The Republican reason is more interesting and long-lasting. The reason the Republican Party is clinging to President Trump is because it has not been able to overcome the problem of collective action.
They’ve known for nine years that they’d be better off without Trump, but they also knew that anyone who tried to make that happen risked angering voters. As a result, individual politicians continue to retreat to the same strategy. He remains silent on the sidelines, hoping that fate will intervene or someone will muster up the courage to remove him. This is morally ineffective and inefficient.
But pointing this out isn’t very helpful. Because bad collective action problems are rarely overcome by moral exhortations. We solve the problem by creating institutions that provide the right incentives.
Unfortunately, America’s ability to build institutions has been undermined by internal failures and external challenges. Of course, that’s how we ended up at odds with Trump in the first place.
In the 1960s, our culture took a hard turn against institutional authority. The most spectacular and memorable examples of this arose from the left-wing counterculture, but the libertarian and populist currents on the right were also anti-institutional in important ways. That right belonged to prosperous religious groups.
In politics, these trends led to good governance reforms and the gradual dissolution of political parties as decision-making bodies. In the primary election, the choice of candidates was left to voters. Congressional reform began by decentralizing power to a small number of powerful committee chairs, giving them various ways to broker legislative deals, and to hold them accountable for failing to broker them. became difficult. Campaign finance reform has weakened the role of political parties as sources of campaign funding, forcing individual politicians to rely more heavily on outside donors and activist groups, and at the same time forcing political parties to discipline corrupt elected officials. ability was also limited.
Today’s Republican Party looks less like a political party and more like a collection of hundreds of political entrepreneurs. Although they may all operate under the same franchise license, their ties to other franchisees are weak and it is difficult for them to have an interest in managing a larger corporate brand.
All of this has been made worse by other good governance reforms. Parliament’s work is increasingly being shown on camera, making it look like a long TV commercial. This is part of the second factor weakening our institutions, a series of technological changes that are upending them and turning them inside out.
Private deliberation is replaced by public performance, which is great for discussion but terrible for making deals. Cable has an insatiable demand for content.His news has made it easier for lawmakers to appear on camera, and social media has made it easier for their words to spread. As a result, politicians increasingly treat their offices as platforms for building their personal brands, rather than as places to work with other politicians to pass legislation.
Social media has also made it easier for the masses to bypass gatekeepers, ignore institutional norms, and launch coordinated attacks on those in authority. On the left, this has taken the form of progressive revolts in newspapers, universities, and left-wing nonprofit organizations. On the right, it takes the form of voting for Trump, whose main selling point is that he won’t let anyone tell him what to do.
These technological changes undermined the functioning of key institutions and further exacerbated the erosion of their moral authority. To be fair, this collapse is also rooted in failures made even more obvious by social media attention. Trump might not have gotten this far if the Republican establishment hadn’t taken its own base for granted. The party could have spent less time on geopolitical grand strategy and more time on good governance. You’ll spend less time talking to your donors and more time actually listening to your constituents.
But as I say, accusations are mostly meaningless. We are in the situation we are in now, and Trump is in the situation we are in now. In short, he is ready to do more damage to his party and country. Until the Republican Party overcomes the forces organized against institutional unity and finds some way to come together as a party and remove him, we will be stuck with redistricting.