There are two natural approaches to help those who are falling behind. The first we’ll call the Bernie Sanders approach. Focus on economics. Provide people with money and jobs and their lifestyles will become more stable. Marriage rates will rise. Depression rates will drop.
The second should be the conservative approach. Focus on social norms, community bonds and a nurturing civic fabric. People need relationships and basic security before they can respond to economic incentives.
But Republicans have walked away from their traditional Burkean turf. The two leading Republican presidential candidates offer little more than nativism and demagogy.
Trump and Cruz Set an Ugly, Nasty Tone
Some of their lines were wicked—some of Cruz’s, at least. He’s frighteningly talented at this sort of thing, and told Trump: “I’m happy to consider naming you as V.P., and so, if you happen to be right, you can get the top job at the end of the day.”
.. The only sane response was sorrow—that this is a presidential election in the greatest democracy on earth, and that blowhards like Trump and Cruz are, for now, setting the pace and the terms in one of our two major political parties.
.. Rubio and Cruz squared off against each other just before the debate clock ran out, with Cruz calling Rubio soft on immigration and Rubio calling him soft on national defense. But it wasn’t typical political theater: It was more sneering and more savage than that—jarringly so.
Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump
His nomination would pose a profound threat to the Republican Party and conservatism, in ways that Hillary Clinton never could. For while Mrs. Clinton could inflict a defeat on the Republican Party, she could not redefine it. But Mr. Trump, if he were the Republican nominee, would.
.. If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break with and a fundamental assault on the party’s best traditions.
.. I will go further: Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it.
The Republican Party’s 50-State Solution
The Koch brothers’ have invested in such state-regulated areas as refining, chemicals, biofuels and ingredients; forest products; fertilizers; polymers and fibers. For the extractive industries, in particular, along with chemical, pharmaceutical, and lumber concerns, Republican-led deregulatory efforts can increase profits.
Wealthy liberal donors, on the other hand, are driven by ideological convictions that can be volatile and vulnerable, as Hertel-Fernandez and Skocpol put it, “to shifting donor fashions.”
.. Rob Stein, a founder of the Democracy Alliance — a “partnership” of liberal donors established in 2005 — pointed out in a phone interview that the right can tap into an embedded
structure of community-based cultural, religious, social organizations — churches, Elks, veterans halls, gun groups, local business organizations, etc. — that are gathering places with offices, meeting halls, phones and computers that can be used by activist troops for logistical and operational support.
.. It has begun to appear that the twenty-first century progressive brain is not as interested in clubs, communities and cultural sharing as the conservative brain is.
.. How, Stein asked, “could we have lost that? How does a communitarian world view lose its communitarian sense of self?”
The short answer to Stein’s question may be that the nature of political liberalism has changed.
.. The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality — what my colleague Ross Douthat calls “The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy” or “the morality of rights.” Economic liberalism – despite progress on the minimum wage – has lost salience.