Republican Party

The Republican Party is presented as both the electoral vehicle for populist fundamentalist mobilization and an example of the reversals that unsettle familiar accounts of American party politics. The book emphasizes a gap between political labels and governing practice: Republican affiliation does not prevent policies associated with a larger federal state or intervention abroad.

Electoral and Political Position

In the United States’ two-party system, the book identifies Republicans with red and Democrats with blue, and notes that populist fundamentalists vote Republican. It finds an irony in the older anti-Communist slogan “Better dead than red!”: red once signified left-wing popular mobilization, but the book detects a continuity of that mobilizing stance in Christian fundamentalist grassroots politics, now attached to the Republican Party. The point is not that the movements are identical, but that a form of popular antagonism can persist as its political alignment changes.

Governing Practice and Reversal

The book argues that the parties’ customary roles are, in important respects, almost reversed. Republican administrations spend heavily, produce a record budget deficit, strengthen the federal state in practice, and pursue global interventionism. By contrast, the Democratic Party is associated with fiscal restraint and, under Clinton, the elimination of the budget deficit. The comparison makes governing conduct, rather than party labels alone, the test of political identity.

The contrast also extends to social and economic policy. The book describes Democrats, like Tony Blair’s government in the United Kingdom, as commonly advancing a neoliberal agenda that includes reducing the welfare state, lowering taxes, and privatization. Against this pattern, George W. Bush proposed legalizing the status of millions of undocumented Mexican workers and making healthcare more accessible to retired people. These examples qualify any simple equation of Republican politics with a uniformly small federal government or an unchanged conservative policy program.

Significance in the Book’s Argument

The Republican Party matters here as part of a broader claim about how political antagonisms and governing positions can be displaced or recombined. Grassroots fundamentalist campaigns take up a mode of popular mobilization associated with the radical Left, even as they support Republicans; meanwhile, the parties’ policy conduct unsettles their inherited reputations. The resulting irony is structural: an oppositional political style can migrate across ideological boundaries without erasing the differences between the movements that use it.