Astral Codex Ten

Republican Party

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Republican Party

Article

Republican Party is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between February 09, 2021 and July 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the Republican Party represents the modal American”; “Trumpist or anti-Trumpist conservatives to split from the Republican party”; “Dear Republican Party: I hear you’re having a post-Trump identity crisis”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Democrats, Democratic Party.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 14
  • Issue count: 14
  • First seen: February 09, 2021
  • Last seen: July 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 09, 2021 · Original source
In 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to support abortion restrictions. That same year, a poll found that "only 54% of the electorate believed that the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party"; 30% thought there was no difference. As late as 2004, about equal numbers (within 5 pp) of Democrats and Republicans agreed with statements like "government is almost always wasteful and inefficient" and "immigrants are a burden on our country". Between the late 60s and early 90s, Democratic presidents deregulated the airlines and passed welfare reform; Republican presidents pushed immigration amnesties and founded the EPA.
Inline links: As late as 2004
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act threatened the Dixiecrats' key issue. It wasn't quite as simple as "Democrats were for it, Republicans were against it" - in fact, 80% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats supported it. But that year's presidential election pitted heavily pro-CRA Democrat Lyndon Johnson against anti-CRA Republican Barry Goldwater, beginning Southerners' defection to the Republican Party.
Stop for a second before reacting here. I get the impression that Klein understands he is taking a risk (not an actual risk of decreased popularity, given the givens, but some kind of metaphysical risk to his soul) by abandoning his previous attempt at a neutral stance and coming out like this. I think he feels bad about it, and that he considered not writing this chapter on that basis. I think it's very important to him that we consider the possibility that he wants to be neutral, is trying as hard as he can to be neutral, but that even from an attempted-neutral point of view he thinks the decline of the Republican Party is a threat to the stability of the country. And I think it's very important that we maintain a stance where we recognize this is a potentially true state of affairs - it really is possible that one party is much worse than the other! - and don't automatically condemn Klein for raising the possibility.
Mantic Monday: Judging April COVID Predictions
February 23, 2021 · Original source
3: This week on Metaculus: will a third-party candidate win 5%+ of the popular vote in 2024? Users say 15% chance, which I started out thinking was way too high. But they reminded me that Perot did in both '92 and '96, and if something's happened two of the last eight times it could have, maybe it's actually kind of common? Add that to the constant threats by Trumpist or anti-Trumpist conservatives to split from the Republican party, and maybe they're not crazy? I'm still betting against.
Inline links: will a third-party candidate win 5%+ of the popular vote in 2024
A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"
February 25, 2021 · Original source
Dear Republican Party:
Consciously embracing the project of fighting classism would let future Republican politicians replicate Trump’s appeal without having to stoop to his tactics. It could tie together all the fractured constituencies of the Republican party.
Aren't I just describing Democrats? No. The Democrats are a coalition of the upper class, various poor minorities, union labor, and lots of other groups. It's an easy mistake to make, because you Republicans absolutely loathe the upper class, and whenever you're talking about Democrats you focus on this group and how much you hate them. But you make the mistake of saying you hate Democrats, and then it looks like boring old partisanship. Or saying you hate the elites, and then it looks like boring old populism. Or saying you hate rootless cosmopolitans, and then it looks like boring old anti-Semitism. Or saying you hate the government, and then it looks like boring old libertarianism.
Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
The crisis of the Republican Party will turn out to have been overblown. Trump’s policies have been so standard-Republican that there will be no problem integrating him into the standard Republican pantheon, plus or minus some concerns about his personality which will disappear once he personally leaves the stage. Some competent demagogue (maybe Ted Cruz or Mike Pence) will use some phrase equivalent to “compassionate Trumpism”, everyone will agree it is a good idea, and in practice it will be exactly the same as what Republicans have been doing forever. The party might move slightly to the right on immigration, but this will be made easy by a fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor, and might be trivial if there’s a border wall and they can declare mission accomplished. If the post-Trump standard-bearer has the slightest amount of personal continence, he should end up with a more-or-less united party who view Trump as a flawed but ultimately positive figure, like how they view GW Bush. Also, I predict we see a lot more of Ted Cruz than people are expecting.
But Prediction 2 suggests I thought there was only a 50% chance Trump would win the Republican nomination. In retrospect that was way too low. I think I genuinely should feel embarrassed about this one - I put myself in the Republican Party's shoes and imagined I would reject Trump, ignoring all the evidence that actual Republicans liked him quite a lot and would probably continue to do so.
The long paragraph sort of flips in and out of making that mistake. I think I was right that the Republican Party wouldn't have some crisis about whether or not to accept Trump. But I think I was predicting that would be because (the public image of) Trump would shift towards the Republican consensus. But in fact the Republican consensus moved towards Trump. I think I got the non-crisis right, but the way it happened wrong. The Republican Party has fundamentally changed to be a paranoid victimization-narrative-based party. Trump got there first, everyone else followed, and while the details can change I don't think they're going to flip back.
Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
This happened to various small online rightist movements as farce, and then it happened to the mainstream Republican Party as tragedy.
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
Both are much more similar to each other than either to Trump. Nobody thought Trump was honestly religious, and nobody thought he was a beacon of ascetism and non-corruption. I was going to add that Trump never had any history as a competent regional administrator, but I guess people who believed his reality show persona believed he was an unusually skilled businessman, which maybe ticks that box. He didn't shed a far-right image to appeal to center-right capitalists - he kind of did the reverse - but maybe the fundamental nature of the Republican Party did that balancing act for him.
I was struck by Modi's view of Indian politics: educated elites cynically fanning racial discord so they could force minority groups to flee to them as "protectors". This is probably how Trump would describe the Democrats if he was smart enough to think of it. Of course, Modi's enemies turned it around and called Modi a populist-nationalist leader keeping a veneer of plausible deniability while inciting anger/suspicion/violence against minority groups, which is of course how the Democrats think of the Trump-era Republicans. All the most recent trends in American politics happened in India too, only ten years earlier.
Against "There Are Two X-Wing Parties"
June 09, 2022 · Original source
Relative to the US? False; both parties usually get about half of the vote, suggesting one is to the right of the median American, and the other to their left. You can probably argue that the Republican Party’s structural advantages cause both parties to be a little to the right of where they’d be without them, or that Americans’ ignorance of party platforms means you can smuggle a few points in that are slightly more extreme than what they’d endorse, but it’s going to be a small effect.
One of my least favorite political tropes is the claim that "America has two left-wing parties" or "America has two right-wing parties" or "both major parties are socialist" or however else you want frame this. The argument goes that even the Democrats aren't truly left (or even the Republicans aren't truly right), and so one side of the political spectrum completely controls discourse.
Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023
February 20, 2023 · Original source
The crisis of the Republican Party will turn out to have been overblown. Trump’s policies have been so standard-Republican that there will be no problem integrating him into the standard Republican pantheon, plus or minus some concerns about his personality which will disappear once he personally leaves the stage. Some competent demagogue (maybe Ted Cruz or Mike Pence) will use some phrase equivalent to “compassionate Trumpism”, everyone will agree it is a good idea, and in practice it will be exactly the same as what Republicans have been doing forever. The party might move slightly to the right on immigration, but this will be made easy by a fall in corporate demand for underpriced Mexican farm labor, and might be trivial if there’s a border wall and they can declare mission accomplished. If the post-Trump standard-bearer has the slightest amount of personal continence, he should end up with a more-or-less united party who view Trump as a flawed but ultimately positive figure, like how they view GW Bush. Also, I predict we see a lot more of Ted Cruz than people are expecting.
The Republican Party hasn’t moved on from Trump in any direction. They have stayed exactly at Trump. Ron DeSantis seems personally successful and good at inciting culture war panics, but I don’t think there is a “DeSantis-ism” that offers a particular vision of 21st century conservatism. Ted Cruz remains irrelevant.
It will become more and more apparent that there are three separate groups: progressives, conservatives, and neoliberals. How exactly they sort themselves into two parties is going to be interesting. The easiest continuation-of-current-trends option is neoliberals+progressives vs. conservatives, with neoliberals+progressives winning easily. But progressives are starting to wonder if neoliberals’ support is worth the watering-down of their program, and neoliberals are starting to wonder if progressives’ support is worth constantly feeding more power to people they increasingly consider crazy. The Republicans used some weird demonic magic to hold together conservatives and neoliberals for a long time; I suspect the Democrats will be less good at this. A weak and fractious Democratic coalition plus a rock-hard conservative Republican non-coalition might be stable under Median Voter Theorem considerations. For like ten years. Until there are enough minorities that the Democrats are just overwhelmingly powerful (no, minorities are not going to start identifying as white and voting Republican en masse). I have no idea what will happen then. Maybe the Democrats will go extra socialist, the neoliberals and market minorities will switch back to the Republicans, and we can finally have normal reasonable class warfare again instead of whatever weird ethno-cultural thing is happening now?
Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America
June 07, 2023 · Original source
In politics, the role of relationships is clear. one of the major controversies in the 1988 presidential campaign was the Republican vice presidential candidate Quayle, who was not considered by public opinion to be a prominent figure or to have gotten ahead by his own struggle, but by his family, which earned two million dollars a year. He did not do well in school, there was some talk of the draft, and so on. The power of family is still important in America.
For example, he spends a long time talking about the specific bylaws of the Democratic and Republican parties, and who the party chair is, and how they pick county level officers, and so on. Most Americans don’t care about this, but it’s easy to figure out why someone from China - where the Party is the power behind the throne - would expect Power to hide somewhere in the Democratic or Republican organizational structure. When he finds out that it doesn’t, he complains that these are barely parties at all:
He praises us for our nonpartisanship. State and local races are dominated by state and local concerns. There is “no ideological difference” between the Democratic and Republican parties (he often makes this statement, sometimes with more qualifications than other times). People vote based on the race in front of them rather than generic partisan cliquishness.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
November 28, 2023 · Original source
Doing things is hard. The more things you do, the more chance that one of your agents goes rogue and you have a scandal. The Democratic Party, the Republican Party, every big company, all major religions, some would say even Sam Altman - they all have past deeds they’re not proud of, or plans that went belly-up. I think EA’s track record of accomplishments vs. scandals is as good as any of them, maybe better. It’s just that in our case, the accomplishments are things nobody except us notices or cares about. Like saving 200,000 lives. Or ending the torture of hundreds of millions of animals. Or preventing future pandemics. Or preparing for superintelligent AI.
Links For January 2024
January 18, 2024 · Original source
37: TracingWoodgrains: The Republican Party Is Doomed. Not electorally; it can still win elections as much as ever. But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively (especially in the modern world where you need to cross your bureaucratic Ts or your policy will be overturned by the Supreme Court). All of this is a pretty common take (albeit well-presented). But I was intrigued by a conclusion hinted at in the article and developed more in comments sections, which is that Republicans will be dragged kicking and screaming towards something like small-government libertarianism, by the brute fact that government power will always work against them no matter how many elections they win. That is, Republicans will never be able to teach conservative principles (or even stop the teaching of woke principles) in the education system, because even if a future President Trump appoints a conservative Secretary of Education, all the teachers’ unions / principals / education degree-granting institutions will be left-wing. But Republicans might be able to create a robust charter school / home school / private school system that circumvents the power of all these groups and gives it back to parents. And ~50% of parents are conservative, which is a better deal than they’d get anywhere else. I dunno, could work.
Inline links: The Republican Party Is Doomed
Secrets Of The Median Voter Theorem
October 23, 2024 · Original source
In 1964, LBJ beat Goldwater 61-39. In 1972, Nixon beat McGovern 61-37. Even as recently as 1984, Reagan beat Mondale 59-41. But we already know that partisanship was weaker in those days. The Median Voter Theorem only works if you can reduce everything to a single straight line. If voters don’t care about the right-left spectrum, they might judge based on criteria like “Reagan is more charismatic”, and then if everyone agrees that he’s charismatic you can get 59-41 or 90-10 or whatever numbers you want. In the old days, partisanship was too weak for the Median Voter Theorem to hold. Now it’s strong enough to matter, but there’s enough primary effect and “collusion” that parties don’t race towards the center, instead only trying to maintain equal distance from the center. But we may still find this surprising. The parties - especially the Republican Party - don’t feel like masterminds executing a complicated dance where they determine the exact amount of extremism the voters can tolerate. And what about non-partisan factors? Do they figure in? If some people dislike Trump because he committed 10,000 felonies and an attempted coup, do the Democrats enter that into their calculations and veer slightly further left? If Biden is demented, do the Republicans enter that into their calculations and veer slightly further right? If so, how come when Biden was replaced with the less-demented Kamala and the Democrats’ betting odds went way up, Trump didn’t change any of his positions AFAICT? The stats show that the past few elections, adjusted for electoral vote advantage, have all been around 49-51. But it doesn’t seem like the parties are working as hard as they would have to be to do it on purpose. Is it just a coincidence? Is there some deeper thermostat independent of the platforms and candidates of the moment? I’m not sure. But I do think we can say with confidence that the reason elections are almost never 80-20 or 99-1 is something like Median Voter Theorem. III. Okay, so the parties have to be in the middle. But which part of the parties? In the middle of what? Do parties target the median popular voter, or the median electoral voter? It must be the latter. We saw above that elections get closer, rather than further, from 50-50 after you adjust for the GOP electoral advantage. Also, this is obviously what you would do if you were at all sensible. You even see evidence of parties doing this; for example, lots of people talk about how the “tipping point state” for this election is Pennsylvania, so both candidates are investing lots of resources there. That’s classic Median Voter Theorem! Here’s a harder question. If you want to control the Presidency, you should target the median electoral voter. If you want to control the House of Representatives, then to a first approximation you should target the median popular voter, since House Districts mostly reflect population. If you want to control the Senate, you should target a different median voter entirely, since the Senate gives small states even more of an advantage than the Electoral College does. Parties want to control all three of these things, so who should they target? Ideally, Presidential candidates would target the median Presidential voter, Senate candidates the median Senate voter, etc. But it may not be this easy. Voters may work off a gestalt impression of where “the party” stands. In theory, the Republican candidate for Governor in California could appeal to the median Californian; in practice, Republicans almost never win in California because Californians hate the national Republican Party. So parties may have to target one of these goals to the exclusion of the others. There’s rarely a united House/Senate platform (Gingrich’s Contract With America possibly excepted). So probably both parties target the Presidency. If we assume small states tend conservative, then the median House voter should be further left, and the median Senate voter further right, than the median Presidential voter. If parties have to run a unified platform, and they optimize this platform to win the Presidency, we should expect to see Democrats win the House and Republicans win the Senate more often than chance. Is this right? Add on the two recent Congresses not shown, and since the Clinton era, Democrats have controlled 4/13 Houses and 6/13 Senates, the opposite of my prediction. I think there’s not enough data for this to mean anything, and continue to think there might be a slight inherent Median Voter Theorem fueled tendency for Democrats to win the House (possibly counterbalanced by other things like who has gerrymandered more successfully). IV. Suppose something happens to give one party an advantage. Maybe DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam all become states, giving the Democrats six extra guaranteed Senators and some extra electoral votes. Which of these do we expect: It’s very hard to have 54 Senate seats. Therefore, Democrats would control the Senate almost all the time, with a somewhat lesser but still probably decisive permanent Presidential advantage.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nsjv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ee3413b-b877-452c-9728-eb10f611b4d6_8888x7887.png
Here’s a simple argument for why this should be true: suppose the Democrats wisely choose a centrist platform, but the Republicans foolishly veer far-right:
Here the Republicans’ best strategy is obvious: shift to the middle.
ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
October 30, 2024 · Original source
The other tailwind is intra-party cohesion. Donald Trump spent the past eight years purging the Republican Party of people willing to stand up to him. The current head of the RNC is Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, the Democrats are delightfully unorganized, such that there are constant rumors that Joe Biden is trying to sink Kamala Harris, that Nancy Pelosi made some kind of horrendous blackmail threat to Joe Biden, and that possibly all of these people are part of a shadow war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I don’t believe any of it, but it’s pretty funny and less worrying from an ability-to-consolidate-power standpoint than what’s happening with the GOP.
When you're in that state of mind, you end up like those Muslims in Michigan. Your world narrows to a two-character psychodrama between yourself and the Democrats. In this psychodrama, the Republican Party is an offscreen character, mentioned but never seen. It fills the same role as Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984: a formless target representing either everything you hate or everything you hope for, depending on how the psychodrama goes. Nobody knew Emmanuel Goldstein's position on tax rates, and it would be insane to ask.
You don’t get from a flourishing democracy to Hugo Chavez in one leap - at least not without a politician younger and more vigorous than Trump. But our democracy isn’t entirely flourishing right now, and frogs are easily boiled. My threat model is less “Trump himself is exactly like Chavez”, and more “Trump’s election shows there are minimal consequences for violating norms; he brings us 10% closer to a banana republic; during the next election, both candidates violate the norms, the next guy brings us 20% closer to a banana republic, and so on.” The Republicans are already arguing that the Democrats’ authoritarian experimentation with cancel culture means it’s only fair that they get to have a mobocratic censorship regime too, if they ever get back in power. Once Trump escalates a bit, the Democrat after him will feel the same way and escalate even more. There will be plenty more chances to stop the cycle - but, like the proverb about planting the tree, the best time was ten years ago and the second-best time is now.
Inline links: that the Democrats’ authoritarian experimentation with cancel culture means it’s only fair that they get to have a mobocratic censorship regime too, if they ever get back in power
Links For July 2025
July 01, 2025 · Original source
Although Shivers was a Democrat, the Republicans nominated him too as part of a galaxy-brained plan to encourage Shivers supporters to vote straight Republican (h/t BobaCalifornian).
Inline links: h/t BobaCalifornian
13: Related: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” originally banned states from regulating AI for ten years, but this provision got pushback, including from Republicans whose votes Trump needed. Earlier today, Senator Blackburn, a leading Republican critic, said she struck a compromise with proponent Ted Cruz - the ban would only last five years, and some online privacy and child porn regulation would be exempted. But this evening, the compromise fell apart, and IIUC the Senate has now voted 99-1 to remove the AI regulation ban entirely (X) (though I’m going entirely off this one tweet and it doesn’t seem to have made it into the news yet). The Big Beautiful Bill still cuts Medicaid, lowers taxes (especially on the rich), attacks the solar and clean energy industries, and adds $3 trillion to the national debt. If you have opinions, consider calling your representative, although this is more likely to matter if they’re a Republican.
Inline links: the compromise fell apart, the Senate has now voted 99-1 to remove the AI regulation ban entirely (X), cuts Medicaid, lowers taxes (especially on the rich), attacks the solar and clean energy industries, adds $3 trillion to the national debt
2: In the 1952 Texas gubernatorial election, incumbent Allan Shivers ran on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, beating himself 73%-25%.
Inline links: 1952 Texas gubernatorial election