LET THEM EAT TWEETS

How the Republicans’ embrace of economic elites threatens democracy.

Political scientists Hacker (Yale) and Pierson (Univ. of California, Berkeley) synthesize many scholarly studies and journalists’ reports to mount a compelling, though not groundbreaking, argument that what they call “plutocratic populism”—reactionary economic priorities and right-wing cultural and racial appeals—dominates the Republican Party, undermining democracy. Although Donald Trump is an exemplar of this stance, the authors maintain that Republicans bowed to the ultrawealthy long before the 2016 election. They cite, for example, the 2001 tax cuts, which benefited the rich far more than the middle class and “were sharply at odds with what the majority of voters thought the nation’s budget priorities should be.” Republicans blatantly covet backing from wealthy supporters, with Mike Pence selected as vice president partly to satisfy evangelicals, partly because of his close ties to big donors, notably the Koch brothers. Over several generations, the party’s loyalty to the wealthy caused a shift to cultural issues and outrage in order to attract voters. “The early specialists in outrage-stoking,” the authors assert, “were the Christian right and the NRA,” which both were fueled by “racial backlash.” Increasingly, Republicans have fostered a campaign of “resentment, racialization and rigging” in their pursuit of white voters. In the 2018 midterm elections, however, the party’s losses caused it to shift to “a third option”: to “make voters’ voices less relevant” by turning election rules and redistricting “into finely honed partisan weapons.” Democracy itself is a problem for Republicans “because it threatens the property and power of powerful minorities.” The interests of those wealthy minorities, the authors warn, “diverge from those of their fellow citizens,” making them “more apprehensive about democracy.” The authors are cautiously optimistic that shifting demographics may weaken Republicans’ power, but only Trump’s “decisive electoral defeat” will possibly “motivate a fundamental rethinking of the party’s priorities.”

A cogent and dispiriting contribution to the growing number of analyses of the ailing American democracy.