Today in the Monkey Cage, Jeffrey Jenkins & Boris Heersink invoke John Aldrich (Why Parties? Chicago UP, 1995) to demonstrate a phenomenon perhaps in need of explanation: how unusual (& risky) it is for Republican leaders to actually go against party by rejecting the candidate their own voters & rules have selected to be their presidential nominee.
Taking their observation to the next level--explanation--leads first through the common wisdom that Republican leaders see the short-term costs of threatening party unity as less than the medium-term costs of tightening their and their party's association with someone as terrible as Trump. Of course, the Republican leaders could be wrong, since it might weaken or break apart the party in the long-term. But a debate about the accuracy of their estimates according to this superficial-level explanation of why this is happening misses another direction the argument could take.
Indeee, a more illuminating explanation emerges from a deeper consideration of Aldrich, the meaning of "political parties" as entities, and the contemporary Republican party
Jenkins & Heersink wisely follow Aldrich in identifying parties as "long coalitions," constituted to bind together legislative voting blocs together and secure the votes of not just those who really want any given policy, but a few others, as well, enough to win policy changes; while every given policy change may displease a small fraction of the party members, it will be a different fraction each time, and most members will get mostly the policy changes they want over time--and far more frequently than if each member were alone, without a stable "long coalition."
But this view of parties depends on the assumption that a) the party's leaders & elected officials actually want the government to do a set of things it's not currently doing, and thus change policy to enact that, and b) want a coherent-enough set of things that they can encapsulate it what Anthony Downs (An Economic Theory of Democracy, Harper, 1957) would call an "ideology." We today would probably just call it a party program, or set of ideals.
But the Republican party today seems united not by what they want the government to do, but only what they want it not to do, which seems to be almost everything. For example, the party doesn't even seem to want the government to enforce the very tax laws that enable it collect the revenue to fund its activities. Everything the Republican party desires seems to involve wanting the government to reduce or eliminate its activities, with regard to enforcing equality, maintaining infrastructure, promoting education, managing the macroeconomy, providing health care, health insurance, and ensuring retirement income, guaranteeing the rights of minority communities to full participation in society.
This amounts to an easy coalition to hold together in the long run, since it wants to do nothing, even with the ill-feelings that may come from division over the party's presidential nominee. Republican leaders may be quite right that they will pay little cost in the next (Democratic) presidential term's legislative & electoral battles for not supporting Donald Trump: who among them would abandon their party's only universally shared tenet of "let's let nothing happen" in order to actually participate in something happening? Certainly not anything that's likely to happen under a Democratic president. Voters & gerrymandering have locked in the electoral benefit of this thinnest of ideological glue.
Anthony Downs defined a political party as an organization that seeks "to control the governing apparatus by legal means," specifically the means of "duly constituted elections." But the Republican party, it seems, would prefer that apparatus not to exist at all, rather than try to control it.
It's true that actually undoing government altogether, especially eliminating entitlement-based programs or Federal taxation, would actually require a set of positive legislation to be passed (& signed), rather than just blocking policy enactment.
But herein lies the open secret of the Republican party's shared goal (too thin to be called an "ideology"): they don't seem to very strongly desire even those claimed reductions in government to come about--they're happy to simply keep the status quo, with some slow erosion. This stance of talking a big talk, but actually just keeping government as it is (or slightly lesser) seems to work for the individual electoral goals of Republicans at every level, except the presidency.
And we can see that the Republican party leadership doesn't seem to really want to control the presidency. If it did, it would, as a collective group, have gotten involved in presidential politics (in this or other cycles) by prodding stronger candidates to run, or picking one of the strongest candidates it had and really working for that candidate from the beginning. (The Democratic party leadership, by contrast, has been quite hands-on about presidential races for the last several cycles.)
So Republican party leaders are indeed, as Jenkins & Heersink claim, acting contrary to the foundational logic of political parties. This could weaken the party, or presage its breaking up (as happened to its predecessor, the Whig Party, a century and a half ago).
Or, it could indicate that the Republican party is simply no longer a "normal" political party, according to classical definitions.
It's instead a kind of mutant entity that calls itself a party, but has no programmatic goals or true desire to control the governing apparatus (akin to the party-like entities that Schattchneider, 1942, calls "pressure groups" or "minor parties," but which don't really act like parties).
Such entities are common, and frequently call themselves "parties," even as the raisons d'être that hold them together are something else, like self-enrichment, office-holding for the sake of immunity from prosecution, serving a particular client or client-class, or something else that takes priority over gaining control of the government by means of duly constituted elections.
If this is true, the Republican party finds itself in the company of Brazil's PMDB, Vladimir Putin's United Russia, and Chinese Communist Party, all of which prioritize other goals than what democratic political parties are all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment