Plutocracy trump4/16/2023 So what has Trump changed? And in what ways is he just a culmination of the trends you’ve been tracking in Republican politics? Matt Grossman: So Jacob, you say, I think in the first line that it’s not a book about Trump, but obviously we’re all thinking in that context now. And so we’ve really in the current book, I think tried to wrestle with that in a way, partly because with the election of Donald Trump, I think we like many political analysts realized that we underestimated the force of a racialized politics and the ability to run a kind of George Wallace style political movement in 21st century America. I think even though we often have been accused of being sort of shrill and alarmist in our views about the party, I don’t think actually, as we look at the evolution over the last almost two decades now, since we wrote that first book or we’re working on that first book, I think if anything, we’ve sort of underestimated the course of extremism within the party.Īnd then of course the other thing that I think we really missed in our earlier work and we’ve really tried to wrestle with in this book is the centrality of racial cleavages and racial resentment as being a critical and increasingly prominent part of the formula through which the Republican party tries to rule in a changing America. The Republican party has continued to radicalize. And so I think a lot of the puzzles that we were interested in then, we still think are really important ones to focus on.īut I think in part we wrote this book both because the world has changed and because the world has changed in ways that I think reveal much more clearly some of the things that we missed in that earlier book. I think we were right to focus on the transformation of the Republican party and the interconnection between what was happening to the Republican party and rising inequality in the United States. Paul Pierson: Well, I think we’re still at it because we believe that what we wrote then is, is still really relevant to thinking about what’s been happening in American politics. How much has changed in your thinking since then and how much has changed in the real world since then? Matt Grossmann: Paul, a lot of those themes go back to your book Off Center. And so the result is plutocratic populism, and we argue that really emerged before Donald Trump, but that Donald Trump was in a lot of ways, a product of this transformation. And to do that, it’s relied a lot on these outrage stoking groups like the NRA. So meanwhile, the party’s really had to figure out how an electoral strategy for keeping voters who are losing from rising inequality in the fold. Those policies that those are the top want aren’t very popular. And the crucial argument we make is that rising inequality has really placed the Republican party in a kind of conservative dilemma.Īnd it’s had to respond to that inequality because it is basically very closely tied to those at the top of the economic spectrum and to corporations. So we call this sort of new party, a form of plutocratic populism. So the book basically argues that the current Republican party has been reconstituted over the last generation by rising inequality and a strategy of outrage stoking that the party has adopted to try to attract voters despite that rising inequality. I asked Jacob to start with the big picture takeaways from the new book. Their books offer a side of political science that is more cohesive and more activist. The Republican party’s economic positioning really is internationally extreme and Hacker and Pierson fear it is helping undermine us democracy. In this conversational edition of the podcast, we also discuss their other books, Off Center: Winner Take All Politics and American Amnesia. Today, I talked to Jacob Hacker of Yale University and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley about their new book, addressing this puzzle, Let Them Eat Tweets. How do they get away with that? Especially in a time of rising economic inequality. Although the Republican party has run populist, culturally conservative campaigns, it’s policymaking has mainly benefited the already well-off. For the Niskanen center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Matt Grossmann: This week on the Science of Politics, how the plutocrats win from the populist right. Guests: Jacob Hacker, Yale University Paul Pierson, University of California, Berkeley In this conversational edition, we assess plutocratic populism and its consequences. The Republican Party’s economic positioning is internationally extreme and threatens to undermine U.S. In a time of rising economic inequality, how do they get away with that? Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson find that Republicans have to ramp up the outrage stoking due to their lack of broad policy appeals. The Republican Party runs populist culturally conservative campaigns, but its policymaking mainly benefits the already well-off.
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