians asking for the return of Bush should be triggering some very hard questions in US politics.
You have forgotten the protection of the cultural and economic interests of middle/older aged working/middle class women (“soccer moms” is one segment).
The middle/older aged working/middle class women are in general very conservative, with a strong preference for law and order, terrified of “bad people” (those with a dark skin, foreigners, …) for the protection of rentier interests, and for lower wages and lower property taxes.
The main ways in which “feminist” and Republican sponsor interests are aligned or compatible:
– Enacting legal privileges for women, such as extremely favourable divorce laws, costs no tax money, because it merely reallocates resources and rights between males and females. It is very easy to win female votes by supporting ever tougher ant-male laws (and both parties compete in different ways for that), by putting them under the “protecting the family” label.
– Enacting legal privileges for women also reduces taxes if it means making males connected to them pay directly for their support instead of general taxation; for every strapping young buck that has to keep paying for the support of a welfare queen taxes on the wealthy can be lower. This includes Republican attempts to make initiation of divorce a felony (for men) in some cases.
– Women also greatly favour ever harsher sentencing and imprisonment policies as these affect almost only males, delighting other conservatives and the prison-industrial complex. It is also easy to win female votes by reducing the probability and extent of penalties for crimes committed (prevalently) by females like child abuse and domestic violence, and supporting even the practical decriminalization even of extreme violence by women again men. All these criminal law changes cost nothing in new taxes.
– Because of divorce settlements and the longer life of women, most property (shares, pensions, housing) in the USA is owned by rentier women (but not all women are rentiers). Their interests are to support tax-free capital gains friendly policies, lower taxes on property, and other rentier friendly policies, to be paid with higher fees and taxes on working males.
– Since many female voters are old rentiers, they tend to vote for policies that minimize low-end wages and favour imports from low-wage countries, to reduce the cost of their lifestyles.
– Since female voters tend to live longer, most of Medicare spending goes to female voters, who strongly support it, to the delight of the Republican sponsors in the medical industry.
– Since female voters tend to live longer, a majority of OASDI payouts goes to female voters (at least the “OAS” parts), and since men tend to work for more year, most of the cost is borne by males. Probably this is the only major point on which female voters’ interests and those of Republicans are not aligned, as Republicans irrationally hate OASDI as a New Deal totem.
It is not just middle or upper class “soccer moms”, but also working and middle females close to retirement. I think that after the Southern Strategy, the Republicans (and the Tories in the UK) are keenly pursuing the Authoritarian Matron strategy. Democrats have their own female constituencies, but they tend to be younger single women more than married, divorced or widowed older ones.
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Rick has had his 15-minutes of national celebrity.
Time to move on. Paul is the real snake in the Rabidly Right wood-pile.