The Three Leg Stool (GOP)
"The Three Legged Stool of the Republican Party" also known by "The Gipper's Stool" or "Reagan's Stool" is a theory about the composition of the Republican party.
See also: Ronald Reagan and Reagan coalitionIt is intended to explain the way the Republican Party's power base derives from the three main "legs" (factions) within the "stool", those being the Christian right/social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and foreign interventionists. This coalition came together with the rise of the New Right and the election of Ronald Reagan.
Terminology[edit]
Variants of the phrase often are used interchangeability such as "Gipper's Stool" or "Reagan's Stool".
Ronald Reagan coined the term as a way to describe the Republican party as a three part coalition based on the social conservatives (consisting of the Christian right and paleo-conservatives), war hawks (consisting of interventionists and neoconservatives), and fiscal conservatives (consisting of right-libertarians and free-market capitalists), with overlap between the sides.[1][2][3]
The phrase "Legs" describe each member of the coalition and the idea is without a leg the party cannot win (as a stool cannot support itself with two legs).[4]
Criticism[edit]
Critics often use the stool as a means to criticize party leadership or another member of the stool, such is in the lament of the "death of the stool" with the election of Donald Trump.
Pundits often criticize party membership for abandoning the stool as Business Insider reported "the person said that thanks mostly to President George W. Bush, the party has failed on the first two legs. The country has shifted significantly on the last one, and there's nothing a Republican candidate can do to change it."[6] Senator Spencer Abraham has also criticized the stool, saying, "The Republican party has much greater divides now in terms of the feelings of its voters than it did when Reagan ran."