Zealots and Pluralists

A moderate Republican almost diagnoses the problem.

Outgoing Nebraska Senator and incoming University of Florida president Ben Sasse argues, “America’s True Divide [is] Pluralists vs. Zealots.”

The most important divide in American politics isn’t red versus blue. It’s civic pluralists versus political zealots. This is the truth no one in Washington acknowledges but Americans must realize if we’re going to recover.

Civic pluralists understand that ideas move the world more than power does, which is why pluralists value debate and persuasion. We believe America is great because it is good, and America is good because the country is committed to human dignity, even for those with whom we disagree. A continental nation of 330 million souls couldn’t possibly agree on everything, but we can hash out our disagreements in the communities where we live and the institutions we build. The small but important role of government, for the civic pluralist, is a framework for ordered liberty. Government doesn’t give us rights, or meaning, or purpose or permission. It exists to protect us from the whims of mobs and majorities.

Political zealots reject this, holding that society starts and ends with power. Government in their view isn’t to protect from the powerful or the popular. More than anything else, zealots—on the right and the left—seek total victory in the public square. They believe that the center of life is government power. They preach jeremiads of victimhood and decline. On the left, they want a powerful bureaucracy. On the right, they want a strongman. But they agree on a central tenet: Americans are too weak to solve problems with persuasion. They need the state to do it.

He blames the usual suspects, social media and cable news, but believes we’ll come out of it because Americans are so awesome.

Americans can and will break the outrage cycle by building institutions. The zealous central planners don’t own America’s future. This country belongs to the optimists, the innovators and the builders. The places where we’ll figure out what comes next are churches, schools, businesses and neighborhood associations.

America can’t do big things if we hate our neighbors. Americans have always done big stuff: winning world wars, walking on the moon, beating the Soviets. None of these would have been possible if tribalism and hatred of our neighbors had defined us. As we did with urbanization and industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries, in the 21st century we have to build big. We must navigate technological disruption, relaunch a post-pandemic economy and win the tech race against the Chinese Communist Party. Political zealots can’t do these things. Only pluralists can. Recovery is possible.

But if recovery is to come, here’s what it will look like: Senators will have to acknowledge that a politicized echo chamber is unworthy of the world’s greatest deliberative body. Citizens will have to see that recovery means resisting the temptation to reduce fellow Americans to caricatures of their political affiliations. Recovery requires investment in things that will outlast partisan preferences. We must steward the present age, and play our small but vital parts in the work of self-government.

This is what Americans have always done, and why people from all over the world still yearn to join this crazy, beautiful experiment in liberty. America was the best home freedom has ever had, and it still is. Let’s build together anew.

Little of this rings true. While I’m a civic pluralist by this description, I’m skeptical that this is the real divide in our country or its politics. While there are indeed political zealots on the left and right who want to win at all costs, I don’t know of a time when that wasn’t the case. Sorting and polarization have perhaps exacerbated the problem, by making those who disagree politically “the other” to a greater degree than they have been in recent generations.

But the zealotry that matters right now* is almost exclusively coming from Sasse’s political party and I’m pretty sure he knows it. Whatever their faults, AOC and “the Squad” are backbenchers who have mostly gone along with whatever compromise Speaker Pelosi could wrangle. They’re simply not driving policy in the Democratic Party in the way the Freedom Caucus is in the GOP. If there’s a Democratic analog to Donald Trump, he’s not going to be the party’s presidential nominee.

Paul Krugman goes perhaps a wee bit too far on this score in his column “We’re Going to Miss Greed and Cynicism,” but he’s not off by much. The setup is a bit cartoonish:

As late as 2015, or so I and many others thought, we had a fairly good idea about how American politics worked. It wasn’t pretty, but it seemed comprehensible.

On one side we had the Democrats, who were and still are basically what people in other advanced nations call social democrats (which isn’t at all the same as what most people call socialism). That is, they favor a fairly strong social safety net, supported by relatively high taxes on the affluent. They’ve moved somewhat to the left over the years, mainly because the gradual exit of the few remaining conservative Democrats has made the party’s social-democratic orientation more consistent. But by international standards, Democrats are, at most, vaguely center left.

On the other side we had the Republicans, whose overriding goal was to keep taxes low and social programs small. Many advocates of that agenda did so in the sincere belief that it would be best for everyone — that high taxes reduce incentives to create jobs and raise productivity, as do excessively generous benefits. But the core of the G.O.P.’s financial support (not to mention that of the penumbra of think tanks, foundations and lobbying groups that promoted its ideology) came from billionaires who wanted to preserve and increase their wealth.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Democrats were pure idealists. Special-interest money flowed to both parties. But of the two, Republicans were much more obviously the party of making the rich richer.

But this strikes me as mostly borne out by events:

The problem for Republicans was that their economic agenda was inherently unpopular. Voters consistently tell pollsters that corporations and the rich pay too little in taxes; policies that help the poor and the middle class have broad public support. How, then, could the G.O.P. win elections?

The answer, most famously described in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” was to win over white working-class voters by appealing to them on cultural issues. His book came in for considerable criticism from political scientists, in part because he underplayed the importance of white racial antagonism, but the general picture still seems right.

As Frank described it, however, the culture war was basically phony — a cynical ploy to win elections, ignored once the votes were counted. “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ,” he wrote, “but they walk corporate. … Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.”

Now, there were certainly True Believers in the culture wars. That’s partly why so much emphasis was put on taking back the Supreme Court. But it’s true that tax cuts and the like was the part of the agenda being enacted into policy.

These days, that sounds quaint — even a bit like a golden era — as many American women lose their reproductive rights, as schools are pressured to stop teaching students about slavery and racism, as even powerful corporations come under fire for being excessively woke. The culture war is no longer just posturing by politicians mainly interested in cutting taxes on the rich; many elected Republicans are now genuine fanatics.

As I said, one can almost feel nostalgic for the good old days of greed and cynicism.

Oddly, the culture war turned real at a time when Americans are more socially liberal than ever. George W. Bush won the 2004 election partly thanks to a backlash against gay marriage. (True to form, he followed up his victory by proclaiming that he had a mandate to … privatize Social Security.) But these days, Americans accept the idea of same-sex marriages almost three to one.

And the disconnect between a socially illiberal G.O.P. and an increasingly tolerant public is surely one reason the widely predicted red wave in the midterms fell so far short of expectations.

Yet despite underperforming in what should, given precedents, have been a very good year for the out-party, Republicans will narrowly control the House. And this means that the inmates will be running half the asylum.

True, not all members of the incoming House Republican caucus are fanatical conspiracy theorists. But those who aren’t are clearly terrified by and submissive to those who are. Kevin McCarthy may scrape together the votes to become speaker, but even if he does, actual power will obviously rest in the hands of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

We’re seeing a preview of this in the battle for the Speaker position, with the cowardly McCarthy kowtowing to the crazies in order to secure their votes. Again, AOC and company are not only not comparably crazy but their power is mostly confined to social media likes and retweets.

And what I don’t understand is how the U.S. government is going to function. President Barack Obama faced an extremist, radicalized G.O.P. House, but even the Tea Partiers had concrete policy demands that could, to some extent, be appeased. How do you deal with people who believe, more or less, that the 2020 election was stolen by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles?

I don’t know the answer, but prospects don’t look good.

So, Sasse is right that the pluralists are fighting against the zealots. But pretending that this is a both-sides phenomenon is simply disingenuous. Sasse is principled enough to have voted to convict Trump in the post-Capitol Riot impeachment trial. But not quite enough to join Liz Cheney in calling out the party itself for enabling the problem.

Interestingly, a column last September by one-term Vermont Congressman Peter Smith (suggested to me by the sidebar of Krugman’s piece), “Moderate Republicans No Longer Have a Home, and It Started With My Defeat,” diagnoses the problem nicely:

Over the last 30 years, the Republican Party has effectively eliminated its moderate and liberal voices — as well as the conservative voices that put country over party. The consequences of this takeover by an increasingly right-wing faction include the threats to democracy that have become increasingly prominent since the Jan. 6 riots.

For those, like me, who have forgotten Smith’s backstory:

When I lost my seat in Congress in 1990, I knew it was because I had co-sponsored a bill to ban assault weapons. The National Rifle Association and conservative Republicans in Vermont and elsewhere united to defeat me, calling the independent challenger, Bernie Sanders, the “lesser of two evils.” First, a right-wing candidate challenged me in the Republican primary, then many of his supporters aided the Sanders campaign in the general election.

Their plan: Elect Bernie Sanders for one term, then defeat him the next time around. The only problem: They couldn’t weaken him in a primary the same way and consistently failed to beat him in a general election. And the rest is history.

But back to the larger analysis:

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my defeat was an early step in the elimination of the moderate and liberal wing of the Republican Party. That process, aimed at members of Congress and state-level officials, began with the ascent of Newt Gingrich’s style of full-throated partisanship and has continued to this day. When moderates like Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine retired, the party typically nominated more right-wing candidates to succeed them. Over the years, the party’s capture by hard-line activists — and now, as seen in New Hampshire’s primaries last week, election deniers — has resulted in ever more extreme nominees.

When Mr. Gingrich was elected Republican minority whip by a single vote in 1989, he and his supporters seemingly had one goal: not to govern, but to control, stifle and stymie Congress. They got less actual governing done as they frustrated Congress’s work, and in many ways their strategy worked.

Now, in fairness to Gingrich—who I also blame for turning the GOP into what it would become—obstructionism is a reasonable tactic for a long-term minority party. Recall that, when Gingrich and company took control pursuant to the 1994 elections, it was the first time Republicans held a House majority since 1955. Further, they actually ran on a rather robust legislative agenda.

Still, this is dead on:

The long-term consequences of their scheme led to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of today’s hard-right extremism. It has also weakened and undermined the Republican Party and multiparty government in states where more liberal general election voters reject hard-liners who become Republican nominees.

About three weeks after his election as whip, Mr. Gingrich called me into his office. He asked whether I was having dinner with Democrats. I was, I said: A colleague from Tennessee and I were hosting fellow freshman members for dinner regularly to share experiences. Mr. Gingrich demanded that I stop; he didn’t want Republicans consorting with Democrats.

I responded — not overly politely — that I was from Vermont and nobody told me what people I could eat with. But his demand was a harbinger of the decline of moderate and liberal Republicans. (Mr. Gingrich told The Times he did not recall the meeting, but noted that he was working to unify the Republican caucus at the time.)

What followed over the next few years was the deliberate quarantining of Republicans from Democrats: separate orientations for new members, a sharp curtailing of bipartisan activities and an increasing insistence that members toe the party line. The very idea of “voting your district” — which was alive and well when I was elected — became anathema within the Republican caucus. Simultaneously, the weaponization of the evangelical religious right and the organization of wealthy conservative donors was going on, largely behind the scenes, with money and organizing often used against moderate Republicans as well as Democrats.

Now, there’s a bit of a chicken-egg situation here. The take-no-prisoners style is absolutely a big part of the problem. But it was accompanied by the aforementioned sorting. The roots of the Republican “revolution” in 1994 were multiple but it marked a dramatic realignment of the parties, particularly the almost complete demise of the Southern Democrat. (It would take a bit longer for the Northeastern Republican to go away but the Southernification of the GOP made that inevitable.) Voting your state and voting your party were much more hand-in-glove than they had been before the sort.

Republican Party leaders fueled the shift to the right by promising results to their conservative base that they could not deliver: banning abortion, eliminating the deficit, slashing federal regulations, cracking down on L.G.B.T.Q. rights and greatly cutting taxes. Mr. Gingrich’s “Contract With America” — and the government shutdown it caused — set the stage for decades of unkept promises and primed primary voters to turn against the moderate and liberal elected officials who had once been a critical component of the Republican coalition, especially in the Northeast, when those officials could be readily blamed for not sufficiently supporting the party line.

As Republican voters and nominees adopted an increasingly extreme agenda, even a Republican Congress could not produce the results they had promised. While Republican officials delivered significant tax cuts for the very wealthy and, under George W. Bush, put numerous conservatives onto the federal bench, they failed to meaningfully relieve the tax burden for working- and middle-class people or to fully realize any of their culture-war goals, instead seeing same-sex marriage become the law of the land.

These failures drove a further rightward shift that resulted in the rise of the Tea Party. And when the Tea Partyers failed to stop President Barack Obama and his Affordable Care Act, we arrived at the 2016 presidential primaries and the rise of Donald Trump. The base of the party had become angry and alienated because the Gingrich-era promises had not been delivered.

I would quibble with this at the margins but it’s mostly true. Crucially, the sense that the party elites were lying to the base, making promises they broke year after year, decade after decade, was crucial to the rise of the Tea Party.

But zealotry begat zealotry:

During this period, some Republicans in the Northeast swam against the tide. Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, my predecessor in the U.S. House, became an independent before his retirement. In her last term, Senator Snowe cast a critical vote in committee to put the Affordable Care Act before the full Senate. She believed health care reform merited consideration by the full Senate, not a quiet death in committee. She favored “governing” over “controlling.”

But even in New England, long a bastion of liberal and moderate Republicanism, moderates are now losing in Republican primaries. This year, a Trump-backed candidate won the nomination for governor of Massachusetts; candidates endorsed by Donald Trump or who deny the validity of the 2020 election won races in New Hampshire; and Vermont Republicans nominated a right-wing figure for Senate. Increasingly, moderate candidates without a deeply established electoral history are unable to win nomination for major offices.

There have been a few moderate and liberal Republican success stories, but they are anomalies, peculiar to the person or the situation. In Vermont, Jim Douglas, governor from 2003 to 2011, and the current governor, Phil Scott, built long electoral careers and personal brands that made them more resistant to hard-right primary challengers. Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts developed a reputation as a competent administrator in the 1990s, long before he ran for office.

But the refusal by Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire to run for Senate this year speaks volumes about the culture and philosophy that the national Republican Party and its elected officials are enforcing in primary elections and in Congress. That doctrine has made a national political career less achievable and enticing, even for an extremely popular right-of-center governor like Mr. Sununu.

As we’ve discussed more than once recently, state-level elections are different from national-level elections for a whole host of institutional and attitudinal reasons. By definition, there are still Southern Democrats at the state level. Sometimes, they even win governorships in deep red states. Absent extraordinary circumstances, they’re not viable candidates for the Senate, where they were a vote for Chuck Schumer as Majority Leader. (The same is true even at the Congressional District level, as even the most conservative Democrat would have voted for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.)

He concludes:

Mr. Gingrich’s style of politics has informed much of what has come since. Under Mr. Trump and his acolytes, the emphasis on power and control has remained, at the expense not only of governing but also of decency.

In 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a moderate Republican from Maine, attacked McCarthyism and its “four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” Republicans today seem to use Smith’s warning as an inspiration, projecting their own worst excesses upon their opponents. There is little room left in the G.O.P. for any disagreement — indeed, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, only one appears very likely to be in Congress next January.

It may be too late for the Republican Party to again welcome moderate and liberal voices into its ranks. But the focus of moderate and liberal Republicans — both elected officials and the voters who supported us — was historically on governing to solve America’s critical problems, not on accruing control for its own sake. If the Republican Party cannot be an instrument of democracy, independent-minded moderates will do what we’ve always done: Vote our conscience, and vote for someone else.

So, again, the pluralist-zealot divide Sasse identifies is real. But it’s hardly the whole story.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. mattbernius says:

    Totally agree with the analysis James. That said, I see two things you might want to correct:

    Sasse is principled enough to have voted to impeach Trump twice.

    Sasse only voted to impeach Trump once, during the second impeachment. Romney was the only Republican to vote to impeach both times.

    Absent extraordinary circumstances, they’re not viable candidates for the Senate, where they were a vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.

    I think I get what you are saying here, but I think you need an extra sentence as you’re talking about the Senate, but the Speaker is a House Function (though Pelosi is far more demonized and focused on than Schumer).

    [Also feel free to delete this if you make those corrections.]

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  2. MarkedMan says:

    Further, they actually ran on a rather robust legislative agenda.

    By this, do you mean the Contract with America? Here is the part of it that dealt with what they would do on the first day:

    1 require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply to Congress;
    2 select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse;
    3 cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
    4 limit the terms of all committee chairs;
    5 ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
    6 require committee meetings to be open to the public;
    7 require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
    8 guarantee an honest accounting of the Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.

    All but the last one is about the operation of Congress itself, and specifically of the House. It seems obvious to me that the first 2 would be moderately beneficial if implemented, but 3-7 are directly and indirectly concerned with concentrating power in the hands of the Speaker, aka Gingrich. You may think that cynical, but events certainly proved me out – No real effort was made on 1 and 2, nothing really came from number 8, but Gingrich certainly ensured that all power derived from the Speaker.

    As for the parts that took place after the first day, there were a number of bills directly tied to the Contract. A balanced budget amendment that everyone knew was going nowhere. A bill to mandate harsher and longer criminal sentences. A bill to take welfare payments away from mothers under 18 and to otherwise make it harder to qualify for and to keep welfare payments of any sort. A $500 per child tax credit. A bill to make it harder for the US to participate in UN Peace Keeping operations. A bill to make it harder for individuals to sue corporations. A bill that reduced taxes on some businesses but also rescinded worker protection laws for employees of government contractors. A Congressional term limit bill.

    “Robust” seems highly generous here. It was a mishmash of sloganeering based legislation that everyone knew was going to go nowhere, or handouts to corporations and the wealthy at the expense of workers. The one exception was making it harder to obtain welfare benefits. That was a conservative piece of legislation Republicans actually worked for and were largely successful in passing.

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  3. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    Sasse portrays himself as a pluralist, of course. Only the craziest would acknowledge being a zealot. But his positions on many issues put the lie to that claim. Abortion, Gay Rights, Guns, Health Care, the Environment…Sasse is nothing more than a zealot in pluralist’s clothing.

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  4. Kylopod says:

    The most important divide in American politics isn’t red versus blue. It’s civic pluralists versus political zealots.

    I would deign to disagree with Sasse that the most important divide in America isn’t between those who accept the reality of climate change and those who don’t, those who believe in same-sex marriage and those who don’t, those who want more citizens to have health care and those who have tried to throw millions of Americans off it. Sasse is on record endorsing the second option in all of those.

    The Q people may be deranged, but there is no political class more insufferable than professional centrists. By “professional centrist,” I am not intending to cast aspersions on everyone whose positions happen to place them somewhere in the center of American politics. Indeed, I wouldn’t even refer to Sasse as an actual centrist (he has a 94% score from the American Conservative Union). Professional centrism is less a philosophy than a type of branding, where you treat the two “sides” of the aisle as quarreling children and try to depict yourself as the mature, serious person who’s above it all. The irony is that this undercuts the seriousness of actual issues and focuses instead purely on the image of respectability.

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  5. James Joyner says:

    @mattbernius: Thanks–I’ve made edits accordingly.

    @MarkedMan: There was certainly some sloganeering. But it was an actual legislative agenda, which is more than the party has had in the last 15 years or so. Although, as I noted when wrote about my experiences at various CPAC conventions, they seemed to have largely run out of new ideas well before that, continuing to recycle Reagan’s 1980 platform despite the fact that much of it was rendered obsolete by having already been enacted.

    @daryl and his brother darryl: Having conservative or liberal policy preferences doesn’t render one a zealot according to the definitions Sasse lays out. Ultimately, he was interested in governing and willing to make compromises to get bills passed. His party leadership was not.

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  6. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Absent extraordinary circumstances, they’re not viable candidates for the Senate, where they were a vote for Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.

    Thanx for the chuckle, James.

  7. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    @James Joyner:
    Sure.
    I mean, he said about the ACA; “If it lives, America as we know it will die.”
    He is dead set against LGBTQ rights, which is the source of his troubles at UF. And he abstained from the vote which codified same-sex marriage rights.
    The NRA loves him and he toes their line.
    He doesn’t support the development of renewables, and doesn’t support the regulation of greenhouse gases.
    But sure…

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  8. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    @James Joyner:
    @daryl and his brother darryl:
    All Republicans are willing to compromise, if only Democrats would give them everything they want.

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  9. Michael Reynolds says:

    Pluralists or Zealots? The search for the perfect binary continues. Is it A or B? Yes or No? Up or down? The one thing we know for certain is that all questions must be boiled down to a binary choice.

    Is it because we are physically bilaterally symmetrical? (Not really, but we appear to be.) Is it that we’re too stupid to cope with even slight ambiguity?

    Here are some other equally plausible over-simplifications: Believer vs. Skeptic. Follower vs. Loner. Smart vs. Dumb. Speaking of dumb, how about this one: it all comes down to Humid vs. Dry. No, seriously, there is, on average, lower humidity in Blue states. I am prepared to die on that hill. Speaking of which, Flat vs. Hilly. Florida is super flat whereas California has mountains. And let’s not forget the impact of Ya’ll vs. You Guys. Sonic vs. In-N-Out?

    Here’s a more serious one: Change is inherently good vs. Change is inherently threatening. Which comes down to Status gain vs. Status loss. All the groups who think they are losing status (because they are) – Whites, males, country folk, Christians, the poorly-educated, the elderly, people who own coal mines – are all gathered together in the Republican Party. All the groups rising or at least aspiring to more – Blacks, Browns, Asians, secularists, college degreed, women, gays, trans, the young – are Democrats. It all comes down to Fear vs. Hope.

    Or not.

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  10. Beth says:

    @James Joyner:

    This is meant to be a slight critique and not insulting. It seems to me that Gingrich has come up a couple of times over the last couple of days and I get the impression that you are viewing him through rosier glasses than warranted. Then man is an absolute scumbag; a dumber Regan and absolutely morally bankrupt. He was and is only in it for himself. He’s not comparable to a regular politician that tries to help while also accumulating power, for him it’s just power. Nixon, Regan, Gingrich all made this country worse and set the stage for Trump. I get that by your nature you’re a more conservative guy and the 90’s were a time when there were some actual worthwhile conservatives and you were a young man while everything was good. I just get the impression that you’re giving him a pass when you shouldn’t.

    @Michael Reynolds:

    Uh! Excuse me! Humidity now! Humidity forever! Also, it’s “Yous guys”.

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  11. Kylopod says:

    @James Joyner: @Beth: Whenever discussing this topic, it always needs to be kept in mind that radicalism isn’t just some either-or condition that springs up instantly. It’s something that has gradually infected the system over several decades. And I don’t mean to make it sound like we’re at some absolute end point now, for that matter–it can always get worse.

    It may be true that Gingrich was more willing to govern than today’s conservatives. But all that means is that he helped set the process in motion, and it escalated from there. He was also limited in how much he could really pull off at the time he was Speaker. Imagine that he completely refused to do any bipartisan legislation with Clinton. It’s questionable whether he’d have even succeeded if he tried–he was presiding over a caucus that included many representatives who faced punishment from their constituents if they didn’t bring home the bacon. He took that seriously because he had to. He knew there were lines he couldn’t cross without leading to himself getting thrown out–and that’s proven by what ultimately did happen to him. A lot of other things had to fall into place–and they would, in the coming decades–to make the kind of maximal obstructionism we see today even doable.

  12. Chip Daniels says:

    The Republicans have gone from being a party devoted to conserving tradition to a revolutionary faction which refuses to accept the legitimacy of the majority of American citizens.

    That is, those are not already part of their faction are considered illegitimate and undeserving of political representation, enemies to be crushed instead of peers to be negotiated with.

    This is why the two parties are not symmetrical. Even the most radical Democratic elected official accepts the legitimacy of their opposition.

  13. Scott F. says:

    @James Joyner:

    Ultimately, [Sasse] was interested in governing and willing to make compromises to get bills passed. His party leadership was not.

    With Pluralists or Zealots, Sasse is merely on the hunt for a political framing that allows him to be on a team he is not appalled by without acknowledging that the Democrats are the only party doing any governing these days. He wants societal cohesion without the ‘central planning’ he abhors. He doesn’t have a clue how to achieve that.

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  14. gVOR08 says:

    I refuse to give money to Rupert the Grinch but I was able to read the whole WSJ column in a private tab. The whole thing is as vapid yet partisan and wandering and nonsensical as in James’ excerpts. There must be professors at UF facepalming at the thought of Sasse being their President.

    The scary part is reading comments. WSJ is supposed to have an elite audience of makers and shakers, but comments are about one half step up from Lucianne. These people live in an alternate universe, for which see James post on COVID belief. Thank gawd for the commentariat here at OTB. And thank you, James, for running this island of relative sanity.

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  15. Mister Bluster says:

    Sonic vs. In-N-Out

    Only Sonic has good looking girls on roller-skates. Not even a contest!

  16. gVOR08 says:

    @Scott F.:

    Sasse is merely on the hunt for a political framing that allows him to be on a team he is not appalled by without acknowledging that the Democrats are the only party doing any governing these days. He wants societal cohesion without the ‘central planning’ he abhors. He doesn’t have a clue how to achieve that.

    A key part of conservative psychology is believing they are the best people: the makers not takers, the elite, the people the Founders wanted to vote in their republic not a democracy, the Real Americans, the common clay of the new West. The last decade has made it really hard for even Republicans to see Republicans as any sort of elite. Sasse’s trying to find a way out of that conundrum, as you say, by redefining conservatism.

    As to central planning, I’m not seeing anyone advocating for it. In Slouching Towards Utopia Brad DeLong notes that the Russian Communists largely copied their command economy from what the Germans did in WWI. He notes they were never able to track and control more than, I think it was 100, key commodities. He notes the irony that most corporations operate internally much like the Soviet command economy. Leaves me wondering what would have happened had Lenin had modern Enterprise Resource Planning software available.

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  17. Modulo Myself says:

    @gVOR08:

    A key part of conservative psychology is believing they are the best people: the makers not takers, the elite, the people the Founders wanted to vote in their republic not a democracy, the Real Americans, the common clay of the new West. The last decade has made it really hard for even Republicans to see Republicans as any sort of elite.

    In my experience, the majority of very educated quote-unquote ‘liberal elite’ are wary as hell of their affluence and privilege, if only because they are worried about the hazards lying in store for their spoiled kids. Are people proud of their accomplishments? Sure. But that pride is mitigated with other factors. Listening to conservatives talk about status is like encountering an adult furious about how their kid only got into Bates and not Harvard. It seems weird and sad, and counterproductive–even though yes Harvard is a better brand than Bates.

    All of this goes back to Nixon, who was deeply aware that the normal establishment people at the top were less status-conscious than he and looked down on him for the grasping quality of his character.

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  18. DK says:

    @James Joyner:

    Having conservative or liberal policy preferences doesn’t render one a zealot according to the definitions Sasse lays out.

    .

    Only if you buy the canard that the radical right extremism of today’s Republican Party = conservative.

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  19. steve says:

    I thought it was youse guys, with an e at the end.

    Steve

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