Longtime TPM Reader JB explains what I left out in my post this morning about the post-2012 GOP …
One thing you left out of your commentary on the post-election GOP is what hasn’t changed. More specifically, what neither the party establishment or the Tea Party types ever even thought of changing.
This is the Republican position on taxation and government, respectively. The entire party is united against anything that might raise taxes on the people most likely to give money to Republican campaigns and the Party campaign infrastructure. The entire party is likewise united in the view that government agencies (other than the military and intelligence agencies) are staffed by people who are lazy, inefficient, possibly corrupt, and doing jobs that taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for. Finally, the consensus that regulation of interests that could potentially help fund the GOP’s campaign infrastructure is bad at all times is unchallenged within the party.
You can call these beliefs an expression of ideology if you wish; I think of them more as the internalization of campaign slogans proven effective in elections held between 20 and 30 years ago, and to some extent as the reflection of tangible policy objectives pursued by organized interests. They represented official Bush administration policy, especially with regard to taxes. After that administration presided over years of economic stagnation followed by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, there was, and is, no reflection within the party about these beliefs representing the core of what the GOP should stand for.
What this does is permit Republicans in public life leeway to be for only two things. One is, “nothing”; a public platform consisting only of attacks on the Obama administration, liberals, and the media can still win support among Republicans. The other thing Republicans can be for is magic: tax cuts that will reduce the deficit, spending cuts that will create jobs, deregulation that will do only good and won’t lead to anyone being taken advantage of.
This is not a Tea Party thing. It was a phenomenon fully formed within the Bush administration, and hasn’t changed in any fundamental way since. Affluent liberals are, I think, too prone to emphasize social conservative extremism on issues, like gay marriage and access to contraception, most important to affluent liberals. I’m not saying these issues aren’t important to anyone (they are, admittedly, less important to me) — but many more people’s lives, today and in the future, are negatively impacted by the sequester; by the steady attrition over many years of the civilian government workforce in key agencies; and by deficit reduction ruling out higher revenues in favor of cuts in benefits.
This is the straitjacket Republicans have made for themselves. I don’t really think social conservatism is a loser, politically — apart from the immigration issue, one of the very few on which a large part of the GOP dissents from Bush administration thinking. It will be a loser, though, if socially conservative positions are the only things Republicans can run on, the only things they can be for that were not inherited entirely from Bush. Right now, that’s the case.
