The Three-Legged Stool Still Holds Up the Republican Party

Sit down on a stool with one leg shorter than the others and you learn something about politics in about four seconds. It wobbles. You can lean to one side and make it work for a while, but the first time somebody shifts his weight, down you go.

For half a century, people trying to describe the Republican coalition have reached for that image. It has three legs. One is economic: lower taxes, less regulation, limited government. One is social: family, faith, life, the schools. One is national security: a strong defence and a firm stance abroad. The seat on top is the voter, the person who walks into the booth and has to decide. Take one leg away and the stool does not become a two-legged stool. It becomes a pile of wood.

I want to argue three things in this post. First, that the image still explains the coalition, why it forms and why it holds. Second, that the best objection to it, that the legs now pull in different directions, is serious and deserves a straight answer. And third, that the compromises that keep the stool standing are not betrayals but the ordinary work of a coalition. Let me take them in order.

How the stool was built

The image is tied to Ronald Reagan, though the coalition was assembled over many years. Its raw material was in place by 1964, when Barry Goldwater's campaign mobilised the free-market right and the anti-communist right behind a single candidate. That campaign lost in a landslide. The organizers kept going. In 1966 Reagan won the governorship of California, and in 1976 he challenged a sitting Republican president, Gerald Ford, for the nomination and lost narrowly. He came back in 1980.

That year something new was added. Religious conservatives, many of them evangelical Protestants who had mostly stayed away from partisan politics, were organized by a new generation of leaders. The Moral Majority was founded in 1979. They had been alarmed by court decisions and cultural change, and they found a candidate who spoke their language. Reagan combined that with his economic message, a promise to cut taxes and restrain government, and with his national-security message, a pledge to rebuild the military and face down the Soviet Union.

The result was a landslide. In 1980 Reagan won 489 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter's 49, and in 1984 he won 525 to Walter Mondale's 13. Those are not numbers you reach with one faction. They were the sum of three groups, each of which had a reason to vote for him that the other two did not share. For more on how the coalition was put together, How Evangelical Voters Became Republican Voters Between 1976 and 1984 is the place to start, and The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides tells the story of the working-class voters who joined it.

The numbered argument: why each leg matters

Here are the three legs, one premise at a time.

1. The economic leg: a free economy gives families the means to run their own lives. Reagan's tax policy shows the idea at work. The 1981 tax law cut the top marginal rate on individual income from 70 percent to 50 percent, and the 1986 reform brought the top rate to 28 percent while closing loopholes. The argument was never only about efficiency. It was that people who earn a dollar have the first claim on it, and that a family with more of its own money has more choices. See The Reagan Tax Cuts Rate by Rate and the Tax Reform of 1986 for the details. Without this leg, the Republican Party is just a party of the status quo.
2. The social leg: free people need a healthy culture to stay free. Marriage, faith, parents' rights in education and respect for human life are what hold a society together before the government ever gets involved. These institutions teach responsibility, which is what makes limited government possible. Where they weaken, the government tends to grow to fill the space. This is the argument of Liberty Without Responsibility Is a Very Short Road to Losing Both. Without this leg, the economic message sounds like greed.
3. The national-security leg: nothing else is safe if the country is not. A free economy and a free culture both depend on a country that can defend itself and deter its enemies. In Reagan's time that meant the Cold War and the push for what he called peace through strength. The evidence of how that played out is argued in Did Reagan Really Win the Cold War or Did the Soviets Just Collapse. Without this leg, the first two are at the mercy of whoever is willing to use force.

Notice that each leg answers a different fear. The economic voter fears an overbearing government. The social voter fears a drifting culture. The security voter fears a dangerous world. A party that speaks to all three offers a family more than one reason to stay.

The Reagan formula in action

Reagan did not claim that all three legs were the same length. What he did was give each group something real and then ask each to accept a share of the others' agenda. The libertarian-minded voter accepted a stronger military than he would have designed. The religious voter accepted that the president would spend most of his energy on taxes and the economy. The hawk accepted that tax cuts competed for attention with weapons. In California in 1966 the party had adopted a rule of thumb, attributed to its state party chairman Gaylord Parkinson and embraced by Reagan: never speak ill of a fellow Republican. It is sometimes called the eleventh commandment, and it expressed the same instinct. In a coalition you fight on policy, not on persons.

Let me add the point nobody likes to hear. Reagan's record on each leg was mixed. On the economic side, the deficits grew. On the social side, many activists wanted more than he delivered. On security, he negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev, which disappointed hawks. A coalition leader does not give any wing everything. He gives each wing enough to stay.

Three households on one stool

To see how the legs work on real voters, picture three hypothetical households. They are invented for the exercise, but you probably know their cousins.

• The Hendersons run a hardware store. They worry about payroll taxes, permits and the paperwork that eats their Sundays. Their first question for any candidate is what he will do to let them keep more of what they earn and hire one more employee. They are economic voters. They rarely mention abortion or foreign policy unless asked.
• The Okafors attend church twice a week and have three children in a public school. They care what the school teaches, whether the community will support a young couple having a baby, and whether the government will leave their church alone. They are social voters. They would vote for a tax cut, but they would not drive across town for one.
• The Delgados have a son in the Army and a nephew in the Navy. For them the budget is a question of whether the men and women overseas have what they need, and whether the country treats veterans fairly. They are security voters. A tax cut is welcome, but a cut in the military is not.

Now ask a candidate to win all three households. If he talks only about taxes, he gets the Hendersons and loses the others. If he talks only about values, he gets the Okafors. The stool image says that the winning candidate has a sentence for each. That is not cynicism. It is the ordinary fact that a country is made of families who worry about different things.

What happens when a leg is ignored

The best evidence for the stool is what happened when a leader tried to kick one out. Take the economic leg. In the 1988 campaign George H.W. Bush promised the party convention, in a line that became famous, "Read my lips: no new taxes." In 1990 he signed a budget agreement with the Democratic Congress that included tax increases. Whatever the merits of the deal, which I discuss in Read My Lips and How the 1990 Budget Deal Led to the 1992 Defeat, it told one leg of the coalition that its priority had been traded away. In 1992 Bush lost to Bill Clinton in a three-way race. Many things drove that result, and I will not claim a single cause. But the broken promise was a wound the party felt for a long time.

The lesson is not that every deal is a betrayal. Governing requires compromise, and a promise made in a campaign can collide with a budget reality. The lesson is that the stool can lose a leg through neglect, not just through attack, and that a leader who shrugs at one wing should not be surprised when it stays home.

The best objection

Now for the strongest case against the stool. It goes like this:

"The image is out of date. When Reagan was running, the three legs pushed in roughly the same direction, because communism was the common enemy. Today they pull apart. The economic conservative may favour free trade and the voter in a factory town may favour tariffs. The security conservative may favour intervention abroad and the voter who has seen the cost of war may favour restraint. The social conservative may want government to act on the culture while the libertarian wants it to stay out. The stool is not a stool anymore. It is three people sitting on three different chairs and arguing over the bill."

That is a real objection, and it describes real fights inside the party. It is not an argument to be waved off with a slogan. Here is my answer, in four points.

1. Every coalition has internal tension. The Reagan coalition had it too. Free-market conservatives and religious conservatives disagreed in 1980 about plenty, and hawks and fiscal conservatives disagreed about the budget. What made the stool work was not agreement but a decision to prioritise the shared goals.
2. The legs pull apart only on the margins. On most days, in most places, the three groups are voting for the same candidates for the same broad reasons: lower taxes, strong families, a safe country. The loud disagreements are over the edge cases, and they get the headlines.
3. The disagreement is old. The Republican Party has argued about tariffs since the 1800s. Republicans were the tariff party first, from Lincoln to McKinley shows that the trade fight is not new, and Ronald Reagan was no free-trade purist, and his record proves it shows that Reagan himself did not follow a single line on it.
4. The alternative is worse. A party that drops one leg is not purer, it is smaller. The economic voter who is told his concerns do not matter will look elsewhere, and so will the others.

I will grant the objection one thing. The stool wobbles more when the leaders stop explaining why the legs belong together. That is a failure of leadership, not of the design.

Which compromises keep it standing

Here is the practical part. I would offer five habits that keep a coalition together, each of which the Reagan coalition practised.

• Rank the goals openly. Tell every group what comes first this year and what comes later. Silence breeds suspicion.
• Let the states differ. Many social and cultural questions can be settled state by state, which lets each voter live under rules he helped write. Three Towns, Three Rule Books and the Case for Letting States Differ explains how.
• Pay the price of unity in speeches as well as votes. The wing that is not winning this year needs to hear its cause named and respected.
• Keep the argument about policy. Fight about the bill, not about whether the other wing is real Republicans. The eleventh commandment was a sensible rule.
• Remember the seat. The voter on top is not a symbol. He has a mortgage, a job and children. A party that serves the family at the kitchen table will find that the legs hold.

For a map of the strands and how they differ, see Five Strands of the American Right Compared in One Table.

The verdict

So does the three-legged stool still hold up the party? My answer: yes, with a caution. It holds up as an explanation of why the coalition formed and why it endures. It does not hold up as a promise that the legs will always agree. The honest picture is a stool that has to be tightened regularly, by leaders who understand that each leg carries real weight.

To the economic conservative, I say: your tax cuts passed because religious voters and national-security voters helped you win. To the social conservative: your causes advanced because the economic and security voters were with you. To the hawk: your budget was funded because the other two were in the room. Nobody stands on one leg.

The bottom line

• The stool is a coalition, not a creed. Economic, social and security conservatives each have a reason to vote Republican that the others do not share, and the sum of them wins.
• Reagan's numbers came from the combination. The 489 to 49 result in 1980 and the 525 to 13 result in 1984 were built by holding all three legs together.
• The legs pull apart on trade, intervention and the role of the state in culture. Treat those as arguments to settle, not as reasons to walk out.
• Compromise means ranking, not abandoning. Ask your candidates which of the three they would put first this year, and what they would give the others.
• Be a good neighbour on the stool. At the county meeting, give the person from another wing the same hearing you would want.