An observation on Republican Party culture

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What I'm about to say isn't really original and may even be fairly obvious, but it just struck me this morning for some reason.

The Republican Party quite simply has a more authoritarian party culture than the Democratic Party does. This isn't meant as a value judgment--plenty of countries with internally authoritarian party cultures have stronger and better-functioning multiparty democracies than the United States. It's also not meant as some sort of backhanded way of claiming that the Republicans "are authoritarians" or advocate more "statist" policies (whatever that means). I don't even mean to repeat the old "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line" saw--while that may have been true in the past, that dynamic clearly reversed this year. What I mean is simply that, once Republicans do have a candidate, and especially when they have a president, they start to treat him in a more caudillo-ish way than Democrats do their candidates and presidents.

We saw this especially clearly at the conventions last summer. Both primaries had gotten pretty negative by the end, but the Republican primary started out negative, was negative for way longer, and involved far more personal attacks on the losing contenders by the eventual nominee (and vice versa, to be fair). And yet Bernie Sanders was booed at the DNC for endorsing Clinton, and Ted Cruz was booed at the RNC for not (yet) endorsing Trump. We've seen it even more clearly since November, with the formerly staunch anti-Trumpist Jeb Bush doing a whole song and dance on Twitter about what a bold conservative leader Andrew Puzder is, even though Jeb is clearly smart enough and may even have good enough intentions to know that Puzder is the Mustapha Mond of fast food CEOs. And now John McCain has said he'll vote to confirm Rex Tillerson, even though Tillerson's connections and attitudes go against everything McCain believes on foreign policy.

So we shouldn't expect to see much resistance to Trump's policies from the McCains or Rubios of the Republican Party. Even though there's at least as much ideological daylight between them as there was between Obama and Bart Stupak or Ben Nelson in 2009, they're likely not to be nearly as dedicated moderating forces on any of Trump's policies as Stupak and Nelson were on Obamacare. This isn't because the Republicans are less ideologically diverse than the Democrats, or even because individual Republican politicians have less courage of their convictions necessarily, but because Republican Party culture morally values deference to leadership in a way that Democratic Party culture simply does not.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The GOP isn't "authoritarian" at all. The GOP isn't as conservative as it once was and it is definitely the party of Trump, no longer of Reagan. The GOP is just moving to the center on too many issues but that is overshadowed by people seeing Trump as hitler 2.0 (which is so damn absurd).

Read the OP again.

Did you forget about the 40 or go GOP congressmen that regularly vote against leadership?

No, what happened was that the bases of both parties revolted in 2016. The GOP revolt was successful, leaving the neoconservatives without a redoubt (other than the hilariously failed McMullin campaign), while the Democrat revolt was suppressed by their party's authoritarian system. Did someone forget about all but a handful of Democratic officials endorsing Hillary Clinton before anyone cast a single ballot?

GOP opposition to Puzder and Tillerson is nill because at the end of the day they do not fundamentally disagree with the GOP platform and past Cabinet nominees have required serious ethical quandries to fail confirmation. Try comparing apples to oranges next time; wait until Trump has a substantive policy battle over a long, unreadable piece of legislation to see how lockstep his party falls in line.

I'm not convinced you understood the point I was trying to make about the primaries but you're right that I hadn't considered that group of Congressmen that vote against everything from the right. I'd still maintain that the "mainstream " of the Republican Party has a more deferential attitude towards the leadership--which, again, I don't mean as a value judgment.

The idea that there aren't any ethical concerns with Puzder and Tillerson is hilarious.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Your example supports your point, but doesn't prove it. Meaning, you might inadvertently be cherry-picking: this was an atypical election, and my hypothesis is if you look back in history you can find equal amounts of these kinds of things going on in either party.

You may very well be right. This is similar to the point that mencken (characteristically forcefully) made.

Like I said in the OP, it's not really original analysis, but the fact that other people have made it doesn't necessarily mean it's correct.