Could the GOP become the anti-corporate party?
John Carney touches briefly on an idea that’s been gnawing at me the last few weeks: the brewing anti-corporate sentiment on the right. For a long time now, the Republican party has been the party of business, but I’m not sure that’s bound to last forever. In fact, I wonder if the right won’t revive itself to some significant extent on a tide of anti-corporate sentiment. Sounds nuts, right? Permit me to try to sketch out this (admittedly half-baked) idea.
Right now, the GOP coalition is, at the minimum, very fragile (for some astute discussion on this, see this BHtv discussion between Matt Welch and Ramesh Ponnuru). And, in general, the right has been less than forthcoming with new policy ideas or wholly new messaging, especially on domestic policy, a handful of exceptions like Ramesh, Ross, and Reihan notwithstanding. I think it’s entirely possible we’ll see some sort of implosion on the right following this year’s election. If this happens, some restructuring will be in order. Where does the party, and the conservative coalition to which it’s long been attached, go from there?
Well, one possibility is that the right uses social issues and national defense not as wedge issues but as ways of gaining the trust of the middle class, and then learns how to govern on the domestic front in a way that’s roughly acceptable to the middle and lower-middle class. Libertarians won’t like this much, and those on the far left will of course be frustrated, but there’s at least a potential for a coalition there.
On the other hand, what if the GOP fumbles around for a while, fails to develop a coherent message, continues to shout “Reagan!” in place of proposing policy, fails to find fresh political talent, and loses a series of elections, to the point where many begin to predict permanent minority status? Meanwhile, the Democrats spend the next decade or so getting used to power in Washington. A lot of their agenda involves finding new ways to regulate various industries. As this happens, industry, looking for influence, naturally begins to fund Democrats and Democratic lobbyists more heavily (corporate donations are already shifting away from the GOP), and rent-seeking becomes even more prevalent on the Hill. It won’t be long before Democrats, regulators, and the lobbying world have a very cozy relationship.
This opens up the opportunity for the right to exploit the anti-corporate outrage in middle America — outrage we can already see boiling up in the crusades against earmarks (handouts to donors and corporate interests), against CEO pay, against hedge fund tax rates and oil company profits. But instead of running the traditional anti-corporate campaigns, which mainly focus on taxing and regulating big-business, the right runs against the way liberal politicians have gotten into bed with corporations. It’s against the Washington favor-racket, against back-room politics, against collusion between business and government. This pleases libertarians somewhat and, if done properly, keeps low-taxers in the fold.
Of course, some will turn the message into a purely anti-corporate one, but if done with a bit of skill, it uses anger at the way corporations influence the government to fuel a separation of the two rather than additional layers of easily gamed regulation. Maybe you even end up with corporations trying to distinguish themselves as good citizens by publicly refusing to have lobbyists or to take subsidies, regulatory favors, etc — starting, obviously, with Whole Foods, run by the self-proclaimed libertarian, John Mackey.
The result is that you end up with a weird sort of libertarian populism, and maybe, just maybe, you trace it back to the (presumably failed) McCain campaign, arguing that McCain’s honor economics — for low taxes but also deeply set against corporate influence and sleazy government deal-making — is what got it all started. The time is obviously not right for this. But five years down the road, or ten, if the GOP is still struggling and business has largely left them anyway, why wouldn’t they abandon their corporate wing and try something crazy? The sentiment is there for anyone who can figure out how to tap into it.
Are you better off NOW than 14 years ago?
For most average WHITE Americans, the answer is increasingly NO, THEY ARE NOT!
If the GOP wants to be embraced, not merely be the lesser of two evils, to middle American white voters (the biggest demographic still), they are going to have to address the fact that so many of these people have it harder than they did under Reagan, Bush 1, and the first Clinton term……………before policies that benefit corporations only really started to have their effect (insourcing and offshoring, illegal immigration, huge dividend tax cuts for the investment class, etc.). Hillary or Edwards would have beaten McCain, but McCain might still win over the vastly unlikeable (the more we get to know about him) Obama.
As long as the Dems are stupid enough to nominate neo-socialists-AA-zealots like Obama, the GOP will still get to play the lesser of two evils and be able to run establishment politicians to victory, no matter how unenthused the electorate is.
— miles · Jun 10, 10:14 PM · #
Considering the Republican party is controlled almost completely by big business interests (unless you think it’s blue collar workers who really hate capital gains taxes and the estate tax), this sounds like a proposal for a new party, not a new Republican party. And you even have a candidate this year. His name is Ron Paul.
— shaister42 · Jun 10, 10:51 PM · #
Short Answer: No.
Long Answer: That first comment sure is crazy.
— talboito · Jun 10, 10:57 PM · #
You are DREAMING! The republican party without corporate cash goes the way of the Whigs.
— carver · Jun 10, 11:11 PM · #
Hear! Hear!
— Timothy P. Carney · Jun 10, 11:18 PM · #
Miles, just a quick question. If you look at Obama’s positions vs those of Clinton or Edwards, it is fairly obvious that he is to the right (or at least not further left) of both of them on most domestic issues. Why is it that you think Clinton or Edwards would do so much better against McCain? Is there any particular issue that colors your judgment?
— Steven Donegal · Jun 10, 11:32 PM · #
This is really fun. Interesting stuff. It’s obviously predicated on a corruption based implosion of the Democratic Party, which judging from the time frame of 1994-2006 (for the GOP) means they can try it in 2018.
The most obvious way Republicans could harness this anti-corporate energy would be to play up the xenophobia associated with certain angles of the anti-globalization movement – the North American merged economy, etc.
— Mike · Jun 10, 11:45 PM · #
It’s fun to see how Republicans are totally focused on strategies to regain their electoral advantage of the past decade. No mention of what policies would actually be good for the country and building an argument for why that is. Just pure strategizing. Fun, in a sad way.
— tgb1000 · Jun 11, 01:21 AM · #
This idea is so crazy, it just might work!
Actually, it probably won’t work. I just like using that phrase.
— Mark in Houston · Jun 11, 01:35 AM · #
This sounds like the Republican Party circa Teddy Roosevelt.
— lindenen · Jun 11, 02:03 AM · #
Obama, Stephen Donegal, basically pissed off regular whites with Jerimiah T. Wright, and what he said about normal working white people in San Fransico “they cling to their guns, their faith, immerse themselves in church, or whatever”—-(I guess as opposed to joining gangs and selling drugs like other dissaffected groups huh?).
My comment isn’t crazy at all. Its the truth. The GOP has been getting votes simply because the Dems are so profoundly despicable, and everyone knows it. If the Dem party of JFK was still with us, they’d kick the living hell out of Juan McCain, but the Dem party is kook-city full or weirdo diversoids and neo-Marxists for the most part, unpalatable as all get out for Joe Sixpack. So, every four years, Joe Sixpack holds his nose, covers his eyes and ears and hits the “R” button.
Obama, as his radical past and radical-associates come to light (hmmm…..sat in that church for 20 years but had no idea about that reverend—-yeah, thats the ticket) he will be increasingly unpopular. As the primary wore on he got less popular with the voters as they got to know him. You cannot win a national election with blacks and status-mongering college kids voting for you to show they are “like un-racist and stuff”.
I hate it, but Juan McCain will probably win the election. In a perverse way, Im kinda sad about that as an Obama presidency would be such a disaster, it could do for the GOP what Carter did for it, and pretty much guarantee a good 12 year GOP run and make leftism in general unpalatable to an entire new generation because Obama’s ideas (green economy my ass) are so ridiculous. Obama is a man who was a “Community organizer” who has never held a real job in my opinion, and certainly has never created a job. He speaks well, and lets latte-liberals feel good about themselves for backing him, and blacks to vote in record numbers hoping he will prove out to be one of their own. That can win a primary, but to win a national election? Only McCain is so unlikeable amongst the GOP (Did you know McCain only got a little more than 30 percent of votes cast in the GOP primary?) is so unpopular as to even give Obama a chance.
By the way…………Ron Paul ran as a Republican, he wasn’t an independent.
And Tablito “sure is crazy”. I tell it like it is.
— miles · Jun 11, 03:13 AM · #
Alright, first off, both parties are heavily indebted to big corporations and big unions (the Obama campaign, let it be known, has a powerful cadre of Wall Street backers). This will never change, and the support of such entities is and always will be essential to their ability to organize and strategize on the national level.
That said, I don’t think Suderman’s thesis is crazy at all. The GOP’s alliance with “business” pre-dates the massive influx of white working class Americans into its ranks. These Democrat expats — many of whom are Southern Dixiecrats — were attracted to the GOP by anti-communism and values issues, primarily. Economically, they are still susceptible to the same anti-corporate impulses that stimulated so much animosity in the Democratic Party from the 30’s onwards. Now that the GOP has nearly shed the Rockefeller wing, the New England Main Streeters, and has even begun to alienate moneyed cosmopolitans, the time is ripe for change. Especially after the Bush malaise, and with the increasing visibility of the likes of Paul and Huckabee, we might soon witness a decisive shift by the GOP to right-wing populism. Some corporate ties would remain, of course, but the rhetoric would become more and more in the line of Buchanan and Lou Dobbs.
The future — an interesting place.
P.S. Didn’t McCain just come out against crazy CEO wages?
— PRP · Jun 11, 04:13 AM · #
Surely the more natural anti-corporate alliance sheds the libertarian wing entirely and becomes some kind of “national greatness” party centered around traditionalism and nationalism (and less free trade and less open borders), combined with some Douthat-style social welfare spending designed to prop up traditional institutions (faith-based initiatives, vouchers for parochial schools or home-schoolers, sundry pro-family and pro-natalist programs). You make it a culture war against internationalist cosmopolitan elites. This party pushes for more extensive regulation, because it doesn’t really trust markets, and can point to the ensuing corruption as further evidence of its ideological enemies’ decadence.
The democrats become a both-sized-l Lliberal party for free markets and free morals, making a grand bargain with plutocrats that trades low regulation (and international trade and expanded immigration) for more tax-and-spend, with a simpler, less distortionary code (no corporate income tax, for example). They wind up with more money, but a lot fewer votes, clustered around an easily-ridiculed core of phony CEO gladhanders and fussy, college-educated women. Plus, they all live in the same ten cities.
Fighting at the margins is over crunchy cons, and black and Latino conservatives, who are increasingly willing to make common cause with their diminishingly-openly-racist white counterparts.
— Trevor · Jun 11, 05:26 AM · #
or, peak oil, ecoservices depletion, and global warming could be truly epochal problems and we will all be working our asses off fixing them for 30-100 years and you guys trying to tear apart the transition effort will demonstrate your apparently bottomless self-infatuation to anyone who’s still listening to you.
— hapa · Jun 11, 06:27 AM · #
In the mid 1950s your environmental wackos and anti-establishment types (with a certain anti-big-business flavor) were not on the left, but on the right. These were not anti-capitalist people, of course. Those you found on the left. This was just a few years before I became politically aware, but I’ve read old magazines from the era — put out by the type of right-wingers that Bill Buckley drove out of the conservative movement in order to make it respectable. These people also included your standard-issue anti-Semites. These, too, seem to have migrated to the left now.
— The Reticulator · Jun 11, 12:08 PM · #
“why, just yesterday, i saw a leftist discriminate against a jewish country, for reasons beyond my political understanding.”
— hapa · Jun 11, 01:53 PM · #
Firstly, I see nothing wrong with amoral armchair speculation on political strategy. But as it happens I think it’s a good idea on the merits, if you like your economic libertarianism with your conservative other-stuff. I think there is a popular syllogism* that libertarianism —> pro-business —> pro-corporate, which is not true. Uncle Milt warned constantly that corporate welfare was just as at odds with free-market principles as any other government largess. And isn’t there a sort of icky correlation between government’s influence on business and business’ influence on government?
My point is that anti-corporatism is actually a classic plank of economic libertarianism. Suderman is suggesting that a party take that principle to market libertarianism as a populist movement. Considering that most people think libertarians are ignoble cranks, that would be a brilliant accomplishment.
Of course a party would have to get out from under the money-wheel first…
— Blar · Jun 11, 04:13 PM · #
“…neo-socialists-AA-zealots like Obama…”
One wonders if Miles actually knows anything about Obama. It’s astounding how he can be tarred by the right as belonging to the very group that distrusts him on the left…
— James F. Elliott · Jun 11, 04:41 PM · #
Maybe you even end up with corporations trying to distinguish themselves as good citizens by publicly refusing to have lobbyists or to take subsidies, regulatory favors, etc
And a pony!
— jeet · Jun 11, 05:37 PM · #
Love the comment about the future Democratic party shrinking down to a cluster of “fussy college educated women.” That’s the sort of snide comment that drove me away after 20 years as a registered GOP voter. It’s reassuring to know not much has changed in the ten years since I left.
— Mandy Cat · Jun 11, 05:39 PM · #
I think the maintenece of fourtunes and foutune generating enterprises owned by people with fourtunes is essentially a conservitive exercise. “A conservaitve is somebody with something to lose,” as they say. So I agree with the upward commenter: you are talking about a new party. A good government party.
But then, if you included resonable efforts to create a fair society—having the goal that there should be somewhat equal opportunity, for instance—then you are getting close to the traditional democrat. Not that the traditional democrats don’t participate in wealth maintnence, they just don’t promote big business in the platform, like republicans do.
So maybe it would be eaiser to move the democrats over to more of a good government party than it would be to create a whole new party. Certainly easier than trying to create an anti-big business republican party.
— cw · Jun 11, 06:21 PM · #
So, what you’re saying is that the Republicans have to end the K Street project, respect the role of government, and show prudence in their choices; you claim that McCain might start this whole process; and you believe that an anti-corporate libertarianism might eventually hold sway.
Bwa ha ha ha.
Excuse me while I wipe the tears of laughter from my face. This is the REPUBLICAN party, right? The party that worshipped George Bush for years, that held him up as the Fearless Leader? The party that broke congressional rules to pass laws that violated every conservative principle? The party that pushed for power, over principle, so that the only principle left was power? Yeah, you, I mean you Republicans. You deserve this. Your party hasn’t begun to see the consequences of its choices. That Republican party has lost the right to govern for at least a generation.
As to the totally new party that you are suggesting, there’s a name for it, and the dude you hate suggested it: Libertarian Democrats. His name is Markos Moulitsas, and he wrote about it at Cato Unbound a while back.
— rik · Jun 11, 06:50 PM · #
For heaven’s sake, what would be left?
http://happyvalleynews.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/the-new-republican-party/
— kamper · Jun 11, 07:28 PM · #
The sooner the GOP divorces from Big Business the better. What has the conservative movement received for its protection of business interests anyway? Let’s list the number of ways big business sells out conservative values: Multiculturalism/Diversity/PC corporate cultures and add campaigns; Immigration—Big biz loves them some open borders; Corporate scandals and abuses of the free market system ala Enron and Worldcom that put conservatives on the defensive because they confuse big business with capitalism and capitalism with conservatism. Conservatives and the GOP should focus on small business, crime, immigration and the overall decline in morality/values. Regarding foreign policy, we should cultivate a nationalistic isolationism; Lindberg sans the anti-semitism. Piss on the rest of the world. Let Europe, Japan and Korea defend themselves. Stay out of Africa and the Middle East. Israel will be fine. Want a primer? Read George Washington’s musings re nuetrality and avoiding foreign entanglements. We’ll win if we do that. Write off the black vote and write off the Hispanic vote. We won’t get them and we never will. Become the party of the White middle/lower class. Let those upscale yup yups vote Dem for 5 or 10 years or so. The first time they get mugged or their identity is stolen by an illegal or their kid gets beaten up by a minority gang member, they’ll come back to the GOP in a flash. And if the Meghan Mcardle/Will Wilkinson/Matt Welch/Reason Libertarian Axis of Evil doesn’t like it, tough shit. Let them rot. When was the last time they voted Republican anyway? Anyone ever notice that all of these Ayn Rand cultists talk a big game about free markets but not one of them has ever been in business before? Hmmm.
— rtwing · Jun 11, 07:52 PM · #
I should clarify that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal and would be right at home in the party of yuppies, gladhanders, and fussy women. That description is me projecting about how our national greatness opponents would describe us.
— Trevor · Jun 11, 08:27 PM · #
Heaven knows I would hate to be accused of discouraging free discourse, but it seems to me that a filter against the phrase “bwa ha ha” would not be inappropriate at The American Scene.
— Blar · Jun 12, 05:44 AM · #
Can one be more historically illiterate if one tried; Corporations were the linch pin of the Whig’s support. How about a little moral issue called slavery, it was also the reason why the Democrats split three ways in the
1860 election. Bell, Breckenridge, Douglas vs. Lincoln. Lincoln wasn’t a
total abolitionist (Seward fit that bill); but it was enough to provoke a move to succesion. Breckenridge, went the farthest route; becoming a Confederate brigadier general. Did you not read about how we were dragged ‘kicking and screaming’ into the Barbary Wars, the Napoleonic wars. Unless you suggest that we not trade with any part of the world, where they maybe conflicts on other powers. Cuba, China, & the Phillipines
fall under that premise. Actually the same argument applies to doing anything about Jim Crow; for nearly a hundred years, which was the pattern until Little Rock in 1957. Seeing how the last hundred years went, you feel
confident that we could realistically stay out of the world in a major way.
— narciso · Jun 12, 05:05 PM · #
This phony ended his presidential dreams
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjGYb_KtAeg
— aicnews · Jun 13, 03:30 AM · #