An observation on Republican Party culture
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« on: January 22, 2017, 02:46:55 PM »
« edited: January 22, 2017, 10:48:34 PM by Night on the Galactic Mass Pike »

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.
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Frodo
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« Reply #1 on: January 22, 2017, 02:57:02 PM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 
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Indy Texas
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« Reply #2 on: January 22, 2017, 04:31:39 PM »

I think the faithless elector results summed it up.

Far more defections from Hillary (5 votes) than from Trump (2 votes).

When all was said and done, the Republicans "fell in line" and the Democrats did not.
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Frodo
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« Reply #3 on: January 22, 2017, 05:49:52 PM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-women-more-authoritarian-than-men-study-1710117
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WVdemocrat
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« Reply #4 on: January 23, 2017, 09:10:34 AM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

http://www.dnaindia.com/lifestyle/report-women-more-authoritarian-than-men-study-1710117

I had read somewhere that in countries with higher gender equality, men held less authoritarian views due to the social stigma attached to it. And in places with lower gender equality, women were more likely to support authoritarian views and values such as obedience as it would allow them to survive in that culture.

To the OP, the GOP clearly holds more authoritarian views than the Democratic Party. Social conservatism and authoritarianism often go hand in hand.
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mencken
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« Reply #5 on: January 23, 2017, 09:24:54 AM »

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.
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #6 on: January 23, 2017, 10:54:42 AM »

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 Smiley Smiley" 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.
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Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin
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« Reply #7 on: January 23, 2017, 10:58:18 AM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

And if the monarch pretended to be Christian, and they dressed in familiar fashions, it would be exactly what the GOP wants America to become.
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Waterfall
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« Reply #8 on: January 23, 2017, 11:49:27 AM »

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.
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World politics is up Schmitt creek
Nathan
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« Reply #9 on: January 23, 2017, 12:20:19 PM »

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.
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Mr. Morden
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« Reply #10 on: January 23, 2017, 03:05:20 PM »

I mean, ~20% of Republicans in Congress outright refused to endorse their party’s presidential nominee, while it was ~0% on the Democratic side.

I just think much of what you’re listing in the OP has to do with different ways that the elite of each party dissent, and who is included among “the elite”.  (And of course, the fact that Trump was himself an “anti-establishment” candidate, and the party’s “establishment” is still thinking about how to deal with him.)

Regarding what’s happened since Trump’s election, there is undoubtedly a “honeymoon” period, which includes the Senate GOP going along with all of Trump’s Cabinet appointments*.  But I’m not convinced that’s going to last once we move from filling the administration jobs to actual policy substance.  There’ll be issues where Trump faces as much resistance if not more as Obama faced from Stupak and Nelson.  It won’t all be “moderating” influences though, since many of the ideological splits in the party have the non-Trump forces as the ones on the right.  (And areas like foreign policy defy easy “right-left” categorization.)

* Though even during this honeymoon period, has any recent president of either party been criticized during the transition period by one of their own party members from Congress as much as Trump has been criticized by Amash?
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Waterfall
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« Reply #11 on: January 23, 2017, 04:11:26 PM »

i will say on a high level, the Dems are actually the ones who seem more authoritarian-driven overall. For example, they have these closed primaries with the party able to just change the outcome on a whim (didn't that happen to Bernie in CO?).

This is because the Dems are a coalition of many very different, even oppositional groups. The ideal candidate of, say, unskilled Hispanic immigrants is very different from the ideal candidate of, say, leftist college students, which is very different again from the ideal candidate of, say, black single moms. Without a very top-down approach, this coalition would be unwieldy and collapse.

The GOP by comparison is fairly unified and simple to run: married white taxpayers mostly want the same things and have pretty close to the same idea of an ideal candidate. (Trump was an odd exception in this case, and I don't think any Republican voter would say he was anywhere remotely close to their ideal candidate.) So the GOP leadership can be more hands-off and let the party do its thing.
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Chunk Yogurt for President!
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« Reply #12 on: January 23, 2017, 06:10:21 PM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

And if the monarch pretended to be Christian, and they dressed in familiar fashions, it would be exactly what the GOP wants America to become.

Will there ever be a time when liberals stop fretting over the nonexistent possibility of a Christian theocracy in America?
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Person Man
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« Reply #13 on: January 23, 2017, 06:57:11 PM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

And if the monarch pretended to be Christian, and they dressed in familiar fashions, it would be exactly what the GOP wants America to become.

Will there ever be a time when liberals stop fretting over the nonexistent possibility of a Christian theocracy in America?

An actual Christian Theocracy, as objectively observed by the Martians from afar, would be considered "a strong, but tolerant Trifecta" by the modern GOP.
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Chunk Yogurt for President!
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« Reply #14 on: January 23, 2017, 08:36:46 PM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

And if the monarch pretended to be Christian, and they dressed in familiar fashions, it would be exactly what the GOP wants America to become.

Will there ever be a time when liberals stop fretting over the nonexistent possibility of a Christian theocracy in America?

An actual Christian Theocracy, as objectively observed by the Martians from afar, would be considered "a strong, but tolerant Trifecta" by the modern GOP.

Was America a theocracy 50 years ago?  Because compared to 1967, the modern Republicans are hardcore social liberals.
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Person Man
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« Reply #15 on: January 23, 2017, 08:51:13 PM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

And if the monarch pretended to be Christian, and they dressed in familiar fashions, it would be exactly what the GOP wants America to become.

Will there ever be a time when liberals stop fretting over the nonexistent possibility of a Christian theocracy in America?

An actual Christian Theocracy, as objectively observed by the Martians from afar, would be considered "a strong, but tolerant Trifecta" by the modern GOP.

Was America a theocracy 50 years ago?  Because compared to 1967, the modern Republicans are hardcore social liberals.

Not really. There were many more Pro-Choice Republicans back then.
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Chunk Yogurt for President!
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« Reply #16 on: January 23, 2017, 08:54:58 PM »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

And if the monarch pretended to be Christian, and they dressed in familiar fashions, it would be exactly what the GOP wants America to become.

Will there ever be a time when liberals stop fretting over the nonexistent possibility of a Christian theocracy in America?

An actual Christian Theocracy, as objectively observed by the Martians from afar, would be considered "a strong, but tolerant Trifecta" by the modern GOP.

Was America a theocracy 50 years ago?  Because compared to 1967, the modern Republicans are hardcore social liberals.

Not really. There were many more Pro-Choice Republicans back then.

Yeah, but support for anything LGBT related was considered fringe.  Yet America in 1967 was not a theocracy.
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Tartarus Sauce
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« Reply #17 on: January 23, 2017, 10:42:27 PM »
« Edited: January 23, 2017, 10:43:58 PM by Tartarus Sauce »

I think I read somewhere that in countries with lower levels of gender inequality (like ours), men are more authoritarian than women because they feel more threatened by the increased competition.  And with our tortured history of race relations, that is especially prevalent among white men.

It is the other way around in countries and societies that are still blatantly patriarchal, like Saudi Arabia.  

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. That's as authoritarian as you can get.

And if the monarch pretended to be Christian, and they dressed in familiar fashions, it would be exactly what the GOP wants America to become.

Will there ever be a time when liberals stop fretting over the nonexistent possibility of a Christian theocracy in America?

An actual Christian Theocracy, as objectively observed by the Martians from afar, would be considered "a strong, but tolerant Trifecta" by the modern GOP.

Was America a theocracy 50 years ago?  Because compared to 1967, the modern Republicans are hardcore social liberals.

Not really. There were many more Pro-Choice Republicans back then.

Yeah, but support for anything LGBT related was considered fringe.  Yet America in 1967 was not a theocracy.

Evangelicals weren't a partisanly galvanized force either in 1967, at least not on religious issues.
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politics_king
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« Reply #18 on: January 24, 2017, 06:36:24 AM »

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.

It really comes down to this... If we're in the center, then the far right extreme part of Republicans is Fascism, the extreme part of Democrats is Communism. Both suck. Let's be frank. I think the country as a whole is really Center-Left. Economically we're centrist because you don't want to  the system up, our gold-mine is money, but socially we're left, because we don't care if you want to marry the person of same-sex or go through with abortion but we want you educated on that decision. I personally believe we'll be a 3 party system in the future. We'll have the Extreme Right, the Centrist and the Extreme Left. Centrist just want to keep it moving, we'll be like the Labour Party (but without Tony Blair) in England. Just keep the budget balanced, that's all we want.
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SATW
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« Reply #19 on: January 24, 2017, 09:07:15 AM »

Good post, Nathan. I think it's pretty on-point. I think Republicans also prefer to patch over differences behind closed doors when it comes to intraparty squabbles. This changed a bit with the Tea Party + Constitutional Conservatives, but still mostly true, I think.
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