These populists seek to defend what the French call “acquired rights”—health care, pensions, and other programs that benefit older people—against bankers and technocrats who endlessly demand austerity; against migrants who make new claims and challenge accustomed ways; against a globalized market that depresses wages and benefits. In the United States, they lean Republican because they fear the Democrats want to take from them and redistribute to Americans who are newer, poorer, and in their view less deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in candidate Barack Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008. Yet they have come to fear more and more strongly that their party does not have their best interests at heart.
..It was these pessimistic Republicans who powered the Tea Party movement of 2009 and 2010. They were not, as a rule, libertarians looking for an ultraminimal government. The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients. The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”
.. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.
.. Last February, three of the party’s most important moneymen—the fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, the health-care investor Mike Fernandez, and the national finance chair of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, Spencer Zwick—publicly urged the GOP to push ahead toward more-open immigration. “America should be a destination for hardworking immigrants from all over the world,” said Puzder, an advocate of importing more low-skilled laborers to meet the needs of his high-turnover industry. Zwick said that any presidential candidate who wanted to be taken seriously had better “be in a similar place” to Jeb Bush on the immigration issue.
.. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.” True, Cruz’s carefully selected words on immigration leave open the possibility of guest-worker programs or other pro-employer reforms after a burst of border enforcement.
.. Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters.
.. Remember that Republican voters care more about aligning government with their values of work and family than they care about cutting the size of government as an end in itself. Recognize that the gimmick of mobilizing the base with culture-war outrages stopped working at least a decade ago.
The Counter Establishment is now nearly as financially flush and institutionally entrenched as the mainstream establishment. Cruz has been able to tap into it to raise gobs of money. In the third quarter, Cruz raised $12.2 million, about twice what rival Marco Rubio raised over the same period. His super PACs raised $31 million in the few weeks of his campaign, largely from hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. He’s had fund-raisers hosted by Joseph Konzelmann, a managing director at Goldman Sachs.
.. As Eliana Johnson of National Review put it, the paradox of Cruz is that “The man who boasts of his ideological purity is perhaps the most obviously tactical candidate.”
.. Ted Cruz is surging as the figurehead of the rich and interlocked Counter Establishment. And he gets to do it while pretending that he is antiestablishment. That’s a nice trick. Even a Machiavellian one.
From the outside, Boehner often looked like a weak Speaker who was letting his most conservative members — roughly forty to sixty congressmen — push him around and recklessly use government shutdowns and potential debt defaults as bargaining tools in negotiations with the White House. But inside the House Republican conference, conservatives had the opposite view: that Boehner was a tyrant who ran the House with little input from members.
.. So far, Ryan’s plan for avoiding the Young Guns jinx has been to mollify the Freedom Caucus—to make the underclass feel like they are part of the governing establishment of the House. Some Republicans are skeptical it will ever work—or else they worry that it will work all too well. “Is Ryan’s Speakership going to break up their power or embolden them?” one frustrated House Republican aide said. “ They want changes in the process.… But if you bring four hundred and thirty-five people to that table of negotiations you are never going to get something that comprehensive. The thing to understand about the Freedom Caucus is that they don’t want any government.”
No, Mrs. Fiorina hasn’t won elected office before, but she is not an anti-establishment figure. She’s a businesswoman whose views fit within the mainstream of the party.
She is similar in many ways to the party’s last nominee, Mitt Romney, even down to the fact that both lost Senate races in heavily blue states. The important exception is that he also won one election before running for president (for Massachusetts governor). Every recent national survey has shown her faring best among affluent and well-educated Republicans. There was even a Fox poll that showed her earning no support among respondents making less than $50,000.
.. If she winds up fading in the polls — and indeed, she has already lost ground since the last debate — it’s quite possible that many of her supporters will drift toward an establishment candidate like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or even John Kasich.