ASKED to name his biggest political success, over a curry in the congressional chamber where he works, sleeps and plots the downfall of his party bosses, Mick Mulvaney, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, is briefly stumped. There have been so many. The House Freedom Caucus he helped launch has made a lot of noise in recent months. That is in itself an achievement for a group of little-known congressmen, mostly elected in a flood of anti-establishment feeling in 2010, with a mission, says the Caucus’s chairman, Jim Jordan, seated opposite, with curry, to “fight for the countless number of Americans who think this place has forgotten them.”
That mainly means fighting to stop the House Republican leadership negotiating with Barack Obama, whom many Caucus members consider to be a power-hungry socialist. They have therefore taken uncompromising positions on trade, public spending, abortion and other issues, at times depriving the House Republicans of their majority. The Caucus’s willingness to create a budget crisis, in September, forced the then Speaker, John Boehner, to seek Democratic help to stop the government running out of money, a humiliation that cost him his job. That was the Caucus’s biggest scalp; also a warning to Mitch McConnell, the party’s leader in the Senate. “Mitch is next,” says Mr Mulvaney.

Most of the 246 Republicans in the House are more interested in governing—yet not immune to the sort of grandstanding, on spending, welfare and other neuralgic right-wing issues, that the Caucus is dedicated to. “Too often we make every vote a vote about principle, which makes it harder for us to pursue our agenda,” says Mike Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. Indeed, the worrying truth for Republicans is that the Caucus is less an outlier in their party than a caricature of it. Its members’ intolerance, apparent indifference to the vulnerable and relentless negativity are qualities that Americans, especially women and ethnic minorities, increasingly associate with Republicans at large.
According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Centre, 60% of Americans, and a third of Republicans, have an unfavourable view of the party. Compared with the Democrats, it is considered by double-digit margins to hold extreme views and be unconcerned about “the needs of people like me”. To compensate, Republicans would at least expect to score well on economic management, which they pride themselves on; most Americans preferred the Democrats on that, too. A year before a presidential election, in which the Grand Old Party must expand its base to have any chance of keeping pace with demographic change, those are horrible numbers.
The primary is not improving matters. One front-runner, Donald Trump, wants to wall off Mexico. Another, Ben Carson, has a tax plan that entails a 30% cut in the size of the government. And if such right-wing posturing makes it hard for more reasonable candidates to remain so, the Republican mainstream, currently led in the primary by Marco Rubio (pictured) and in the House by Mr Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, a representative from Wisconsin, is anyway immoderate. Mr Rubio, a 44-year-old senator from Florida, proposes tax cuts that by one estimate could increase the deficit by $12 trillion over a decade. Both would repeal Mr Obama’s health-care reform without promising a reassuring alternative to the 17.6m Americans it has provided with insurance. “I think it’s funny that people talk of Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan as mainstream Republicans,” smiles Mr Jordan. “They’re the classic class of 2010, like most of the Freedom Caucus.”
To end their damaging purity contest, the Republicans need to understand what is fuelling it. That starts with a relentless drive to differentiate the party from the Democrats, whose erstwhile obsessing over ideology has given way to pragmatism. “At some point, people will say what’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats, and it can’t just be abortion,” says Mr Mulvaney.
Yet the change that has come over their opponents is something Republicans should celebrate, not fight. Whatever Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s socialist challenger in the Democratic race, might say, the victory of Reaganite economic policy in the 1980s was complete. That was plain in the following decade when Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over. Yet instead of revelling in Reagan’s economic legacy, many Republicans hardly recognise it. They misremember the Reagan years as a time of inexorable tax, deficit and spending cuts (the Gipper at various times raised all three) and mischaracterise everything that has followed as a retreat from that imagined perfection. This is a path that leads to the vast, unfunded tax cuts almost all the Republican primary candidates are now promising, as they vie to be what their party craves: the second coming of something that never actually existed.
George W. Bush’s early stab at compassionate conservatism was an effort to restore moderation. It didn’t go well. Mired in profligate wars and bank bail-outs, his presidency ended as a recruiting sergeant for the caustic right. “I got into politics because of George W. Bush,” says Mr Mulvaney. “We expected him to be like Reagan, but what did we get? No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, compassionate conservatism—just spending more and more.”
Then, in 2009, came an $830 billion stimulus package, signed off by a black, left-leaning Democrat president. It, and almost everything Mr Obama has done since, has driven the right wild. This sometimes manifests itself as a virulent antipathy to welfarism, which many Republicans, unfairly to a degree, associate with black Americans. Asked how he would woo black voters, Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida and one of the more moderate candidates in the primary, said he would offer them aspiration, not, as the Democrats do, a promise to: “Get in line, and we’ll take care of you with free stuff.” Black Americans are not, as it happens, all welfare claimants. But because they are much likelier to vote for the Democrats, whom Republicans traduce as the party of scroungers, this is another half-truth that polarisation has reinforced.
Working themselves into a lather over Mr Obama and free stuff has not made the Republicans more liked. Nor has it helped them fill the hole where a credible, centre-right, socio-economic policy should be; Mr Rubio, to his credit, has some suggestions—including decentralising welfare programmes and topping up low wages with a bigger state subsidy—but he is untypical. The third televised Republican primary debate, on October 28th, was supposedly about economic policy; almost none was discussed except tax cuts.
The impression is of a party so accustomed to carping that it has forgotten how to govern. Yet in the states the Republicans are in rude form. They occupy 32 governors’ mansions and control both houses in 31 state legislatures, having secured an extra 900 seats since Mr Obama became president. In Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa and elsewhere, Republican governors have balanced budgets with hard-headed, but sometimes innovative, policies. “I’m not a very partisan person,” says Iowa’s veteran governor, Terry Branstad. “I’m like many Republican governors.”
This divergence, between antagonism in Washington and pragmatism closer to home, may be less paradoxical than it seems. “In America, small state conservatism is about localism,” says Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. By extension, Washington has become for many conservatives a bogey and irrelevance: “When you send someone to DC, you say screw you. When you elect someone to run your state, you want your trash to be collected.”
An alternative view is that the party’s success in state and congressional elections has convinced those Republicans still interested in winning national power that the need for reform is less urgent than it is. A post mortem by the Republican National Committee into Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election found that the party was widely viewed as “scary”, “stuffy” and “out-of-touch”. But then, in a wave of anti-establishment rage, it swept the mid-terms in 2014, and whatever impetus for reform existed was lost.
Can it be regained before next year’s presidential election? It is otherwise hard to see how the party can carry out the necessary expansion of its base. In 2012 Mr Romney hoovered up the white vote, but lost because he won support from only 27% of Hispanics, the fastest-growing electoral group. To win next year, his successor will need to get around 40% of the wary Hispanic vote, reckons Mr Rubio’s pollster, Whit Ayres.
That would require the party not only to stop bashing immigrants, but also allay the wider concerns about its motives, indiscipline and intemperance. It is not only Mr Trump’s excesses that are hurting it. Political parties, like people, tend to get the reputations they deserve, and the Grand Old Party’s may yet shut it out of the White House next year.