Understanding the Republican Opposition

Republicans are mostly outside our current national elite. Republicans do dominate two parts of the elite—small business and the military. And they have pockets of strength elsewhere, including:

1. Big business. Starting in the Great Depression, big business has learned to survive by getting along with Democratic-dominated government. Big business knows how to play both sides of the aisle, however, which does help some Republicans. And some in big business, most notably brothers David and Charles Koch, even openly side with Republicans.

Here are America’s wealthiest families, based upon Forbes' survey of our wealthiest people:


And here’s what the Koch brothers, according to the Weekly Standard’s Matthew Continetti, think of Obama:

[His] silver tongue promised to build a “New Foundation” for America based on greater federal government involvement in health care, education, and energy. Taxes would be raised, regulations increased, mandates imposed to guarantee a more equitable distribution of wealth. [The Koch brothers] agreed with none of this. The larger government grows, they believed, the worse off societies become. Obama had to be stopped.

I guess to those who worry about Republican firepower, the Kochs certainly are worth a New Yorker feature article.

2. Religious America. The country’s increasing secularization is seemingly transforming itself into an alternate religion complete with its own moral code. This development unsettles believers. Religious people feel drawn to Republicans who share the believers’ concerns about where our country is headed, and who make believers feel more at home.

Here’s Canadian David Warren on North America’s new non-religion:

what makes our own society unique is not its freedom from religion but rather the peculiar nature of the religion upon which our theocracy rests. That is to say, we have an upside-down religion, in which there is no God, but that “Not God” commands an obedience more absolute than God ever required, stipulating everything from the sanctity of antinomian sexual behaviour, down to how we should sort our garbage. It rides upon an inexhaustible series of mildly fluctuating, but invariably self-contradictory moral and epistemological premises (or more precisely, conceits); and because everything is “relative,” nothing may be challenged. [One maxim:] “You must seek pleasure, and avoid pain."

3. Upstart media. What I first called “mainstream media” or MSM, and later just labeled “media,” I now prefer to call “legacy media,” like the legacy airlines, the carriers formed in an earlier era now having the most trouble adapting to deregulation. The legacy media certainly do struggle against new media in all their forms, a part of which is conservative, as opposed to conventionally liberal or solidly progressive/radical-left. One area where conservatives seem to dominate is talk radio.

Wilfred M. McClay, writing in Commentary, explains why:

Talk radio is, implicitly, talk-back radio—a medium tuned to during times of frustration, exasperation, even desperation, by people who do not find that their thoughts, sentiments, values, and loyalties are fairly or even minimally represented in the “official” media. . . Talk radio is a place where people can go to hear opinions freely expressed that they will not hear elsewhere, and where they can come away with a sense of confirmation that they are not alone, are not crazy, and are not wrong to think and feel such things. The existence of such frustrations and fears are the sine qua non of talk radio; it would not exist without them.

Three pockets of Republican support to help the U.S. flatten (i.e., disempower the elite).