Meet the New Republican Party; (Mostly) Same as the Old Republican Party
Over the last several months, I have repeatedly encountered news stories reporting on the ostensible irony that some policy that the Trump administration is pursuing through executive action or in Congress will hurt the mostly white rural and working poor Americans who voted for him in large numbers. Here are some recent examples.
* Cuts to the National Weather Service and FEMA leave rural communities more vulnerable to natural disasters and may have already played a role with respect to preparedness and the response to the west Texas floods.
* Cuts to Medicaid will have their greatest impact on people who qualified for expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, who are disproportionately working class. Those same cuts will be devastating for rural hospitals, many of which will close, leaving people in deep-red counties without access to emergency health care and in many instances without access to any health care.
* Cuts to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting will be felt most acutely by stations providing service to rural communities, as those stations rely on CPB money for a much higher percentage of their funding than do stations that serve major urban areas. Those rural stations mostly carry vital local news, a service to the community in normal times and a potentially lifesaving necessity during emergencies. Many of these stations will either need to cut back their service drastically or close completely.
* Tariffs on imported steel and car parts will raise the cost of American manufacturing, harming those people in the rust belt who voted for Trump because they believed he would bring back manufacturing jobs; meanwhile, targeted retaliatory tariffs imposed by trading partners land hardest on farmers, another Trump constituency.
No doubt there are many more examples of this phenomenon, but by now one would have hoped that the media covering them would have caught onto the fact that these are not man-bites-dog stories; they are standard operating procedure.
Nor is this a new phenomenon. It has been over twenty years since the publication of the first edition of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, in which he described what was already then a longstanding practice by which Republican politicians use social wedge issues (like abortion, race, and gender/sex) to appeal to social conservatives, but once in office wield their power to deliver tax cuts to the wealthy and deregulation to industry; those economic policies work to the detriment of the social conservative voters who support Republicans. To be sure, Frank has his critics, and perhaps he overlooked some nuances, but no one paying any attention can deny that he described the basic bargain accurately.
One thing that has changed since Frank's book was originally published is that Republicans have delivered on the social issues. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, read the militia clause out of the Second Amendment, and eliminated race-based affirmative action. Meanwhile, both the Trump administration and its allies have gone after sexual minorities--especially transgender persons--very hard. The picture used to be that Republicans ran on social issues but then only served the interests of the well-to-do. Now we can say that they're acting on both elements of their agenda.
However, there is still a puzzle--something the matter with the salt-of-the-Earth Kansans and other rural and working class voters who support Republicans: they don't appear to just swallow the Republicans' regressive economic policies as the cost of action on their social issue agenda; rather, they don't seem even to realize, or if they do realize they don't seem to be upset by the fact, that the economic policies that Republicans enact harm rural and working class voters. Some working-class social conservatives could rationally conclude that the economic policies that hurt them are a price worth paying for a winning political coalition that can then deliver on the social issues they care about more than their economic well being. That would be a rational calculation. But, unless I'm missing something, I don't see a whole lot of people making it.
Rather, what we tend to see is Republican/conservative support for Republican policies across the board. That was already true before Trump--when people who would have benefited from redistributionist policies were anti-communists and thus susceptible to the message that redistribution was socialist and thus the road to the gulag--and it remains true today.
But wait. Hasn’t that changed under Trump? Trumpism is not traditional conservative politics, right? Well, yes and no. Certainly the utter contempt for and attempted destruction of the institutions of democracy is new, but that doesn't really bear on the relation between social policy and economic policy. In other ways--especially the tax cuts to benefit the wealthy and the massive deregulation--Trump is the fulfillment of traditional Republican aspirations.
Apart from style, Trump differs on policy from traditional Republicans in at least three ways. First, with respect to foreign policy, he views the world in transactional terms and devalues traditional alliances. Trump brings his distinctive brand of bullying and crassness to this approach, but while he is not the internationalist that any of his Republican predecessors since WWII was, Trump's embrace of something like isolationism is hardly novel. There has long been an isolationist branch of American conservatism, especially on the far right. And in any event, foreign policy per se doesn't bear on the social-versus-economic policy question. Accordingly, at least with respect to today’s topic, I discount foreign policy as an area where Trump and Trumpism are something new.
The other two main ways in which Trump differs from other Republicans are more substantive and important for our present inquiry.
Second, Trump's fondness for tariffs marks a break with traditional conservatism, which favored free trade. Trump believes tariffs are a kind of Swiss Army knife to be used to further any foreign policy objective, but his core belief in them is protectionist, which is something new for Republicans. How is that playing?
Based on the coverage I've seen, small business owners--a traditional Republican constituency--are worried about the tariffs because of their impact on their businesses, while those rust belt workers who voted for Trump remain supportive. Others, like farmers, who opposed tariffs but voted for Trump anyway, seem to be in the familiar position of Kansans and their ilk: trying to rationalize an economic policy that harms them coming from someone they supported for cultural reasons. If American politics since Reagan is any guide, I'm betting they'll continue to rationalize up to and perhaps past the point of having to declare bankruptcy.
That brings us to the third way in which Trump is distinctive: his aggressively anti-immigrant policies. Republican presidents were generally pro-immigration or at least not interested in aggressively targeting undocumented immigrants because they knew that businesses saw such persons as a source of cheap labor by people who would be too scared to take advantage of laws protecting workers against exploitation and workplace hazards.
To my mind, the Trump anti-immigrant policy is the most insidiously clever aspect of Trumpism because of how it merges economic and social conservatism. Many conservative voters believe--falsely but fervently--that undocumented immigrants and even some legal immigrants are bad for the economy because they take jobs away from Americans. Meanwhile, by playing on xenophobia and racism, Trump leverages anti-immigrant sentiment as a social issue. Cracking down on undocumented immigrants thus leads Trump supporters to feel their social issue preferences aligned with what they (mistakenly) perceive to be their economic interests.
In light of the inherent power of anti-immigration policy to unite the Republican social and economic policy agendas and thus reduce the cognitive dissonance that any of Frank's more astute Kansans might otherwise be feeling, it really is a testament to the viciousness of the Trump/Stephen Miller/Kristi Noem policies that immigration policy is now one of Trump's greatest political weaknesses. Even so, 85% of Republicans support Trump's "handling of immigration." In short, there's still something very much the matter with Kansas--and the rest of America.
-- Michael C. Dorf