Maybe Republicans and Democrats aren't so different, after all

OK, that title is deliberately provocative. But it gets to what I think is a real issue.

Let's start with the fact that the Republican party is undeniably composed of an unlikely coalition of two wildly different groups: the plutocrats who provide its funding, and the social conservatives who provide its votes.

By now, the pattern is familiar (and very recently it seems that the white working class is starting to catch on): Once every election cycle, Republican politicians and their backers pretend to care about issues like abortion and gay marriage, and use these issues to drive their voters to the polls. Once they've been reelected, they continue with their program to reduce taxes on the wealthy and cut benefits to the not-wealthy, essentially ignoring the social issues they campaigned on.

So: in the Republican party we have two groups:

• Plutocrats like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, and allied groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
• "Real Americans" who vote on expertly-contrived "values" issues that the plutocrats put before them. 

Thomas Frank addressed this in his great book "What's The Matter With Kansas?". (Aside: in answer to the question of why the hell lower-class people vote against their own interests, I have proposed the notion of Altruistic Punishment: they hate the professional elites so much that they are willing to incur a cost to themselves to punish or confound them: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/12/01/1605815/-Trump-supporters-and-Altruistic-Punishment  )