Douthat: What’s the matter with Republicans?
Thirteen years ago, in the midst of a different Republican administration, the liberal book of the moment was Thomas Frank's “What's the Matter With Kansas?” In answering his title's question, Frank argued that hardworking heartland Americans were being duped by a Republican Party that whipped up culture-war frenzy to disguise its plutocratic aims. Middle-class and working-class Republican voters, he insisted, were voting against their own economic self-interest and getting worse than nothing in return.
At the time, Frank's analysis had two flaws. First, it minimized the importance of social issues, both their inherent moral stakes and their role in shaping the ecology of everyday life, of work and family and community. You don't have to be a dupe to be a “values voter” of one sort or another: Whether you live in Topeka or Manhattan, you just have to believe that some moral questions are more important than where to set the top tax rate.
Second, Frank minimized the extent to which Republicans, in the Bush era and before, did make a concerted effort to deliver for the middle class. The modern GOP was certainly solicitous of the interests of wealthy donors and corporations and always eager for an upper-bracket tax cut. But as Henry Olsen points out in his recent book “The Working Class Republican,” Ronald Reagan also accepted the New Deal settlement and sought to balance his donor base's interests with his voters' pocketbook concerns - and George W. Bush did likewise.
Yes, the Republican in the White House while Frank was writing his jeremiad was the president of dividend tax cuts and a lower top rate. But Bush was also the president of Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, a big homeownership push and a larger child tax credit and lower rates for almost everyone, not just the upper class.
So Frank was wrong … or maybe he was prescient. Because he was writing just before Bush won re-election to a second term without a clear middle-class agenda, which led to the unpopular pushes for Social Security reform and an immigration amnesty and to the collapse of Bush's political position. Then after Obama's election the GOP lurched away from the middle class in a more stark way than it ever did under Reagan or Bush or the Newt Gingrich speakership, embracing theories about how the working class was actually undertaxed, rallying around tax plans that seemed to threaten middle-class tax increases and promoting an Ayn Randian vision in which heroic entrepreneurs were the only economic actor worth defending.
The success of Donald Trump's populist candidacy seemed like a partial repudiation of this Randian turn, and a possible return to the middle-class-focused politics that had made Reagan and Bush successful - albeit in a more aggressively nationalist and mercantilist form. But as president, Trump has essentially become the Frankian caricature in full, draping the rhetoric of populism over an agenda that so far offers little or nothing to the middle class, making appeals to the religious right that are notable in their cynicism, and rallying his base through culture-war controversies distinguished mostly by their ginned-up phoniness.
So “What's the Matter With Kansas?” was a poor guide to the party of Reagan and George W. Bush, but thus far it is a very useful guide to the Trump administration. And two possible takeaways from this shift seem worth considering.
The first is that, for all its failures, not everything about the Bush era was disastrous, and there were ways in which the Bush White House had a clearer sense of what conservatism should offer to the common man than any of its would-be successors have come up with since.
This doesn't excuse the disaster of Iraq or the various problems with Bush's domestic agenda, including the way that one of his middle-class-friendly policies, the push for homeownership, contributed to the housing bubble and the crash. But it is still a mistake for the right to dismiss the Bush agenda as merely “a failure and a fraud,” as my friend Peter Suderman did recently in the New York Times, and also a mistake for liberals to suggest that Trump is just returning to the Bush playbook, as New York magazine's Jonathan Chait did in a recent piece.
Because he's not really returning to it; indeed, as things stand in key respects Trump would benefit from imitating Bush. His tax plan offers much less to working Americans than did the Bush tax cuts. His larger agenda is much less thought-through than what Bush attempted in his first term. And if Trump wants to make his populism something more than just a con, he probably has to start with an issue - the child tax credit - that was part of both the Bush agenda and the Contract With America.
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