The GOP and the Threat to American Democracy

For decades Americans have viewed our political parties as representing the center-right or the center-left. Thus, every election was viewed as a competition which would move the dial a little to the Left or to the Right. But this is a very simple-minded perspective which ignores several important basic truths about the two parties.  In 2015, two political scientists, Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, published a book that, according to Ezra Klein, “[will] change how you think about American politics…Grossmann and Hopkins’ research decisively shows that the two parties are not the same-and once you understand the ways in which they’re different, American politics begins to make a lot more sense.”

What are the differences?  In the authors’ words, “Scholars commonly assume that the American left and right are configured as mirror images to each other, but in fact the two sides exhibit important and underappreciated differences. We argue that the Republican Party is the agent of an ideological movement, while the Democratic Party is best understood as a coalition of social groups. Left-leaning constituencies primarily seek concrete government action from their allies in office, while right-of-center activists instead prize doctrinal purity.” This difference is encapsulated in the 2013 quote from John Boehner, Republican Speaker of the House, who, when asked about the historically low number of bills passed under his tenure, replied, “Most Americans think we have too many laws. What they want us to do is repeal more of those. So, I reject the premise to the question.”

The Republican Party tends to be ideological and its primary goal is “purity,” as exemplified by the Tea Party Movement. The Democratic Party is generally transactional, and its goal is to enact a liberal agenda. Democrats seek to find public sector solutions to policy issues; Republicans seek the more general goal of limiting the size and reach of government. By its very nature, this is an unequal contest, one that Republicans are certain to lose. If winning means thwarting change, than in a rapidly changing culture standing in the way of change is a Sisyphean challenge.

Grossman and Hopkins argue, “Because the Democratic Party is composed of a coalition of social groups making specific programmatic demands on government, Democratic officeholders seek to initiate large-scale legislative and administrative action to address a catalog of social problems in order to simultaneously appease this diverse set of interests and appeal to a larger majority of the mass public. Democrats tend to divide public policy into issue areas, often associated with specific party constituencies, and enlist experts to develop potential solutions, aiming for a high rate of productivity and policy change—thus fulfilling the ideal-typical model of policymaking.”

Figure 1 presents the results of a study on the differences in conceptualization between Republicans and Democrats. Even as early as 1968, the difference between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who valued “group benefits” (solid line) and difference between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who valued ideological purity (dashed line) was already manifest, peaking during the Reagan Administration.

What this means is that Democrats seek policy changes that result in benefits for their constituencies, while Republicans are content with thwarting such changes and are happy with gridlock. Figure 3 shows how important the various interest groups are to Democrats and Republicans. This is measured by the density of their network. The Republicans have fewer, but more potent, interest groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the National Right to Life Association. For the most part these interest groups tend to want to block legislation rather than support new legislation.

Thus, figure 4 (below), which depicts the policy changes over the 1945-2004 period, should not be surprising. In the 1960s the Democrats, under the leadership of President Johnson, enacted sweeping legislation in Civil Rights (the 1964 Civil rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act), health (Medicare in 1965 and Medicaid the next year), poverty (1964 Economic Opportunity Act), education (1964 Elementary and Secondary Act and the 1965 Higher education Act), as well as legislation to enhance consumer protection and to advance the arts.

But the 1960s represented the high-water mark in legislative achievements. From what was said above, we should not be surprised that Republican Administrations under Presidents Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and G. W. Bush were much less interested in enacting legislation to promote the benefits of specific interest groups. A significant environmental law (the Clean Air and Water Act) was passed under President Nixon in 1970, and a welfare reform act was passed in 1996 under President Clinton. Since 2000, two significant pieces of legislation were passed: No Child Left Behind in 2002 under G.W, Bush and the Affordable Care Act in 2010 under president Obama.

The Legacy of the Tea Party.  The current Republican Party has its origins in the Tea Party Movement which reached prominence in 2009, the first year of the Obama Administration. The Tea Party exemplified what we described above: an ideological agenda to limit or reduce the size of government. It has been marked by initiatives to repeal Obamacare, reduce taxes, and demand a balanced budget. (The fact that the Tea Party movement was bankrolled by oil and gas interests doesn’t change the analysis).    

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Speaker of the House John  Boehner                   Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

Geoffrey Kabaservice writes, “Periodic upwellings of grass-roots anger and enthusiasm have energized the conservative movement for decades. The first outbreak dates to the “America First” isolationist and nativist groundswell of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare followed in the early ’50s. Next came the insurgency around Sen. Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in 1964 and the similar movement around Ronald Reagan’s presidential candidacies in 1976 and 1980. Then there was the surge that won a Republican House majority in 1994 — and made Newt Gingrich speaker — and, finally, the Tea Party.”

He goes on to write that the Tea Party was notable for its “anti-institutionalism and its breaking of norms.”  By its very nature, by its opposition to governing, the wave of the Tea Party’s influence in Congress broke on the rocks of actual governing; governing was too hard and too mundane for zealots. Outside of government, the Tea Party continued as a strong movement (eventually as Trumpism), online and in the conservative media.  However, it morphed from its small government origins to champion “birtherism,” and “white identity,” correctly identifying the real grievances of the white working class.

Kabaservice goes on to write, “Trump himself was well aware of the continuity between the tea party movement and his own. ‘Those people are still there. They haven’t changed their views,’ he told reporter Tim Alberta. ‘The Tea Party still exists — except now it’s called Make America Great Again.’ Trump and Republicans in Congress could have chosen to pursue policies that would have improved the lives of their supporters. But the Tea Party’s contempt for policymaking carried over into the Trump administration; the GOP couldn’t even be bothered to assemble a platform at its 2020 convention.

Thus, we have a Republican Party that is uninterested in governing, that sees its main role as capturing the judicial system, undermining Democrats’ reforms, and creating gridlock. Even before Trump, Mitch McConnell, in 2010, said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Since then, the political divide in America has become a chasm, and the Republicans, even without Trump, have been successful at achieving their goals.

According to Zack Beauchamp, “Over the past decade and a half, Republicans have shown disdain for procedural fairness and a willingness to put the pursuit of power over democratic principles. They have implemented measures that make it harder for racial minorities to vote, render votes from Democratic-leaning constituencies irrelevant, and relentlessly blocked Democratic efforts to conduct normal functions of government.”

As a result, the Republican Party is viewed by political scientists around the world as an extreme outlier, compared to other conservative parties in Western democracies. The figure below plots political parties on whether they favor minority rights (vertical axis) and respect liberal democratic principles (horizontal axis). The red dot in the Northeast quadrant represents the GOP, while the red dot in the Southwest quadrant represents the Democratic Party.  

“Experts on comparative politics say the GOP is an extremist outlier, no longer belonging in the same conversation with “normal” right-wing parties like Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Instead, it more closely resembles more extreme right parties — like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey — that have actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.”

Many observers believe that any effort to fix American politics needs to be clear-eyed on this point: “The Republican Party is so beyond what’s normal in a healthy democracy that some kind of radical pro-democracy reform is required — be it ending the filibuster, court-packing, DC and Puerto Rico statehood, a new Voting Rights Act, or all of above — to try and turn things around.  “The Republicans pose too much of an authoritarian threat,” Harvard’s Levitsky says, “to simply go on with business as usual.”