Where is the Republican Party Going?
For a solid half-century, the Republican Party has housed what has always seemed to many to be a very uneasy marriage (the "Reagan Synthesis") between social conservatism and market liberalism. Now a major realignment is under way, and the outlines of the new Republican Party are becoming visible. The changes have produced some momentary excitement on the Right, but the bigger political picture seems to be a vindication of a half-century of criticism of the neoliberal/cultural conservative synthesis, coming largely from the Left. According to its critics, the GOP has committed four deadly sins. 1. They have ruined the middle class. Since Nixon's time, Republicans have been following Friedrick Hayek and Milton Friedman, deregulating the domestic and global economy, attacking unions, undermining worker protections, giving tax breaks to the wealthy, and generally promoting an economic libertarianism that critics see as flattering the foolish and insecure while completely
