I interviewed Jacob Hacker (the Stanley Resor professor of political science in Yale), and Paul Pierson (the John Gross professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley) about their new book, “Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality.”
You build on Daniel Ziblatt’s scholarly research on 19th century conservative parties to describe what you call the “Conservative Dilemma.” What is the dilemma, and how does it apply to the modern U.S. Republican Party?
Ziblatt argues persuasively that many of the most acute strains on democracy run through leading conservative parties. They’re the parties most closely aligned with economic elites, so they’re the parties that face the greatest pressure as ordinary citizens gain the right to vote. The Conservative Dilemma is: Do you desert those elites and respond to the economic demands of those ordinary citizens, or do you sustain your alliance with elites and do whatever is necessary to win elections without responding to the economic demands of ordinary citizens? This challenge, and how conservative parties chose to respond, produced some of the most turbulent politics in the early modern history of democracies. It’s worth stressing that the Conservative Dilemma is most intense in highly unequal societies, because economic elites are so powerful and their interests so distinct. Thus, the Conservative Dilemma has reemerged in the United States as inequality has grown dramatically, which is why it is now central to understanding American politics and the Republican Party in particular.
Your book is self-consciously a “top-down” explanation, focusing on business elites and their political allies rather than movements rising from below. What’s at stake in the disagreements between “top-down” and “bottom-up” accounts of changes in the Republican Party?
After the 2016 election, everyone flocked to the “heartland” to interview Trump voters. But while voters’ views are important, a majority of white evangelicals didn’t just wake up one morning and decide Christians were more discriminated against than Muslims. Elites help shape how voters make sense of the political world, attracting their attention to some things and away from others.
Elites also have a big influence on what the politicians aligned with them do with power. Any analysis of American politics should be able to explain why the first thing President Trump and congressional Republicans did was pursue a hugely unpopular health bill that would have slashed benefits for millions of Trump voters, and the second thing they did was pass a massive and hugely unpopular tax bill that gave 80 percent of its permanent benefits to the top 1 percent. No analysis that doesn’t focus on the power of economic elites can explain why elected officials focus so relentlessly on these kinds of policies.
Of course, elites aren’t all-powerful, nor is there some centralized conspiracy. Plutocrats are not Bond villains hiding out in their lair inside some volcano. The evolution of what we call “plutocratic populism” has involved trial and error, adjustment and contestation. Politics is both bottom-up and top-down. But the top-down aspects don’t get nearly enough attention from either journalists or political scientists.
Your book stresses how the Republican Party has outsourced activities to outside groups. Why did the party do this, and how has it shaped the party’s electoral strategy?
The groups fall into two broad categories: organized money, that is, business groups, billionaire donors, and other organs of conservative economic advocacy; and organized outrage over perceived threats, that is, the Christian Right, NRA and other culturally conservative groups and right-wing media. The first group includes Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council, as well as the Chamber of Commerce and Koch network. These are the vanguard of the plutocracy (the increasingly rich super-rich, and big corporations who have pulled the Republican Party sharply right on economic policy). There’s money on both sides in American politics, but the plutocratic choir sings with a strong conservative accent.
The second group plays a complementary role. Republicans came to rely on groups like the NRA to intensify conflict over cultural divisions as cover for their unpopular economic policies. American parties are typically “big tents”; they aren’t designed to cultivate outrage. That’s why these party “surrogates” become so important. The NRA and major evangelical organizations combine deep community ties with a national structure, and they thrive on generating a perception of threat among their members. Right-wing media, which is uniquely large-scale in the United States, has become a vital part of this ecosystem, a kind of social-movement-for-profit.
George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum summarized the consequences: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.” Trump exemplifies how this outrage machine has transformed the GOP.
In previous work, you have been somewhat skeptical that electoral politics might lead the Republican Party to change. In this book, you seem to think that it’s at least possible. What has changed?
We think elections are crucial because of who they confer power on. While we are more skeptical than most political scientists about how responsive public officials are to ordinary voters, we recognize that politicians and their supporters really want to win. If a strategy or coalition no longer seems compatible with winning, that’s going to be a huge problem and likely to generate a new strategy over time.
Clearly, Trump’s form of plutocratic populism is becoming more problematic electorally, despite some considerable structural advantages for Republicans. Demographic trends make the challenges tougher every year. Lindsay Graham was right to say that Republicans are “not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
There is a scenario in which the Republican Party has to become more responsive in order to compete effectively. This path would require a truly multiracial party that is significantly more moderate on economic issues.
However, there is another plausible path: Rather than adapting to the electorate, the GOP could seek to adapt politics to its shrinking coalition. Various forms of counter-majoritarian rule and democratic backsliding are already in evidence. The party’s desire to hold onto power in the face of shrinking electoral strength could make it more willing to undermine democratic institutions to promote its narrow agenda.
