Ramesh Ponnuru, in his post on Ross and Reihan's Grand New Party
, does a good job defining my concerns. "the Republican rank-and-file would, in the main, be willing to support the policies that D&S have in mind...D&S are going with the grain of Republican voters and not against it. That does not mean that they will succeed. It does make their success possible." Here are a few other policies that polling suggests rank-and-file Republican voters would support: Universal health care. Extremely high corporate taxes. Far more money spent on the public welfare. A significantly enlarged focus on environmental protection. Indeed, a recent poll conducted by a Republican pollster found that if you deleted the word "Republican" from descriptions of party positions, overwhelming majorities agreed with Democrats on everything from the economy to taxes to trade. Of course, the Republican Party does not rush to adopt those policies. It does not fight for universal health care or adopt the Democratic line on taxation. Why? Well, the party is far more than its rank and file. It's very, very hard to argue that its centers of power are particularly responsive to the beliefs of the base. And that's what I mean when I say that the book is insufficiently concerned with its own political economy. The ideas have an extremely clear electoral logic (though it would be even more powerful if it married simply progressive positions with social traditionalism), but that's been true for many years. As Gingrich and his warriors learning in 1995, as Reagan and his followers found in the 80s, the entitlement state is a popular thing. If the party were simply worried about elections, or the interests of its voters, Washington would be a contest between progressive Democrats and Christian Democrats, and our country would be a tremendously different place. But the GOP's constant has been a high regard for the rich and ingenious capitalists who fund the infrastructure and populate the mythology. Even when the party embraces entitlements -- as in Medicare Part D -- it does so through policies exquisitely constructed to ensure the flow of corporate profits is not only unmolested, but accelerated. Grand New Party suggests that this should cease being central to the party's agenda; that the party should realize its soul lies with its voting base, not its funding base. But that's been true for an extremely long time. And the political rational for it not being true has been around for an extremely long time. So what's going to change? What lever will be pulled? At the end of the day, the structure of the Republican Party is no accident, and its power centers are not unprotected. Populism may be popular with the GOP's voters, but it's never been clear to me that the GOP sees itself as a party meant to advance the interests of its voters.
