How Has the GOP Managed to Go Far Right With a Minority of the Voters?

The Republican Party appears to be divided between a tax-cutting old guard and a white-nationalist vanguard — and with Donald Trump’s ascendance, the upstarts seem to be winning. 

The party has raced to the fringe. Republican leaders have become singularly focused on tax cuts for corporations and the superrich, whatever the effects on American inequality, or on the people who make up the Republican “base.” When those cuts have conflicted with their traditional emphasis on fiscal restraint, they have run up huge deficits to finance them, abandoning the principle of budget balance—except as a cudgel with which to attack popular social programs, such as Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. They have launched an intensifying assault on environmental, consumer, labor, and financial protections. They have attempted to strip health insurance from millions of Americans. They have appointed the most consistently pro-business, anti-labor, and anti-consumer judges in modern history of the federal courts. And they have done all this despite the fact that every one of these aims has strikingly little public support, even among Republican voters.

Which raises the obvious question: How?

The book “LET THEM EAT TWEETS, How the Right Rules In An Age of Extreme Inequality” by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2020) answers the question.

You should read this book if:

1. You think Trump is the problem, and as soon as he’s gone, the GOP will come back to its old self.

2. You think the GOP is the problem, but if Democrats win the Presidency and both Houses of Gov’t. in Nov. 2020, the “old” GOP will be forced to reassert itself.

3. You think the only reason Trump won the 2016 election was because so many people hated Hillary Clinton.

If it convinces you you are wrong, you will have learned something.

If it doesn’t convince you you are wrong, you will be even more assured your position is correct.

Either way, YOU WIN.