Today’s Republicans

Today’s G.O.P. is the party Ronald Reagan built, a party that always sees government as the problem, not the solution; people who’ve spent decades steeped in that mind-set just can’t wrap their minds around the idea of using government spending, not tax cuts, to solve a problem. This presents a serious political problem since Republicans will never have solutions to problems that the country faces. For smart Republicans like McConnell is no dummy.  They witnessed how all of the objections to solutions like the Affordable Care Act helped swing voters away from Regan/government is the problem thinking to looking to government for solutions to other problems.  More and more people are willing to support government when government acts effectively.  The divide between political polls becomes blurred when people can choose between good, effective, problem solving government and government by party lines. Once voters see the government do something well, they worry, the public will be more inclined to have it do other things they don’t want it to do, like reducing poverty and curbing the accumulation of wealth at the top. To be fair, the Biden team has the same belief: it wants to use the popularity of its pandemic response to advance a broad center-left agenda.  If Biden manages to convince the holdouts like Manchin to go along with his agenda odds are Republican obstruction will end up empowering the very things the G.O.P. wants to avoid, just as it did on stimulus. Republicans might appear to have a plan to protect republicanism but because Republicans are too fixed in their orthodoxy to take advantage of opportunities to be a part of solutions they will continue to face declining membership and declining power.