Interesting Argument

Ezra Klein analyzes Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's new book that talks about how conservative parties have a conundrum. They analyze the question: How does a conservative party wedded to the interests of the wealthy continue to win votes in a democratic system dependent on majorities.  They conclude:

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. You can try to change the political topic, centering politics on racial, religious, and nationalist grievance. Or you can try to undermine democracy itself.

This is where the GOP is. Since they won't abandon tax cuts for the rich, they have to exacerbate racial tensions and undermine democracy.  Klein has a question:

 Indeed, reading Hacker and Pierson’s book, I found myself wondering whether inequality was, itself, the cause of the coalition’s collapse: Perhaps the plutocratic agenda is becoming too unpopular to even survive Republican presidential primaries. And if that’s so, is the future of the Republican Party more moderate on all fronts, or more purely ethnonationalist?

"What comes after Trump?" is the pressing question for the GOP, but it may be that the party itself has no control over this. White Nationalism is clearly where the votes are. The establishment GOP did not want Trump, but they took the tax cuts and the judges. They presume that even if they get slaughtered in November, the voters will have forgotten about Trump by 2024, if not 2022.  It worked against Obama, it can work against Biden.

The problem is that suburbanites who used to warm to the aspirational plutocratic politics of the GOP have soured immensely on the White Nationalism. Even billionaires seem willing to embrace some of Elizabeth Warren's ideas. In fact, the Reaganesque suburbs might have really been George Wallace's suburbs with a polite veneer, that has been stripped away.

As Klein and Hacker/Pierson note, the GOP has decided not to moderate its unpopular economic policies and there probably isn't a long term viable strategy to mobilize angry white men to stay in power.  The result is to undermine democracy as a whole.

This is why a vigorous voting rights act and DC "statehood" is essential in the first weeks of a Biden Administration and a Democratic Senate. I don't think the White Nationalist/Plutocrat coalition is capable of sustaining electoral success.  But as 2010, 2014 and 2016 showed, they can creep into power. Until "conservatism" redefines itself, they need to be held at bay by the easy and proper method of making sure elections represent the will of the majority.