What’s Happening to the Republican Party II

I’m with JM. Now that we’re a straight-up corrupt oligarchy, why bother with the expensive, time-wasting political Kabuki? We just need one party. With a nod to Gary Shteyngart (and David Broder) let’s call it the Bipartisan Party.

Just as a reminder, this is how bad things ALREADY are. I wonder how much worse they can get under the system Henry describes? We’re going to find out, I’m afraid.

The biggest revelation for me post-Citizens United is that the previous legal regime was doing something after all.

I’d bought the previous received wisdom that campaign finance reform, while a noble cause, was basically impossible — the money always gets in, it’s like squeezing a balloon, etc.

If you look at the numbers pre- and post-CU. though, that’s clearly not the case.

After the election, destroy the GOP. Drive a wedge between the mainstream Republican leadership and their nuttiest stupidest voters.

Demand that the Republicans don’t get any tax cuts, unless they put the matching spending cuts in the SAME Congressional bill. So everybody can see what they are planning to trade off.

Because tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. Fight that phony rhetoric everywhere: tax cuts do NOT create the economic growth to cover the extra deficits they cause. Rhetoric works, and Rove knows it.

The only way to reduce deficits is to end the tax cuts or reduce spending. They want to complain about the deficits? Make them face it!

Keep your eye on the ball. We are merely going into Battle #2 of a very very long war. So if the economy can’t get much worse, well then, the thing to do is run a full blockade, as the economy slowly creeps back on its own. We have two years to bang them on the head, see if we can get any more sense in there.

Do NOT give in to Republican initiatives, just because they MIGHT cause some growth somewhere — this is the liberal disease: shooting yourself in the foot. No more doing things just because economists think it might be a good idea.

No tax cuts for the wealthy. Lots of detailed arguments on how healthcare really works. No changes to Social Security — let the missing “Trust Fund” come out of the sunsetting Bush tax cuts. No tax cuts at all, unless the Republicans want to put the matching long-term spending cuts in the same bill, for our advice and consent.

The people are worried about the deficits? The Dems have LOWERED the long-term deficits because Obamacare gives Medicare a little haircut to a porkbarrel. So people want lower deficits but no, the Dems are hurting Medicare! What bullcrap. Are you going to let the Republicans cut Social Security and also shift the distribution of taxes onto you more? Stick with the party that defends the safety net, while shaving long term costs.

Capitalishiousness: free markets with a goddamn good safety net!

So “man-up” to the mattresses, ram it to the ramparts, and after the election, start to drive a wedge between the mainstream Republican leadership and their nuttiest stupidest voters. Destroy the GOP! Do it! Why the hell not!

Both parties have been using what Henry calls “uncoordinated group models” (ie interest group politics) for quite some time. For the Dems for example, unions, various corporate interests, and varied interest groups have been providing funding. This ends up working well at the state level where a smaller number of groups are relevant to debate, but less well in larger, national elections.

However, one wonders if the the new coordinated group politics is really all that different from this older model. In this election, a very large proportion of outside money is funnelling through the Chamber and Rove’s groups. While one would assume that this funding is coordinated, the opacity of the process makes it unclear how much control these groups have over anonymous donations. And are these groups more coordinated or just bigger? My guess: group coordination has not changed much, aside from democrats losing the fundraising battle. The fundraising picture will change as much by 2012 as it has since 2008, and these coordinated groups will end up looking fairly uncoordinated.

“I can’t imagine a co-ordinated movement running O’Donnell rather than Castle.”

Because they don’t coordinate absolutely everything they coordinate nothing?

“However, one wonders if the the new coordinated group politics is really all that different from this older model.”

Yes, it is. If you notice, there isn’t much of a GOP as a political party in this discussion. In fact, the GOP is weaker and has less money than the larger single private groups – and the private groups together have something like 10 times the money of the formal party. The GOP is more of a vague group name now than being a political party. The real power lies elsewhere and the GOP itself is a sideshow.

Second, the amounts of money themselves make a structural difference. Yes, certainly under the previous campaign laws, if you put in a certain amount of work, you could donate a lot of money. But it was relatively difficult and involved, and it could backfire – if your candidate’s opponent discovers that you were using a wide variety of fronts before the election, it would hurt your candidate’s electoral chances, bring some heat on you and maybe attract attention from the FEC. You used to need attorneys who were willing to push the envelope and so on. None of that exists anymore.

In Delaware, they may well have supposed O’Donnell too nutty to win the nomination; didn’t she peak a little late?

The Palin endorsement was the trigger, and while the Vanity Fair piece suggests that a fairly standard wingnut welfare operation surrounds her activity, her endorsements don’t quite fit that model. Delaware has closed primaries and a relatively small registered GOP electoral base, so it didn’t take much to swing it.

Looking more generally from a structural perspective, the new landscape seems to entrench the laundering operations that occurred during election season pre-CU with the brief flowering of otherwise-dormant PACs and 501( c )(4)s. So instead of reactivating Americans For Fluffy Kittens out of a maildrop to run attack ads between Labor Day and election day, then shutting down shop before anyone identifies the funders, you get a much more efficient infrastructure for both co-ordination and anonymity.

Well, what they’re aiming for is Getrennt marschieren, vereint schlagen, no? There’s quite a lot to be said for task-organising and having independent groups pursuing specific goals, as long as they all arrive on the same objective at the same time 24 hours before the polls close.

Without disagreeing for a moment that the US is in the grip of oligarchy and that congressional votes are basically for sale, I’d like to point out that no one here is really addressing the central, underpinning issue: why is it that campaign money can reliably, if not perfectly, be translated into citizen votes? If you believe, as everyone here apparently does without dispute, that sufficient cash can, on average, buy elections, then you must also inevitably admit/conclude that the voters themselves are selling their votes — and quite cheaply, at that. The image is of a disconnected, uninformed voter whose decision can be swayed if he/she is simply sufficiently pandered to with a few (hundred) TV commercials over a campaign. I think this is rather a disrespectful view of voters at large; is it really true? State your belief clearly.

All of these discussions of political campaign finance, now greatly amplified by the Citizens United decision, ultimately boil down to this question: why do the voters sell themselves so cheaply? or, do they? Answer that, and you’ll know the right point to split the diamond.

I think when one is dealing with a political system that is both disinclined and utterly incapable of responding effectively to the needs and wishes of the electorate and has therefore descended almost entirely into Kabuki, one really has to ask how much longer are questions of campaign organisation and mobilisation going to be? Obama seems to have been the last best shot at restoring some basic sanity to a socio-economic order that has become increasingly unjust as well as inefficient both in terms of economic outcomes and generating social stability. Cultural ressentiment and economic insecurity have aligned in such a powerful way that his party is going to get shellacked for applying vital economic measures (TARP, the Stimulus, and HealthCare Reform) in a form that was maximally friendly to conservative policy positions without rendering them utterly meaningless. Plus, these are all outcomes resulting from a political system that is highly resistant to reform itself.

The question is increasingly becoming what’s the best outcome in terms of justice – a series of Republican ascendancies in which the country is virtually destroyed followed by ever shorter Democratic interregna where the damage is temporarily ameliorated, dramatically lengthening the period before decline becomes both undeniable and unstoppable? Or total GOP take over of all governing institutions and a short sharp nose dive into the tar pits?

Without disagreeing for a moment that the US is in the grip of oligarchy and that congressional votes are basically for sale, I’d like to point out that no one here is really addressing the central, underpinning issue: why is it that campaign money can reliably, if not perfectly, be translated into citizen votes? If you believe, as everyone here apparently does without dispute, that sufficient cash can, on average, buy elections, then you must also inevitably admit/conclude that the voters themselves are selling their votes—and quite cheaply, at that.

The voters aren’t “selling their votes”. They don’t gain anything by voting. They’re just responding to advertising. Generally advertising that makes them feel that it would be unacceptable to vote for one of the two options, so they have to vote for the other one.

The image is of a disconnected, uninformed voter whose decision can be swayed if he/she is simply sufficiently pandered to with a few (hundred) TV commercials over a campaign. I think this is rather a disrespectful view of voters at large; is it really true? State your belief clearly.

Well, it works with other forms of advertising. Try replacing “voters” with “people”.

Cryptic Ned: The voters aren’t “selling their votes”. They don’t gain anything by voting. They’re just responding to advertising.

I wouldn’t quite agree that voters don’t gain anything by voting; if sufficiently motivated they can certainly gain a sense of having “struck a blow” for their own side in a war, which can be be quite satisfying. But it’s sort of a distraction from the question I want to ask to phrase it in terms of voters being rewarded or “bought up”. In less metaphorical terms, my question is: why do voters allow themselves to be influenced so significantly by paid political communication? (this includes TV commercials, mailings, phone banks, etc.) Why don’t voters put more effort into making their choices, say by spending time and money to do their own research rather than lazily consuming what is presented to them for free?

You might be tempted to answer “because voters are largely lazy people”. Now, I think that’s a quite contemptuous view of people, and so problematical: if you essentially hold the voters in contempt then you’re never going to approve of any democracy-centered system, and there’s no point in discussing any reforms. I also don’t think it’s factually correct to simply say that most people are lazy or dim-witted and that’s why they do what the TV tells them to. I’m not denying that paid communication has a big influence, but I think the reasons why it succeeds, and why it doesn’t, are complex, and we should seek to understand those reasons rather than just dismissing voters with contempt.

Daragh McDowell 10.26.10 at 8:26 pm
” Not that I disagree with your objectives or diagnosis, but for me the best likely solution is a conservative engineered and overseen major economic collapse and subsequent dissolution of the US as a political entity in its current formation. EG Let the coastal states break off, form their own rationally based economically prosperous republics, and let Oklahoma see what being governed by a Coburn-Inhofe duopoly is REALLY like.”

What I think of as most likely now is simply a continued looting, followed by bailouts (ie., more looting), with frequent post-facto legalizations (de facto or de jure) of the looting, followed by a repeat of the cycle.

Until either (a) the looting ‘elites’ crisis so sharp and deep that the government can’t bail it out in time (especially if Teabagging politicians are playing fillibuster games), or (b) they loot so successfully that the government is no longer capable of a bailout.

Landru, personally I agree that your question is the most interesting one here. This seems like precisely the kind of question that political scientists should be interested in, and surely there’s an extensive literature out there addressing it. What does that literature say?

Interest groups have coordinated in elections for a number of years, and this has in the past been more evident on the Democratic side. What we have this election is a reversal, with the GOP working through vaguely independent groups and the Dems working through party committees.

The coordination issue is tricky for these kinds of groups, which is why the Democrats created the larger 527 committees in 2004 to help both coordinate and also to put all commitments on the table.

I would be interesting in seeing anything on HOW the GOP groups are coordinating. But in a sense it is easier if they are not genuine groups — that is, this is not Focus on the Family and the NRA and the Chamber, so much as quasi party groups that have the same donor base.

This all just a load of rich, creamery butter.