The week before Obama’s State of the Union, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote a piece “The Tea Party and the Hammock Theory of Poverty” in which he noted: “Here’s a striking finding: The ideas and assumptions underlying the GOP economic and poverty agenda are far and away more reflective of the preoccupations of Tea Party Republicans. Meanwhile, non-Tea Party Republicans are much more in line with the rest of the public on these matters.”

In the speech itself, Obama characteristically steered away from finger-pointing at GOP obstructionists, but his broad themes clearly struck a chord with the American people, above all his call to raise the minimum wage — a call that he cannily directed to all levels of government as well as to private businesses. The title, and core argument of Brian Beutler’s postmortem captured it well — “The Right’s Agenda Is Reviled: The Lesson From Obama’s Confident State of the Union.” The fragmented, four-part GOP “response” may have blurred the picture somewhat, but Sargent’s earlier analysis is a potent reminder that the Tea Party’s ideological isolation lies right at the core of the GOP’s problem. Their economic agenda is key to how they’ve defined themselves, but it reflects a similar, quite visible isolation on immigration and women’s issues as well. In all these areas, a conspiracist mind-set can be observed: The problem is a morally suspect out-group, being coddled and encouraged by big bad government, which is trying to destroy America, because of Evil.

Obviously, not everyone who agrees with those specific positions subscribes to the full-blown conspiracy mind-set. But the more vehemently they reject contrary evidence and arguments, the less open to honest discussion and dialogue they appear, the more powerful the evidence is that a close-minded conspiracist outlook is at work, with a chillingly narrow predetermined cast of heroes and villains. Hence, if ideologically purity is what’s wanted — as many on the right repeatedly say — it’s hard to see how that doesn’t include this conspiracist mind-set as well. It’s no accident that Glenn Beck did so much to help launch their movement.

In all three issue areas, the GOP as a whole faces real, long-term electoral dangers if the underlying logic of their actual positions becomes too clear to everyone outside their base. You can’t get people to vote for you if they know you despise them on some level. At the same time, GOP politicians individually need to make sure those positions are clear to those in their base.  Their base won’t passionately support them otherwise. It’s a delicate balancing act, which Republicans are quite accustomed to in some areas — particularly when it comes to racial politics, for example. But what happens when too many people start catching on — as seems to have happened with women and Hispanic voters in 2012, for example? And now a further complication: What happens when a whole new category of people gets added — the poor/working poor/near poor who have become increasingly indistinguishable from the middle class since the financial crisis?

In his piece, Sargent looked at items from two different polls — one from Pew, one from CBS — that were about government  action to reduce the income inequality gap, extend unemployment benefits and raise the minimum wage, along with Paul Ryan’s hammock theory of poverty – that government aid is a cause of poverty.  CBS polled specifically on unemployment making people less motivated to look for a job, while Pew asked if government aid to the poor does more harm than good by making people dependent on government. The “hammock theory” is a striking image, but not to be taken too seriously, given its close connection with opposing a higher minimum wage — a straightforward example of government clearly encouraging people to work.  No one who seriously accepts the hammock theory of poverty ought to oppose a higher minimum wage, not unless there’s something else, something deeper going on: some form of animus toward the poor.  Still, it’s a convenient cover story for selling the 1 percent’s selfish interests to the conservative masses — epitomized by the Koch brothers’ long-term funding of the Tea Party movement — and conservative politicians invoke it repeatedly as if it were simple common sense.

On all the questions Sargent looked at, Tea Party and non-Tea Party Republicans differed by 20 points or more. More strikingly, on most of them, pluralities or majorities of each group are on opposite sides. For example, Pew found that Tea Party Republicans oppose doing something to reduce the income inequality gap, 66-28, while non-Tea Party Republicans support doing something, 60-35.  Those are the kinds of figures you expect to see between the two parties, not within them.  Likewise, on raising the minimum wage, Pew found the Tea Partyers opposed, 65-33, while the non-Tea Partyers supported it by the exact same margin.

The roots of these intra-party divisions that Sargent highlights are not new. The 1 percent’s economic agenda has long been supported in theory by strong majorities of conservatives — and solidly opposed by them in practice. (The same division exists in the broader public as well, though the contradiction is less acute.) What’s new is how these attitudes have morphed in the aftermath of the catastrophic economic failure of 2008. But to understand what’s new, we need to begin with what is not.

In 1964, two pioneers of public opinion research, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, conducted an exhaustive survey of American public opinion, the results of which they published three years later in “The Political Beliefs of Americans.” Probably their most important finding was a profound disjunction between what they called “operational” liberalism (based on support for specific spending programs) and ideological conservatism (based on agreement with a set of five questions about “government interference” versus individual initiative). A sharper edge can be drawn by noting that ideological conservatism is congruent with the “free market” economics that led to the Great Depression, while operational liberalism is congruent with the New Deal and subsequent programs that not only ended the Great Depression, but were the foundations of America’s broad post-WWII prosperity, very much in evidence in 1964. They found that 50 percent of all Americans qualified as ideological conservatives by their definition — but that 65 percent qualified as operational liberals, meaning that 23 percent qualified as both — a number that doubled in the Deep South states that Goldwater carried that year.

There are multiple ways one might understand this disconnect, all of which could be partially true. Most charitably, it could be seen as reflecting the power of pragmatism (spending money on what works) over abstract idealism (what a wonderful world, if only the market magically made everything work out fine). Less charitably, it could just show how confused people are. But it could also reflect a lack of readily accessible, well-articulated alternatives.  In the final section of the final chapter of their book, titled “The Need for a Restatement of American Ideology,” Free and Cantril wrote:

“The paradox of a large majority of Americans qualifying as operational liberals while at the same time a majority hold to a conservative ideology has been repeatedly emphasized in this study. We have described this state of affairs as mildly schizoid, with people believing in one set of principles abstractly while acting according to another set of principles in their political behavior. But the principles according to which the majority of Americans actually behave politically have not yet been adequately formulated in modern terms.

“There is little doubt that the time has come for a restatement of American ideology to bring it in line with what the great majority of people want and approve. Such a statement, with the right symbols incorporated, would focus people’s wants, hopes, and beliefs, and provide a guide and platform to enable the American people to implement their political desires in a more intelligent, direct, and consistent manner.”

Such a restatement — conceiving of government as promoting the general welfare, and of the economy as an organic whole, not simply reducible to individual actors — lay at the heart of Johnson’s War on Poverty and Great Society programs, and was explicit in Martin Luther King’s economic agenda as well, as seen in his 1967 speech “Where Do We Go From Here?”:

John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about $20 billion a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and $20 billion to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.

But even though Johnson tried to stress class rather than racial concerns, his efforts were effectively stymied by racism, as it morphed into its modern form of so-called principled conservatism under the guidance of George Wallace, as civil rights historian Taylor Branch recently summarized, on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington:

By the end of 1963, with segregation losing its stable respectability, he [Wallace] dropped the word altogether from a fresh stump speech denouncing “big government” by “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” tyrannical judges, and “tax, tax, spend, spend” legislators. He spurned racial discourse, calling it favouritism, and insisted with aplomb that he had never denigrated any person or group in his fight for local control. Wallace, though still weighted by a hateful reputation, mounted the first of three strong presidential campaigns.

For most of the five decades from 1964 to today, racialized rhetoric has dominated campaigning, and stymied the emergence of a restated American ideology that Free and Cantril envisioned. Yet, it has not altered the most basic of attitudes, or economic realities: where and when the market fails badly enough, the American people expect their government to act.

This can be seen in four decades of polling by the General Social Survey, the gold standard of public opinion research in the United States. For decades, its questions have included a set of spending priority questions — are we spending too much, too little or about the right amount on Social Security, national defense, protecting the environment, etc. And for decades — just as Free and Cantril could have told us — the majority of self-identified conservatives have said we’re spending too little or about the right amount on almost every item they are asked about.

Even in the peak Tea Party year of 2010, for example, Republicans said we were spending too little on Social Security, rather than too much, by a lopsided 52-12  margin. The same year, self-identified conservatives said we were spending too little on “improving and protecting the nation’s health,” rather than too much, by a 2-to-1 margin: 48-24. Combining the two categories and the two spending questions, and we find that conservative Republicans think we’re spending too little, rather than too much, on one or both of these, by 51.4 to 28.7 percent.

This pattern isn’t limited to these two issues, however. If we combine six questions in 2010 — adding education, mass transit, highways and bridges, and urban problems to Social Security and healthcare — then only a minuscule 0.4 percent of conservative Republicans said we were spending too much on all of them, while two-thirds (66.5 percent) said we are spending too little on at least one of them. This is exactly what Free and Cantril were talking about, and it’s a similar point that Blake Zeff made in two different stories in January. The American people are profoundly liberal in terms of economic policy, so much so that,  as a whole, self-identified conservatives are to the left of the “bipartisan center” in Washington, D.C.

The big-picture way things have generally worked for decades now has been relatively simple, with two main components. The first is the variation in terms of who is seen to benefit. The second is variation in terms of perceived legitimate need — a reflection of economic hard times, or their absence. The former category includes spending on poor people and blacks, for example.  Combine them together, and liberal Democrats say we’re spending too little rather than too much by a ratio of 200-to-1 (40.8 percent to 0.2 percent) in 2010, while for conservative Republicans it’s more than 2-to-1 in the other direction (6.4 percent to 13.8 percent). What this shows is that the one way to get conservative Republicans to be operationally conservative is to talk about poor people and blacks, the so-called undeserving poor, to put things in 19th century terms. But the focus has to be very tight.

As for the second component, this was best illuminated by Martin Gilens in his 1999 book “Why Americans Hate Welfare.” Reviewing his book for the Denver Post, I explained:

“Using a study of major news weeklies, he shows that when the issue is welfare and its many failings, white faces grow extremely rare; when times are hard and coverage grows more sympathetic – the mid-’70s and early ’80s recessions – white faces grow more plentiful.”

In short, when times get hard enough, the public realizes that people are victims of a system they cannot control. The victims they are shown look just like them, so it’s an easy connection to make. Along similar lines, the 2001 paper “Why Doesn’t the US Have a European-Style Welfare State?” by Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote, cites multiple reasons, but race is arguably the most prominent of them. The authors present two charts showing that social spending levels go down as the level of racial and ethnic diversity goes up. The first is a comparison of country-level spending, the second compares state-level spending in the U.S. Thus, what Gilens showed was a consistent pattern: When times get hard, we tend to see ourselves less as two nations, and more as one, more willing to share a common burden, even a majority of self-described conservatives.

But after 2008, something fundamentally changed. Instead of pulling together, and turning to government programs to counter the damage the Great Recession had done, as even Reagan and Bush had done during past recessions, the broad political consensus of more than 50 years’ standing was shattered, led by a sharp right-wing refusal to pull together as one nation. That pattern seen in the GSS questions still held up — though at a low ebb — but its expression in the public realm was completely stifled. Nothing shows this more clearly than the willingness to default on the national debt — except, perhaps, the delusional notion that doing so was a supreme act of fiscal responsibility. One obvious factor was the president’s race, reinforced by Republicans’ persistent otherization and demonization of him. Forget the question of what people in need looked like, just look at who’s asking on their behalf!

But three other interrelated factors played a role as well. First was the sheer magnitude of the financial crisis; nothing like it had been seen since the Great Depression, and seemingly no one was intellectually, morally or politically prepared for it. Second was the convergence of elite opinion and outlook, which contributed enormously to that lack of preparedness, and rebelled instinctively against the sort of bold, dramatic action that was called for by the scope of the catastrophe. Third was the total ideological failure of conservatism underscored by the crisis. The first two factors effectively stifled the sort of sweeping political response that was needed to match the scope of the crisis and its aftermath — the kind of response that mobilized tens of millions during the Great Depression, and helped the Democrats prosper politically even when business turned sharply against them. The third factor energized the right into an unbounded frenzy of self-deceptive reinvention, in which all the old balancing of pragmatism vs. zeal went out the window. It was as if a European center-right Christian Democrat party had dramatically transformed itself into a xenophobic neo-fascist National Front party in the space of just a few short months.