Why Don't Republicans Disagree?

A very interesting post from Matt Yglesias about the lack of difference between Romney and Perry on the issues brings up a point I've thought about on occasion. I have sometimes expressed the view (though not necessarily in any recorded form) that the Democratic Party, and liberals generally, have a much more cohesive philosophy than conservatives and Republicans, namely kindness. We on the left generally like the idea of kindness, and of kindness as a big part of what guides public policy. On the other hand, the Republican Party seems split into lots of different pieces. I have this very distinct memory of a FiveThirtyEight post on the subject, that I have subsequently tried and failed to find, in which Nate Silver breaks down the Republican Party into a) religious conservatives; b) big business; c) foreign policy hawks; d) libertarians; and e) racists, with the last two groups being the smallest, a) providing the voters, b) providing the money, and c) providing a lot of the upper-level personnel. These groups, his article notes, have fairly little in common with one another. d) ought to dislike a) and c), while incidentally agreeing with b) to some degree; b) has obvious interests aligned with c) but not with a); a) ought to dislike c); and everyone ought to dislike e). So why don't we see more splits within the Republican Party? Shouldn't we see things where big business wants one thing, but the religious right wants another, and they get into a big ol' shouting match over it?


Here's my theory, more or less: the point here is that none of these groups care about very much outside of their own narrow self-interests. If the Democratic Party is the coalition of assorted groups traditionally disempowered, plus those in powerful groups sympathetic with the less fortunate, then the Republican Party is the coalition of those who have power and don't want you to take it away from them. Thus, the Democrats are united by their ideology -- kindness, fairness, equality, justice, call it what you will -- but still disparate in their interests, while Republicans have no ideology except power. So what happens is that the various power-holding groups, from mainstream churches to multinational corporations to the military, all make an alliance against those nasty liberals. The thing is, since they're all in it mainly to maintain their own power, they don't really care what the other members of their coalition are doing, until and unless their agendas start directly conflicting.* Big business is happy to ally with racists, who provide votes in the South, because, hey, they don't really care about the racism thing, they just want profit. Likewise, they'll join in with the Christian right because, well, they don't care about what goes on in people's bedrooms, but they also don't care about not caring about what goes on in people's bedrooms. Democrats are a lot of people generally united in their guiding philosophy but who disagree, for reasons more or less legitimate, about the proper way to interpret and act upon that philosophy. Republicans are a lot of people making a loose alliance to keep their power by defeating the liberals, and part of that alliance is a non-aggression pact. We don't see Republicans arguing with one another because none of them really cares enough to argue.



*Libertarians are a different story, of course. Libertarians are people with genuine political philosophies that just happen to line up with the "everyone with too much power gets to keep it" goal. So the people who want to keep their undue portion of might hijack the libertarians' philosophy, and the libertarians vote for the people who want to keep their undue portion of might by implementing libertarianism. Except, of course, that the Republicans don't practice genuine libertarianism, and the number of particularly genuine libertarians in this country is rather small; most of them are just conservatives who like pretending that conservativism isn't horrid.