In their tem­pes­tu­ous pri­ma­ry, Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial aspi­rants have cam­paigned as if they were com­pet­ing in an extreme real­i­ty TV show called ​“How Far Right Can You Go?” While pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry can­di­dates tra­di­tion­al­ly play to the party’s hard­core believ­ers before the win­ner moves to the cen­ter for the gen­er­al elec­tion, can­di­dates this year have crawled much far­ther into the swamps of right-wing beliefs, fears, hatreds and vin­dic­tive solu­tions than at any time in recent history.

On major issues of class power and benefits, all the Republican hopefuls are united and far to the right. How did the GOP become a party of reactionary politics?

In their fight to be deemed tru­ly con­ser­v­a­tive, almost all have called for deep­er tax cuts for cor­po­ra­tions and the rich (dis­re­gard­ing their jere­mi­ads about deficits), for boost­ing mil­i­tary spend­ing while dras­ti­cal­ly shrink­ing fed­er­al gov­ern­ment (if only they could remem­ber which parts), and for wip­ing out new reg­u­la­tions of finan­cial mar­kets or for any envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion. They would repeal the new Afford­able Care health insur­ance and begin pri­va­ti­za­tion of both Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare. And they would deport all – or most – undoc­u­ment­ed workers.

But in their efforts to out-flank all com­pe­ti­tion from the Right, the can­di­dates embraced even kook­i­er posi­tions as well: end­ing child labor laws (Gin­grich), arrest­ing judges and abol­ish­ing fed­er­al court dis­tricts that vio­late right-wing prin­ci­ples (Gin­grich, again), erect­ing elec­tric fences on the Mex­i­can bor­der (Cain), and occa­sion­al­ly deny­ing sep­a­ra­tion of church and state (Bach­mann). And beyond Ron Paul’s not-so-old racist newslet­ters, he oppos­es key civ­il rights leg­is­la­tion, he sup­ports a gold stan­dard and has been close­ly tied to white suprema­cists, John Birchers and much of the worst of the old Right.

Rom­ney, still the favorite to win the nom­i­na­tion after his eight-vote mar­gin of vic­to­ry in the Iowa cau­cus­es, may once have been a mod­er­ate Repub­li­can, but he has since repu­di­at­ed those posi­tions. On major issues of class pow­er and ben­e­fits, as well as most social issues, all the Repub­li­can hope­fuls are unit­ed and far to the right.

This pri­ma­ry spec­ta­cle rais­es ques­tions about how and why the Repub­li­cans have devolved so dra­mat­i­cal­ly over near­ly four decades into a par­ty of extreme reac­tionary pol­i­tics. Why have they been so suc­cess­ful when polling shows sub­stan­tial majori­ties of the pub­lic oppose their stands on many key issues? Accord­ing to the Pew Research Cen­ter, despite wide­spread skep­ti­cism about gov­ern­ment and tax­a­tion, most Amer­i­cans favor increased tax­es – espe­cial­ly on the rich – plus spend­ing cuts to reduce deficits, pro­tec­tion of Medicare and Social Secu­ri­ty, strong envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and alter­na­tives to car­bon fuels, and a path to cit­i­zen­ship for undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants. Put sim­ply, how did the GOP win as much as it has while becom­ing so much more con­ser­v­a­tive than the country?

Tea Par­ty charades

The emer­gence of the Tea Par­ty, fol­lowed by record Repub­li­can midterm vic­to­ries, makes the move right seem a response to pop­u­lar pres­sure. It’s true that Tea Par­ty agi­ta­tion has often effec­tive­ly shaped news media polit­i­cal nar­ra­tives and pushed Repub­li­cans (and some Democ­rats) right­ward. But wealthy indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness elites – not right-wing, mid­dle-class, anti-gov­ern­ment faux-pop­ulists – have pri­mar­i­ly orches­trat­ed the long-term shift.

In the 1970s, react­ing against grow­ing eco­nom­ic equal­i­ty, a prof­it squeeze dur­ing the stagfla­tion, and new reg­u­la­tion on behalf of work­ers, con­sumers and the pub­lic inter­est, both the cor­po­rate elite and rich right-wing fam­i­lies began invest­ing in build­ing an infra­struc­ture of a new ​“win­ner-take-all pol­i­tics,” which is the title of a book by polit­i­cal sci­en­tists Jacob Hack­er of Yale and Paul Pier­son of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berkeley.

These monied inter­ests under­wrote a vast expan­sion of cor­po­rate lob­by­ing for the insid­er polit­i­cal com­bat over leg­is­la­tion and reg­u­la­tions. And pow­er­ful out­side groups like Amer­i­cans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth added the threat of elec­tion chal­lenges to enforce dis­ci­pline, espe­cial­ly on cut­ting taxes.

The Repub­li­can Par­ty also devel­oped an effec­tive, if often vicious and dem­a­gog­ic, elec­tion­eer­ing style – asso­ci­at­ed with infa­mous cam­paign con­sul­tant Lee Atwa­ter. Espe­cial­ly after Gin­grich emerged as a leader in 1994, the scorched earth cam­paign­ing mor­phed into an obstruc­tion­ist, uncom­pro­mis­ing approach to leg­is­lat­ing and gov­ern­ing. The new cor­po­rate Right used deceit­ful eco­nom­ic argu­ments and loads of cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions – also to Democ­rats, when need­ed – to win these pol­i­cy goals:

• low­er taxes.

• high­er cor­po­rate subsidies.

• dereg­u­la­tion that cre­at­ed ​“mar­ket out­comes” favor­able for the few.

Very lit­tle was con­ser­v­a­tive – in the pop­u­lar sense of act­ing slow­ly and cau­tious­ly to con­serve some­thing of val­ue in tra­di­tions – about most of the new cor­po­rate agen­da, such as dereg­u­la­tion of finan­cial deriv­a­tives – ​“eco­nom­ic weapons of mass destruc­tion,” accord­ing to bil­lion­aire War­ren Buffet.

Fox pop­uli

To win a major­i­ty on behalf of their agen­da for the busi­ness elite, the new cor­po­rate Right enveloped itself in a pho­ny pop­ulism direct­ed against lib­er­al, intel­lec­tu­al elites. It encour­aged a broad range of resent­ments against the ​“unde­serv­ing,” minori­ties and undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants. Indeed, the tele­vised rant that launched the Tea Par­ty exco­ri­at­ed fore­closed-on home­own­ers as losers ask­ing for bailouts from more sober home­own­ers – though all home­own­ers would have ben­e­fit­ed if vic­tims of the burst hous­ing bub­ble had received help.

While shift­ing almost all new­ly gen­er­at­ed income to the pock­ets of the very rich, win­ner-take-all pol­i­tics stoked social resent­ments and under­cut social sol­i­dar­i­ty among those whose pock­ets were being picked. Pro­mot­ing the idea, in econ­o­mist Jared Bernstein’s words, that ​“you’re on your own” rather than, as Oba­ma said, ​“we’re in this togeth­er,” the new cor­po­rate Right obscured how much the rich ben­e­fit­ed from rig­ging the rules of the game. As Hack­er and Pier­son note, gov­ern­ment drift or inac­tion more often helps the rich and pow­er­ful. The Right wins when gov­ern­ments adopt its poli­cies and also when there’s stale­mate and obstruc­tion. But the left needs to change the sta­tus quo to make any progress.

This fact is well under­stood by Tea Partiers, who, as Har­vard social sci­en­tists The­da Skocpol and Vanes­sa Williamson write in The Tea Par­ty and the Remak­ing of Repub­li­can Con­ser­vatism, are main­ly old­er, white, rel­a­tive­ly well-edu­cat­ed and finan­cial­ly well-off Repub­li­cans. They have pre-exist­ing right-wing orga­ni­za­tion­al expe­ri­ence. Ide­o­log­i­cal­ly they split between social con­ser­vatism and libertarianism.

Tea Partiers have shift­ed the Repub­li­can Par­ty toward a more ambi­tious right-wing agen­da – and a more intran­si­gent, uncom­pro­mis­ing polit­i­cal style. They have orga­nized most effec­tive­ly at the local lev­el but also have sup­port from bet­ter-fund­ed, ​“astro­turf” nation­al groups like for­mer Rep. Dick Armey’s Free­dom Works. Yet the Tea Party’s pop­u­lar­i­ty is on the wane, even where its can­di­dates won, accord­ing to a Novem­ber Pew poll. In a year, pub­lic agree­ment with the Tea Par­ty dropped from 27 to 20 per­cent while dis­agree­ment rose from 22 to 27 per­cent (half had no opin­ion). This fall par­al­leled a decline in pub­lic approval of the Repub­li­can Par­ty (from 42 per­cent in March to 36 per­cent) that exceed­ed the slip­page in Demo­c­ra­t­ic approval (from 48 to 46 per­cent over the same peri­od). That sug­gests a grow­ing rejec­tion of the Right, even as can­di­dates take more hard­line positions.

Democ­rats have been too often com­plic­it in wag­ing this war on behalf of the cor­po­rate class, as they too have drift­ed right, becom­ing depen­dent on cor­po­rate polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions and declar­ing ​“the era of big gov­ern­ment is over,” as Pres­i­dent Clin­ton did in Jan­u­ary 1996. Democ­rats have done a sor­ry job of expos­ing how the Repub­li­can Right is serv­ing the 1%, part­ly because they have been doing the same thing. They have nei­ther designed poli­cies to make the state vis­i­ble in people’s lives nor pro­mot­ed government’s pos­i­tive role and high­ly effec­tive performance.

Today’s Repub­li­can Par­ty increas­ing­ly embraces a strain of right-wing thought that Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Mark Lil­la, writ­ing in the New York Review of Books, describes as ​“redemp­tive reac­tion” and ​“apoc­a­lyp­tic.” Such reac­tionar­ies, he writes, ​“think the only way for­ward is to destroy what his­to­ry has giv­en us and wait for a new order to emerge from the chaos.” The first step in block­ing the ongo­ing right­ward march of the Repub­li­cans is cre­at­ing a stronger move­ment and bet­ter infra­struc­ture to pro­vide a per­sua­sive alter­na­tive from the left, includ­ing a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty that is tru­ly com­mit­ted to the 99 percent.