Over at New York Mag, Jonathan Chait has an unfortunately challenging and well-argued piece, strongly suggesting that my cozy analysis of a Republican Party sliding inexorably into ever-increasing disarray is not, you know, accurate.1 Chait sees Trump, or, rather, Trumpism, as similar to one of those Alien critters that first infects you and then sort of digests you and turns you into itself, except even more ugly. And is Hillary Clinton really up to filling Sigourney Weaver’s space boots? One can wonder.
To be fair, Chait’s prose is somewhat less hysterical than mine, but he also provides a particularly juicy “inside” quote from Mitt Romney henchman and American Enterprise Institute visiting “scholar” (uh-huh) Ed Conard who explained to the brethren the task before them: “So the question is, how do we build a coalition with displaced workers like we did with the religious right after Roe v. Wade and which we used to lower the marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent … and that leaves us in control, us being advocates of free enterprise, in control of the coalition? The answer, I believe, is tough, and perhaps even odious, compromises”—the kind of compromises that, one guesses, are right up Ed’s alley.
Jon buys strongly into the notion that Paul Ryan’s Republican Party can and will co-exist and eventually merge with Donald’s Trumpery. I’m not so sure. Ed Conard Republicans could indulge the religious right’s hatred of Roe v. Wade in large part because they weren’t worried about their wives, mistresses, and daughters lacking access to, you know, first-rate medical care. But the simple fact is that Ryan’s Wall Street-friendly budget package caters neither to the passions nor the needs of the Republican “masses”. Republican voters aren’t going to benefit from the elimination of capital gains and estate taxes. They hate both liberalized immigration laws and, worst of all, free trade. They want entitlement “reform” to leave both Social Security and Medicare untouched, which is to say, they don’t want entitlement reform. Republican voters support increased defense spending in principle, until it starts to crowd out domestic spending. They support cuts in domestic spending until those cuts are actually made. Ryan can achieve Republican unity on his package only by not enacting it.
It’s true that Wall Street will go a long way to avoid becoming a captive of the Democratic Party—business leaders stayed largely aloof when House Republicans tried to force a default on the federal debt following the 2010 congressional election, for example—but Trumpism flies so directly in the face of global capitalism that I like to think that the Ed Conards of the world will find that the “odious compromises” they’ll be offering the fellows at the Club just a little too odious for the taking.
So is the future bright? Hell no! Thanks to the massive cowardice of FBI Director James Comey, the dreams of a Democratic sweep, never exactly bright, are flickering. And Trump or no Trump, the “crazy Republican Party,” which basically defines itself by its hatred for the Democratic Party, still lives.
Afterwords
Chait, a libertarian-hater, sees in the Ayn Rand-readin’ Paul Ryan the definition of the right-wing conservatism, which he sees as eating up Eisenhower Republicanism, and it’s very true that libertarian crank/fruitcake/folk hero Murray Rothbard eagerly played the white nativist card while writing the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report back in the day.2 However, I see Ryan as Wall Street’s servant, and I see the white nativism of the Trump-Right, Alt-Right new-style Republican Party as anathema to Wall Street’s vision of a Davos world. Of course, there’s also the chance that all Wall Street really cares about is lower taxes, and to hell with everything, and everyone, else. There’s that possibility to consider as well.
