Daddy, What's a Republican?

From Krugman in NYT today: "There is also, I'd suggest, an underlying cynicism that pervades the Republican elite. We're talking about a party that has long exploited white backlash to mobilize working-class voters, while enacting policies that actually hurt those voters but benefit the wealthy."

 And this from Zeynep Tufekci: " 'Jail her!' is the collective cry. It’s not an actual policy statement as much as an entertaining fiction. It’s in fact the logical outcome of a political strategy not based on policy differences but on delegitimizing President Obama, and now Hillary Clinton. The Republican establishment has used this strategy to cover over the fact that a substantial chunk of its base does not share its pro-big business, small government politics."

These two comments share a common theme - that the Republican Party at its core is an alliance of two dissimilar groups: (1) white working class and (2) wealthy business people.

Yet from Grossman and Hopkins in Asymmetric Politics, we have: "While the Democratic Party is fundamentally a group coalition, the  Republican Party can be most accurately characterized as the vehicle of an ideological movement. Most Republican voters-- and nearly all of the party's activists, financial supporters, candidates, and officeholders--identify as conservatives and voice support for the abstract values of small government and American cultural traditionalism. In contrast to the variety of single-issue interest groups and social movements that collectively constitute the activist population of the Democratic Party, Republican politics is dominated by a broadly organized, cross-issue conservative movement that now maintains control of the party apparatus. Likewise, the Republican base of support in the mass electorate is less an aggregation of conscious social groups mobilized by the activation of identity based interest than a less diverse set of voters who perceive themselves as mainstream Americans defending the values of individual liberty and traditional morality against the encroachment of left-wing-ideas."

So which is it? More to come.