GOP Candidates Sparred Over Wealth, War and Washington Itself

Robert W. Merry

Politics, Americas

Is the Republican Party becoming overtaken by Tea-Party conservative economic populism?

After the Republicans’ presidential-nomination debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday, the focus of the pundits was almost exclusively on who won and who lost, who performed well and who didn’t, who met expectations and who fell below. That’s understandable. After all, as Mark Twain said, it’s difference of opinion that makes horse races. And I’m not inclined to ignore that aspect of the event; hence, more on that below.

But perhaps a more significant exploration would focus on what the debate tells us about the Republican Party. It tells us that the GOP has coalesced behind a strong antipathy toward what has become known as crony capitalism.

This is no small matter. The country is in crisis, as Senator Ted Cruz said in his closing remarks, and each party must establish a credible narrative outlining the nature of the crisis and an approach to attacking it. For the Democrats, the narrative is clear: The problem is an unequal distribution of money and power. The enemy is rich people. The answer is European-style democratic socialism, with the managerial elite taking on more and more power and pushing more and more programs designed to redistribute wealth and societal prerogative.

Slow economic growth and a shrinking economic pie breed such thinking among liberal-minded people, and so it’s not surprising that there isn’t much of a gap between Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, and Hillary Clinton, who seems to have totally discarded her husband’s centrist governing philosophy.

For Republicans, the narrative comes into focus through the attack on crony capitalism. It suggests that this is not a status quo party, not particularly sympathetic to the country-club ethos that once maintained such a hold on the GOP establishment. The Tea Party movement that emerged in 2010 didn’t take over the party, as some feared, but the party clearly has absorbed significant elements of the Tea Party outlook, including the feeling that big government and big business and big finance and big labor are all mired together in a sump of mutual back-scratching and corruption. The word “corruption’’ was tossed around with abandon during the debate.