Should-Read: The point, though, of being a party of cultural grievance-mongers catering to symbolic and social recognition ethno-sectarian demands is that one can also, on the side as it were, enrich plutocrats. As Lyndon Johnson said in Bill Moyers's hearing: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you..." This has been going on since the 1890s... hell, the 1870s... hell, the 1810s. It used to be the business model of the Royalist wing of the Southern Democratic Party. Now it is the business model of the Republican Party. The interesting thing is that they do not seem able to execute it very well: Matthew Yglesias: Republicans should admit to themselves they mostly don’t want big change: "It’s a cranky old person party, not a policy visionary party...
...Republicans are mostly a party of cultural grievance-mongers, not ambitious legislators. That’s why Donald Trump is their president. That’s why they don’t seem to notice or care that Paul Ryan is a total fraud. They’d be a lot happier if they just owned it. At the end of the day, mostly adhering the policy status quo while catering to the symbolic and social recognition demands of the ethno-sectarian majority is a perfectly plausible approach to the problems of party politics. One could even call it conservatism....
...The Dodd-Frank Model: Republicans spent five or six years swearing up and down to anyone who listened that the post-crisis financial regulation law Democrats passed was strangling the economy... promised over and over again to repeal it... [and] usher in some unspecified new utopia in which bailouts would never happen and the grand awesomeness of the free market would fix everything. After the election, there were even a couple of months’ worth of talking about maybe trying to find a way to actually do that stuff.... But then... they just quietly gave up.... The economy is not, in fact, being strangled by Dodd-Frank, so Republicans have stopped pretending that it’s being strangled by Dodd-Frank....
Rather than repeatedly beating their heads against the wall over this problem, they just quietly let it drop.... And the GOP has worked itself into a similarly happy place on Medicare, abandoning Paul Ryan’s fanatical vision of privatizing.... For a party whose electoral base is now cranky old white people who are mad about the kids these days, it’s a perfectly reasonable solution. And the sooner Republicans own up to it, the happier everyone will be.
