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Where’s the beef: ideology or results?

A recent statistical study shows that GOP advocates routinely follow a predictable commitment to abstract conservative ideology. Democrats, instead, create a “big tent” coalition serving many interest groups that lack a common ideological doctrine.

The Democratic Party’s character as a social group coalition fosters a relatively pragmatic, results-oriented style of politics in which officeholders are rewarded for delivering concrete benefits to target groups in order to address specific social problems. Republicans, in contrast, are more likely to forge partisan ties based on common ideological beliefs, encouraging party officials to pursue broad rightward shifts in public policy. As a result, Republican voters and activists . . . prize symbolic demonstrations of ideological purity and pressure their party leaders to reject moderation and compromise (*23).

This asymmetry became consequential when, in 1928, President Hoover conformed to traditional GOP economic ideology and failed to ease the Great Recession. Elected by a landslide, FDR’s (1932-33) economic recovery plan, the New Deal, set into motion transformations in government and the wellbeing of citizens that are still with us.

These progressive reforms expanded on policies that first arose during the US Progressive Era (1890s-1920s: policies dealing with industrialization, corruption, and urbanization). New Deal Progressive reforms “played a central role in cementing the Democratic Party’s claim to be the party of the people, especially the ‘little people’ (†363).”

FDR immediately proposed emergency legislation for government cutbacks, farm relief and credit, taxing beer and wines, regulation of securities transactions, creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, protections against mortgage foreclosures, regulating railroad monopolies, creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the National Industrial Recovery Act. New agencies were instituted to promote government-entrepreneurial cooperation, control farm over-production, and to raise prices, employment, and wages. Other changes addressed refinancing home and farm mortgages, and facilitating trade unions and collective bargaining.

He also initiated the Social Security system, pledging to have the overprivileged pay their fair share, and lifting up the underprivileged. This elicited GOP ideological accusations of ‘class warfare’ and eventually led to the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers to denounce the New Deal. The National Recovery Administration’s (NRA) policies against monopolies, governing collective bargaining, minimum wages and maximum hours for workers were opposed by GOP ideologues, and SCOTUS struck it down in 1935 (seven years into the Depression).

To cover the repeal of the NRA, FDR responded with what’s been called a ‘Second New Deal’. He guided through Congress the Social Security Act, the Wagner Labor Relations Act (collective bargaining), and a substantial tax increase on the wealthy. Even artists were covered: The Federal Art Project (1935), part of the Work Progress Administration (WPA), funded visual artists (for art/images in public places), and promoted traveling art shows. He advocated cradle to grave social security for farmers and industrial workers and created jobs through the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

These Progressive, pragmatic initiatives were predictably opposed by the ideological right (GOP); but FDR’s popularity and enthusiastic public approval of New Deal successes ensured his re-election (4 times). His Progressive innovations “achieved revolutionary changes in the relationship between government and business, business and labor, and in the growth of a new middle class that embraced many more Americans of both genders and all races and ethnic backgrounds” (†380).

Following Truman, Republican Eisenhower also continued New Deal programs in return for congressional cooperation in foreign affairs and defense policy, believing that “[s]hould any political party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in political history” (‡73). Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I and II also continued these popular programs. However, “[f]or too long, Republicans have promised to shrink the size of government without fully acknowledging that fulfilling this objective would entail sacrificing popular programs and benefits.” Democrats, in turn, often overlook the costs of addressing the needs of the social groups they represent (*331).

Recent political science research shows Democrats to be Progressive not Liberal (*101-102), and that ‘moderate’ GOP ideology is increasingly an oxymoron (‡; *28-29). The coalition of interests and groups under the Democratic Party has produced major and important concrete benefits for voters since the 1930s, not ongoing confrontations over abstract ideological purity: e.g., between William Buckley, John Birch Society, Tea Party, Trump disciples, and others, ‡).

Republicans’ own obsession with ideological dogmatism leads them to conclude, falsely, that Democrats also promote competing ‘leftist’ or ‘socialist’ ideologies (*329-30) rather than policies (including scientific findings rejected by GOP ideologues,*138-146) toward practical social results. “The fault lines that divide the contemporary Republican Party, and often interrupt the smooth workings of the federal government, represent the uncontained political energy generated by the collision between the party’s steadfast commitment to conservative tenets [ideology] in the abstract and its chronically limited success at putting those ideas into practice (*322).”

Sources: *Asymmetric Politics, Grossman & Hopkins, 2016; †Party of the People, Witcover, 2003; ‡A Man and His Presidents, Felzenberg, 2017.

Thomas Regelski is a emeritus distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

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