The GOP attracts voters emotionally, not intellectually. This is why the incoherence works. Kepp voters riled up with false claims and emotional appeals in order to get votes. Voters don't care about coherence or even truth. It is mind boggling to me that after all the failed law suits and the complete lack of evidence that a majority of republican voters believe that there was massive voter fraud. Democrats are not going to overcome this with rational policy arguments. I fear we're doomed.
You have to also understand the following: As the New Deal coalition dies away, the Democratic Party has died away in lots of the rural areas of America. The county I live in hasn't voted for a Democrat since FDR in 1936, but there are countless times it has voted for a Democrat in a statewide race. Now, however, the only side that is heard in much of American rural areas is Republican.
These are areas in which we no spray for Democrats.
Further, because he was born and went to high school at an area school is the person of James Watt. He took over the Interior Department with the idea to undermine its mission. I can see a definite coherence in saying that the preference would be to eliminate the Department of Education legislatively. But, since the filibuster lives, and Democrats won't let us do that, we should put people in charge (Betsy DeVos) who will undermine it enough to make it more amenable to conservative ends.
I think its true that the Republicans have often manipulated social conservatives to protect the prerogatives of high earners but the radicalism and arrogance of liberals in pushing their agenda from the 1960s to the present--often through judicial fiat or bureaucratic initiative--has played a role as well. This, coupled with an aggressive monitoring of the discourse that rules ever more opinions out-of-bounds, is a major driver of the negative partisanship that works like acid on our democracy.
* On the point about intellectual doings and more specifically The Distribution of Knowledge in Society:
As an anthropologist specializing in politics and ideology, I have long wondered how the public relates to the intellectual production of ideas--but it is not easy to get a comprehensive picture of the distribution of knowledge in society. In the immediate connection here, I often wonder how many of the general public members of Catholic church parishes today, even know who Patrick Deneen, or Adrian Vermeule or Sohrab Ahmari (or--going a bit further back in time, Alasdair MacIntyre) are, much less what these thinkers stand for and prescribe. Back in the early days of Marxism, I believe I have heard about people meeting and discussing Marx's very complex writings (as if these were religious tracts), but I think that may have been a "special moment" that has not continued, and seems not very common. My very educated British niece does not know who John Locke was or what his contribution was to politics. My very Right-wing Trumpist cousin in the US, who has a PhD in Biochemistry, is virulently opposed to what he considers the Democrat's "socialism" but he cannot define what socialism is (when I asked him to define it, he said it is "when the government takes his money", by which I think he meant: just being taxed). Just yesterday, two local Social Democrats, again--generally educated young men, knocked on my door to get me to go out and vote (I will), and in our subsequent conversation, I realized that these two very committed people had no idea what the concept of "state capture" is, and no idea about Trump's attempt at state capture through his "Schedule F" plan (a "Deep State" of his own, reported in, among other places, Jonathan Swan's investigative reporting in Axios--and that is journalism, not even "high intellectual" philosophical production). These two also seemed to have no idea about how--once upon a time--opprobrium of elites was registered by the Further Left (as in the tract "The Professional Managerial Class" by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in Radical America, Vol 11 (2), March/April 1977 -- https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1125403552886481.pdf )--this before that orientation was taken by whatever happened to Kansas, and before Trumpist-style populism.
To be fair--there is a lot to know--and it is hard for any one person or group to master it all--but, there also seems to be a lot of basic ignorance out there--and that can make for incoherence.
* As for Reconfigurings of Received Classifications:
On top of it all, there does seem to be reconfiguring within parties (if not their devolvement, as noted for example in "The Partys Over by Jan-Werner Muller - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n10/jan-werner-mueller/the-party-s-over ) and reconfiguring of the traditional Left/Right spectrum, practically rendering these labels and concepts defunct as a way of classifying things (as many have already noted--and arguably the Left/Right spectrum changed enormously when the problem of inequality shifted from a focus on economic/class to a focus on identity/recognition starting back in the 1960's). Can we say of the militias who are supportive of Trump that they are Conservatives? Is Antifa Leftist? And--in connection to my point above about the Ehrenreich's statement: how did the Left generally lose the working class, which they once championed as an emblematic feature of the Leftist essence, as many analysts have been warning the Democrats about for some time (as in, for example: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial by Michael Lind, and the assorted analyses of David Shor or Ruy Teixeira).
***
* Increase in Social Complexity
The plethora of things to know, the reconfiguring of parties, and of political sectors, along with institutional lag (inability of institutions to keep up with fast changes on the ground), and breakdowns of received boundaries (as with the changes in traditional classifications of gender), are all manifestations, in my view, of what in my business is called the continuous increase in social complexity (which I defined in a previous comment on this site) and this increase is, in a way natural in human societal development, yet very hard to control (although given to some degree of management). But increased social complexity yields multifaceted types of incoherence and we have to expect this as a staple feature of our times. Perhaps we need a kind of "Incoherence Studies" to deal with it.
So the right remains effectively committed to diametrically contrary propositions, aiming both to destroy the administrative state and deploy it for its own ends.
Contrary? How else do you achieve the mass clientelism necessary to maintain the cash flow and undying loyalty.
The GOP attracts voters emotionally, not intellectually. This is why the incoherence works. Kepp voters riled up with false claims and emotional appeals in order to get votes. Voters don't care about coherence or even truth. It is mind boggling to me that after all the failed law suits and the complete lack of evidence that a majority of republican voters believe that there was massive voter fraud. Democrats are not going to overcome this with rational policy arguments. I fear we're doomed.
You have to also understand the following: As the New Deal coalition dies away, the Democratic Party has died away in lots of the rural areas of America. The county I live in hasn't voted for a Democrat since FDR in 1936, but there are countless times it has voted for a Democrat in a statewide race. Now, however, the only side that is heard in much of American rural areas is Republican.
These are areas in which we no spray for Democrats.
Further, because he was born and went to high school at an area school is the person of James Watt. He took over the Interior Department with the idea to undermine its mission. I can see a definite coherence in saying that the preference would be to eliminate the Department of Education legislatively. But, since the filibuster lives, and Democrats won't let us do that, we should put people in charge (Betsy DeVos) who will undermine it enough to make it more amenable to conservative ends.
I think its true that the Republicans have often manipulated social conservatives to protect the prerogatives of high earners but the radicalism and arrogance of liberals in pushing their agenda from the 1960s to the present--often through judicial fiat or bureaucratic initiative--has played a role as well. This, coupled with an aggressive monitoring of the discourse that rules ever more opinions out-of-bounds, is a major driver of the negative partisanship that works like acid on our democracy.
* On the point about intellectual doings and more specifically The Distribution of Knowledge in Society:
As an anthropologist specializing in politics and ideology, I have long wondered how the public relates to the intellectual production of ideas--but it is not easy to get a comprehensive picture of the distribution of knowledge in society. In the immediate connection here, I often wonder how many of the general public members of Catholic church parishes today, even know who Patrick Deneen, or Adrian Vermeule or Sohrab Ahmari (or--going a bit further back in time, Alasdair MacIntyre) are, much less what these thinkers stand for and prescribe. Back in the early days of Marxism, I believe I have heard about people meeting and discussing Marx's very complex writings (as if these were religious tracts), but I think that may have been a "special moment" that has not continued, and seems not very common. My very educated British niece does not know who John Locke was or what his contribution was to politics. My very Right-wing Trumpist cousin in the US, who has a PhD in Biochemistry, is virulently opposed to what he considers the Democrat's "socialism" but he cannot define what socialism is (when I asked him to define it, he said it is "when the government takes his money", by which I think he meant: just being taxed). Just yesterday, two local Social Democrats, again--generally educated young men, knocked on my door to get me to go out and vote (I will), and in our subsequent conversation, I realized that these two very committed people had no idea what the concept of "state capture" is, and no idea about Trump's attempt at state capture through his "Schedule F" plan (a "Deep State" of his own, reported in, among other places, Jonathan Swan's investigative reporting in Axios--and that is journalism, not even "high intellectual" philosophical production). These two also seemed to have no idea about how--once upon a time--opprobrium of elites was registered by the Further Left (as in the tract "The Professional Managerial Class" by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in Radical America, Vol 11 (2), March/April 1977 -- https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1125403552886481.pdf )--this before that orientation was taken by whatever happened to Kansas, and before Trumpist-style populism.
To be fair--there is a lot to know--and it is hard for any one person or group to master it all--but, there also seems to be a lot of basic ignorance out there--and that can make for incoherence.
* As for Reconfigurings of Received Classifications:
On top of it all, there does seem to be reconfiguring within parties (if not their devolvement, as noted for example in "The Partys Over by Jan-Werner Muller - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n10/jan-werner-mueller/the-party-s-over ) and reconfiguring of the traditional Left/Right spectrum, practically rendering these labels and concepts defunct as a way of classifying things (as many have already noted--and arguably the Left/Right spectrum changed enormously when the problem of inequality shifted from a focus on economic/class to a focus on identity/recognition starting back in the 1960's). Can we say of the militias who are supportive of Trump that they are Conservatives? Is Antifa Leftist? And--in connection to my point above about the Ehrenreich's statement: how did the Left generally lose the working class, which they once championed as an emblematic feature of the Leftist essence, as many analysts have been warning the Democrats about for some time (as in, for example: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial by Michael Lind, and the assorted analyses of David Shor or Ruy Teixeira).
***
* Increase in Social Complexity
The plethora of things to know, the reconfiguring of parties, and of political sectors, along with institutional lag (inability of institutions to keep up with fast changes on the ground), and breakdowns of received boundaries (as with the changes in traditional classifications of gender), are all manifestations, in my view, of what in my business is called the continuous increase in social complexity (which I defined in a previous comment on this site) and this increase is, in a way natural in human societal development, yet very hard to control (although given to some degree of management). But increased social complexity yields multifaceted types of incoherence and we have to expect this as a staple feature of our times. Perhaps we need a kind of "Incoherence Studies" to deal with it.
(Sorry again for the long post).
So the right remains effectively committed to diametrically contrary propositions, aiming both to destroy the administrative state and deploy it for its own ends.
Contrary? How else do you achieve the mass clientelism necessary to maintain the cash flow and undying loyalty.