Angelo Codevilla described the revolt of the Republican “country class” in which Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination and Ronald Reagan eventually won the presidency. Codevilla traces the divisions within the Republican party to the New Deal where the Bob Taft wing opposed big government while the Rockefeller wing wanted big government to be more corporation-friendly. This led to a split in which most of the Republican leadership wanted to join the Democrat-constructed ruling class while most Republican voters (the country class”) were opposed to the ruling class and big government leading to the eventual Goldwater revolt.
I’m not sure this conceptual scheme fits Reagan perfectly. Reagan governed with the acquiescence of the Republican establishment (Howard Baker, Bob Michel and Bob Dole might not have agree with everything Reagan wanted but they went along in the end), and the enthusiasm and admiration of the party’s activist and voter base. He also won over many ancestral Democratic voters who would have sooner voted for Ming the Merciless than a member of the anti-New Deal wing of the Republican party. Reagan wasn’t simply of the Republican country class. He was also able to recruit members of the other party’s coalition by offering solutions to the country’s problems (and those solutions did not include eliminating the basics of the New Deal welfare state.)
The Republicans need something similar now. They need a strategy that will unite the party’s establishment and ideological activists while at the same time reaching out to Democrats and voters who feel abandoned by both parties. This has a public relations aspect, but let us put that aside for the moment. Republicans need policies with populist appeal and not of the “cut taxes on the job creators to get money out of the caboose of big government and into the engine of the high earners who built that” variety that united both the Republican “establishment” and “country class” in 2012.
Republicans need to be able to be able to talk to skeptical ancestral Democratic-leaning voters and explain policies that will directly benefit them. The alleged indirect effects of cutting taxes on somebody else won’t be nearly enough. They need policies that will be able to explain to rural working-class voters how they will be able to maintain their health insurance if their plant or mine closes and they have to make do with a patchwork of part-time jobs that leave you working fifty hours a week but don’t provide benefits while one of your kids has asthma and your wife is a cancer survivor. Conservatives have answers to these kinds of concerns.
Republicans have family friendly tax reform that would cut taxes on working families and especially on parents while making the tax code more investment-friendly. Let the Democrats be the party that is forever proposing tax increases on high earners and nothing for everybody else while Republican can be the party of the middle-class tax cut, working families and growth.
Yuval Levin has proposed reducing old age benefits for lifetime high earners. The details are open for debate, but the principle is sound. The safety net should be for the vulnerable and we shouldn’t tax the middle-class (or anybody else) in order to provide benefits to people who do not needs them. The Republicans can offer the electorate a deal. We will tax you all less (relative to the Democrats) but we will keep the safety net for the vulnerable. Democrats want to tax you more because they think you are too stupid and greedy to maintain the safety net if we aren’t giving benefits to people who don’t needs them.
By making the health insurance tax exclusion a flat refundable tax credit, Republicans could propose a plan that would make health insurance affordable to people who end up outside of the employer-provided health care system. A system of reinsurance pools could help those with preexisting conditions much more cheaply and transparently than Obamacare and with far fewer burdens on everyone else.
Let the Republicans be the party of lower middle-class taxes, a more rational and sustainable welfare state and lower health care premiums combined with health insurance security. Then we might see a country class revolt that includes many current Democrats.
February 24th, 2013 | 5:58 pm
[...] Angelo Codevilla described the revolt of the Republican “country class” in which Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination and Ronald Reagan eventually won the presidency. Codevilla traces the divisions within the Republican party to the New Deal where the Bob Taft wing opposed big government while the Rockefeller wing wanted Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
February 24th, 2013 | 9:19 pm
None of the boring proposals you mention come close to being enough. Until and unless the GOP gets seriously, intelligently “populist” anti-crony-capitalism and is able to present why TARP and the whole TBTF notion flow naturally from the very worst sort of Big Government-Big Business incest, they aren’t going to be able to attract any Dem voters. You seem to have either missed this critical part of the linked essay, or to be massively underestimating its importance. The Dems and the MSM have done too good a job painting the 2008 meltdown as the result of the “unregulated free market” (HA! times a million) and that we were “saved” by Obama’s policies (I honestly don’t know whether to put HA! times a billion here, or SOB! times a billion), and nothing you write even attempts to set the record straight.
The country-club GOP is massively implicated in all of this, of course. Romney personified the worst possible image the GOP could have put forward. Yeah, all the other candidates running against him were jokes, but man, oh man, was he a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate, as I said over and over last year.
February 24th, 2013 | 9:52 pm
A prime example of the idiocy of the DC GOP is their prioritization of opposition to the new cabinet appointees. Sure, they’ve made it quite clear that the new Defense Secretary is a subliterate moron, but as far as the public knows, it’s just the GOP being mad at someone in their party who opposed the Iraq War. Yeah, it’s important to oppose a Jew-hating buffoon for a major government position, but this fight was never going to be victorious, and is only reinforcing hugely negative party baggage.
Far better would be to focus all attention on the new Treasury Secretary, and make it clear that no one with such a resume based on pure cronyism and the Wall Street-DC axis will be tolerated for such a position. Now THAT’S a battle that might be winnable, and even if they didn’t prevail, some points might be scored.
February 25th, 2013 | 8:27 am
Pete, isn’t the problem with cutting off old-age benefits for high earners is that they paid for them? Social Security and Medicaid are true entitlements, in that they are what what one paid for and is therefore entitled to as a right. Much of what we term entitlements are welfare payments. That Americans feel entitled to them is absurd in comparison.
February 25th, 2013 | 8:43 pm
Kate, plans differ but two points:
1) Life time high earners wouldn’t get nothing. Even high earners have things go wrong for them sometimes so they would be entitled to some benefit as an emergency measure. They would just get somewhat less than those with lower life time earnings.
2) I picture these reforms being phased-in for future retirees (some plans include faster phase-ins.) This would offer people a deal. You can either pay a lot more taxes during your working life (when you might or might not be a life time high earner based on a lot of factors), and retire to an unreformed system in a poorer America, or you can pay lower taxes during your working life and if you make a lot of money during your working years you will get a somewhat lower benefits when you retire.
This of course not getting into the idea that most people who make it to retirement will draw more in benefits than they pay in etc. since it wouldn’t effect current retirees. I have sympathy for current retirees who reject that argument for three reasons:
1. They did plan their retirements around the current system.
2. They feel like they can’t go back to work and support themselves so that any argument that protects their benefits will do. Who was it that said that you can’t convince somebody when their paycheck depends on their not being convinced?
3. They are trying to maintain a sense of dignity in the face of arguments than make them feel like moochers when they only spent their lives following the rules.
February 26th, 2013 | 10:36 am
They paid all their working lives for the benefit. As I said, what you are proposing is converting an entitlement program to a welfare program. In that case, people are not paying a contribution to fund their benefits, but taxes to redistribute their proceeds of their productive lives. I am not seeing in other people’s arguments that this will happen to another generation, but that this must happen very soon, because there are too many draws on the current entitlement programs. Did you know that in the case of a man who was married more than once (for more than X years – 14, maybe?) and dies then not only his eligible widow, but his former wives can claim half of his survivor benefits? I am not even sure he has to die, now that I think about it.
February 26th, 2013 | 7:25 pm
Kate, future retirees would not have “paid all their working lives for the benefit.” They would have exchanged paying lower taxes during their working lives for somewhat lower (but not zero) benefits if they end up as high earners when their working lives are over. What you describe would be a reasonable complaint from current retirees, but not in a phased-in system.
” In that case, people are not paying a contribution to fund their benefits”
To some extent they surely are because:
a) Nobody get zero who pays in – unless you die young of course.
b) There is little guarantee that any particular person will be a high earner over the course of their working life as markets change and old skill become obsolete.
So you have a safety net program rather than one that overtaxes in order to overspend on people who don’t actually need the money.
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