From my latest Bloomberg Opinion column:
The issues Republicans want to highlight — inflation, crime, and illegal immigration — all fit into a larger conservative story about government. Each of them involves a failure by the government at a core task: maintaining the value of the currency, suppressing violence, regulating the border.
They thus reinforce public suspicions about the competence of government and, therefore, about ambitious proposals for government-directed social change. They threaten the public’s sense of stability, order and control — the very things conservative politicians specialize in offering, if they can avoid coming across as radicals themselves.