REIHAN SALAM ON DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS:

The Republican and Democratic coalitions are both political parties in the same way that whales and lemurs are both mammals, or that Finnish and Hungarian are both Finno-Ugric languages. Though they share some very broad characteristics, they are profoundly different. Our failure to understand the differences between the two parties sows confusion and resentment, so I’d like to clear things up.

One of the more amusing aspects of our politics is that Democrats will often accuse Republicans of being in the pocket of this or that special interest while Republicans insist that Democrats are wild-eyed ideologues. This is almost the opposite of the truth. It is Republicans who are the ideological ones, while it is Democrats who, in the wise words of political scientists Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins, are “a coalition of interest groups whose interests are served by government activity.” I realize that this is a massive oversimplification, but bear with me, because I think it illuminates why both parties keep falling in the same old patterns.

The Democratic Party is a collection of interest groups that seeks to, among other things, redistribute income and wealth from people who are not Democrats to people who are, or who will be, and they do a pretty good job of it, even when they lose elections. . . .

Republicans are rarely this slick. They’re far more likely than Democrats to be true believers who put ideology above all else and who struggle to achieve their concrete goals. They struggle because unlike ideological progressives, ideological conservatives believe that most people already agree with them, and that when they fail to win a particular policy fight, it’s because something shady and underhanded is going on. The fact that there are far more conservatives in America than liberals is, in a funny way, a liability for the right. Liberals understand that they can’t win without moderates; conservatives will only concede this unfortunate fact reluctantly, if at all. The result is that Republicans spend much of their time banging their heads against whichever wall happens to be close by.

Democrats also realize that they can’t win without dissembling and incrementalism, which the GOP isn’t as good at.