The Emerging Political Landscape

I really like Reihan Salam’s article at Atlantic. It purports to be an analysis of the “new GOP coalition” but goes a bit farther than that. Here’s the meat of the article:

In some respects, Trump’s rise vindicated our thesis: Here was a candidate who spoke to the party’s working-class base, and who managed to breach the “blue wall” as a result. In others, though, it underscored the inability of the Republican policy-making apparatus to adapt to the new dispensation. As an undisciplined political outsider, who takes great pride in his improvisational approach to governing, Trump is singularly ill-equipped to drive the Republican agenda in new directions. In short, Trump has cronies, not cadres. That is, he has a small coterie of loyalists who aren’t especially experienced or knowledgeable when it comes to policy making, who’ve since been joined by Republican regulars who champion ideological nostrums that are always unpopular and often discredited. The GOP has yet to develop a cohort of policy professionals capable of reconciling egalitarian populism and market conservatism in an attractive program, and the result is that Trump’s taste for invective has filled a vacuum that might otherwise have been filled by a creative and unifying new nationalism.

This is not to suggest that Democrats don’t face challenges of their own. To Democrats who came of age when memories of the New Deal were still fresh, the realization that the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt has become the party of the metropolitan rich has proved more than a little discomfiting. Shortly after the midterm elections, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist published a column recounting conversations Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York had with various friends while traveling to Washington, D.C., on the Acela. Having pored over the results, Nadler, the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, worried that the Democrats’ growing reliance on affluent voters made them “more vulnerable to the charge they are no longer the party of the working person.”

I found this snippet interesting:

Nadler might have added that as henrys—Shawn Tully’s ingenious acronym for “high earners, not rich yet”—go from swing vote to core Democratic constituency, they might stymie efforts to greatly increase the scope and generosity of the safety net. While henrys might accept the creation of boutique social programs that leave their federal tax burdens untouched, there is reason to believe they’d resist more ambitious domestic-policy initiatives that threaten to eat into their disposable incomes.

I don’t think that Mr. Salam quite understands. The henrys depend on government for their very nice livelihoods. There is no level of “boutique social programs” that they will oppose because they get theirs off the top. They are the actual beneficiaries of these programs, not the more sympathetic presumed beneficiaries. That is the inherent shortcoming of helping the poor by paying people to do it. The people you pay do very well and the poor stay poor. And nearly every program other than SSRI and SSDI fits into that category.

One of these days I should write a post on the risks that face the two political parties. They are very different and, as I have pointed out before, not symmetrical.