![]() ![]() Voters see racial and religious dominance as political interests as compelling and legitimate as tax benefits, and the demand for politicians to reflect those underlying resentments and fears is real. Hacker and Pierson are careful to sidestep the crude version that holds that ethnic and religious division are mere distractions. Republican elites weaponize racial resentment to win voters who would otherwise vote their economic self-interest. This is their synthesis of the great economic anxiety versus racial resentment debate. Instead, they have been locked in a doom loop of escalating extremism that must be disrupted.” “In the United States, then, plutocracy and right-wing populism have not been opposing forces. “To advance an unpopular plutocratic agenda, Republicans have escalated white backlash - and, increasingly, undermined democracy,” Hacker and Pierson write. The plutocrats control economic policy, and the populists win elections by deepening racial, religious, and nationalist grievances. The key to Hacker and Pierson’s formulation is that, in the GOP, plutocracy and populism operate on different axes. Plutocratic populism presents as a contradiction - like shouted silence or carnivorous vegan. Where it’s less convincing is in its description of where “here” is: Does Trump represent the culmination of the Republican coalition or the contradictions that will ultimately tear it apart? The logic, and illogic, of plutocratic populism Hacker and Pierson call the resulting ideology “plutocratic populism,” and their book is sharp and thoughtful on how the GOP got here and the dangers of the path they’ve chosen. That’s left Republicans reliant on the second and third strategies. From Let Them Eat Tweets, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson It’s not the kind of accomplishment you can run for reelection on. For that reason, it’s one of the most unpopular bills ever to be signed into law. Donald Trump might have run as a populist prepared to raise taxes on plutocrats like, well, him, but according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the bill he signed gave more than 20 percent of its benefits over the first 10 years, and more than 80 percent of the benefits that last beyond the first 10 years, to the top 1 percent. 1 - and poll after poll showing their voting base desperate for leaders who would represent their economic interests while reflecting their cultural grievances - Republican elites have refused. Or you can try to undermine democracy itself.ĭespite endless calls for the GOP to choose door No. You can try to change the political topic, centering politics on racial, religious, and nationalist grievance. You can cease being a party built around tax cuts for the rich and try to develop an economic agenda that will appeal to the middle class. In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer three possible answers. Occupy Wall Street’s rallying cry - “We are the 99%!” - framed the math behind the conservative dilemma more directly: How do you keep winning elections and cutting taxes for the rich in a (putative) democracy where the top 1 percent went from 11 percent of national income in 1980 to 20 percent in 2016, and the bottom 50 percent fell from 21 percent of national income in 1980 to 13 percent in 2016? How do you keep your party from being buried by the 99 percent banding together to vote that income share back into their own pockets? Nishant Yonzan ![]() Romney’s 53 percent versus 47 percent split was a gentle rendering of an economy where the rich were siphoning off startling quantities of wealth. But slicing the electorate by income tax burden only makes sense if you’re wealthy enough for income taxes to be your primary economic irritant. Sure, 47 percent of Americans, in 2011, didn’t pay federal income taxes - though they paid a variety of other taxes, ranging from federal payroll taxes to state sales taxes. If anything, Romney understated the case. “Our message of low taxes doesn’t connect,” he said, a bit sadly. When Mitt Romney told a room of donors during the 2012 election that there were “47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what” because they “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it,” even though they “pay no income tax,” he was describing the conservative dilemma. Conservative politicians know the bind they’re in. Historically, conservative political parties face the problem Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls “the conservative dilemma.” How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win elections in a democracy? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens: The more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who will vote to tax them. ![]()
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