Month: August 2020

I was just a child then, but I remember 1968. Burning cities, violent demonstrations, MLK, RFK, Chicago–it seemed like the country was coming apart at the seams. It was a crisis. Ultimately, it passed.

Maybe it is just because I’m not sick or unemployed, but 2020 has a different feel to it. It doesn’t feel like a fever; it is more as if the foundations of our political system are rotting away before our eyes. Today, we have a president who doesn’t respect the authority of Congress to control the purse or hold him accountable. Tomorrow, it will probably be something even worse.

The people dodging tear gas in the streets are not ultimately a threat to the system, because they believe it can be made to work for them. The real danger today comes from get off my lawn white reactionaries who think they have a divine right to rule, and will sell out our institutions in a heartbeat to maintain it. They are a minority, but they are too numerous to crush. They have to be appeased until they are converted or die out.

If the ideas that represent the foundation of your party are unpopular, what do you do to stay in power? Here are some options:

1. KEEP SCREAMING ABOUT SOCIALISM AND HOPE THE DEMOCRATS RUN THE COUNTRY INTO A DITCH: Trump is already doing some of that in his campaign.
2. THE MCCONNELL OPTION: Who needs to win elections to hang on to power? The federal system, the filibuster, and friendly judges will block the Democrats’ agenda. It’s a half loaf, but that’s a lot better than nothing.
3. NATIONAL CONSERVATISM: Drop the regressive tax cuts and deregulation and go with a more populist and nationalist economic policy. Persuade the PBPs to go along by warning them about socialism.
4. SOFTEN THE SOCIAL CONSERVATISM: Those old white Christians aren’t being replaced, you know.
5. THE ORBAN OPTION: McConnell plus vote suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and a variety of First Amendment violations. There is a market for it. Some GOP intellectual leaders are already on board.

So which will it be? Most of them are not mutually exclusive. I would bet on the first two, and not the next two. The Orban Option? It’s a real and frightening possibility.

Ever since Reagan, the GOP orthodoxy has been to support tax cuts and deregulation for business under every imaginable circumstance. There are two problems with this. First, it hasn’t worked, except to massively enrich the donor class; inequality has risen sharply as a result. Second, it is unpopular, even with GOP rank-and-file voters. For a politician, that is an even greater sin.

Historically, the party has compensated for the unpopularity of its fiscal policies by cranking up the culture wars. As recently as 2004, it succeeded. Times have changed, however; even social conservatives admit that they have lost the culture war, and view themselves as an endangered minority. What is more, the situation will only get worse over time, as the party’s elderly white Christian base dies off.

So where does the GOP go from here? If both parts of the bargain that represents the foundation of the party are electoral losers, how can the GOP ever hope to win a majority in the foreseeable future? More on that in my next post.

I’ve noted innumerable times before that the foundation of the current GOP is a deal in which the PBPs get tax cuts and deregulation, and the Reactionaries get conservative judges and lots of soothing words on social issues. While Trump has a heterodox style, to say the least, he is a traditionalist on this subject; he has unquestionably delivered the goods to both factions. But what happens if he is trounced in November? Will the deal remain in effect?

It will come under attack from both sides, because the PBPs and the Reactionaries are going to blame each other for the debacle. The Reactionaries will attribute Trump’s defeat to his failure to adopt a populist economic strategy; the PBPs will say it was all due to those damned outrageous tweets that pleased the base, but turned off swing voters. Some Reactionaries are toying with a populist economic plan that deviates dramatically from the Reagan era theory of freedom and tax cuts; you will hear more about it in the future. Some PBPs will support Biden in order to bring an end to the division and chaos.

My best guess is that the agreement will ultimately stand, as neither party to it has much chance of getting what it most wants without using the other faction as an ally. The agreement has some seriously negative consequences for the future of the GOP, however. I will address these, and some potential ways out, in future posts.

It was the obvious choice, and the correct one. I predicted it months ago. So did lots of other people.

The best thing about Biden as a campaigner is that he doesn’t overthink things. For example, he’s staying in his basement and letting Trump hang himself on TV every day. It works, so why stop?

The tricky thing about the VP choice is to avoid saying anything negative about any of the other contenders. My guess is that he will refuse to answer questions on that topic. Whether his staff can be relied upon to do the same remains to be seen.

(Joe Biden is in his basement, still mulling over his VP choice, when God calls his name. Unlike Trump, he knows who it is immediately.)

B: Yes, Lord. What can I do to best serve you?

G: Well, you could stop hating me, and being against me, for one.

B: I hope you’re not buying into those lies that Trump tells. I’ve always been here for you, just as you were here for me.

G: I’m just pulling your chain. Trump has you confused with that guy from the XFL. I don’t believe a word he says.

B: So, am I going to win the election?

G: I know, but cannot say. Kind of like your VP choice.

B: Who knew God was a comedian?

G: George Burns, for one. Here’s one for you: two angels and a demon walk into a bar together . . .

B: Enough divine comedy! Let’s be serious. You’re not going to help Trump, are you?

G: I stay out of elections. As I told him, if America is stupid enough to vote for him, they deserve him. I’ll be happy if you win, though. I’m tired of the lies and the stupid drama.

B: Is there anything I can do for you?

G: Yes. You can try to heal all of the divisions in your country. I hate that. Something needs to be done.

B: Job 1, boss.

(God leaves. Biden still hasn’t picked his running mate.)

My fellow real Americans:

I’m here today because I’m told there was a big battle here. Really big. Huge, even, but not as big as me. Lots of people died. It was bad, I tell you.

I’m also told that Lincoln gave some kind of speech here, although I’ve never heard of it. Did you know I won more electoral votes than Lincoln? Way more! I even carried the South, and he didn’t. He didn’t beat Hillary Clinton, either. I should have a much bigger monument than he does.

Anyway, the fake news says that the South lost the big battle here. As usual, they lied. That would make the South losers, and they love me, so that can’t be right. The South won the battle. They won the war, too. Didn’t they pretty much get to keep their slaves after it was over? That’s winning in my book. Just like how I repealed Obamacare.

I’m here today to tell you that Lincoln was wrong. A house divided is better than a house united, at least as long as I’m president. Black people claiming to want their rights are Communists and terrorists. I’m running again to turn the clock back and put those people in their place. Without me, America is just another sh___hole country overrun with drugs and crime. Joe Biden won’t do anything to stop them, but I alone will. Vote for me on November 3.

Once again, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

My initial reaction, of course, was to be offended. The more I thought about it, however, the more appropriate it seemed. Given Trump’s continuing efforts to divide the country, his affinity for Confederate symbols, and his position in the polls, his speech could be the 21st century equivalent of Pickett’s Charge.

Bernie Sanders’ formula for winning the election was base mobilization–nothing else. As one of his young followers put it memorably on Twitter, “There are no @#@#@ swing voters!” He made no effort to accommodate centrists, or even to package his opinions in a way that was more palatable to them. The results speak for themselves.

Donald Trump operates in the same way, and with the same electoral model. He has done nothing but feed his base red meat for 3+ years, presumably because he thinks they represent a majority of the country. He believes they alone won him the 2016 election. He’s wrong, and the polls prove it.

If Biden wins, will everyone wake up and realize that there are, in fact, swing voters, and that you still need to move to the center to win national elections in this country? The center left already understands that. It’s doubtful the right does.

We’re all equal in the sight of the virus. It has no respect for racial or class distinctions. Rich or poor, young or old, black or white, man or woman–you can get it and spread it just the same.

It is a problem that demands concerted action by all of us. There is no rugged individual solution. It has to be us and our government–period.

Is it any wonder that we are failing so badly at this? And is it really a good idea for our leader to be doing everything in his power to harden our divisions under these circumstances?

Determined to create and use leverage that is denied to him by the Constitution, and desperate to show the voters that he is the benevolent despot he plays in his dreams, Trump signed executive orders on unemployment insurance, payroll taxes, and evictions yesterday. He undoubtedly thinks the public will give him great credit for these patently illegal actions. It is more likely that they will lead to yet more chaos.

On the UI issue, he is proposing to use money from a fund that will be needed during the height of hurricane season. Hurricanes or not, it will run out pretty quickly. The states will have to find money they don’t have in their pandemic-ravaged budgets to participate. It will take at least weeks, and possibly months, to reprogram antiquated state computer systems to make the new system work. Finally, the payments represent a cut from the previous entitlement. How much credit does he think he will get from the unemployed for that?

As for the payroll tax holiday, it does nothing to address the lack of consumer confidence that is driving the recession, it does not help the unemployed, and it is just a deferral, which means that anyone seeking to take advantage of it has to be prepared for a big hit a few months away. In all likelihood, most businesses will continue to pay as before in order to avoid the later big hit. In the meantime, Trump is blowing a hole in the Social Security and Medicare budgets, which won’t exactly endear him to seniors, and dividing his party. This is another political disaster in the making.

So how will the Democrats respond? Will they continue negotiations in the face of these illegal actions? If I’m Nancy Pelosi, I tell the GOP leaders in Congress that there will be no negotiations unless and until they acknowledge the executive orders are unconstitutional. If they don’t do that, and they probably won’t, then I sue.

There once was a Judas named Mitt.

In Trump’s GOP he’s a poor fit.

He’s viewed as a traitor

By millions of haters.

They’re just angry folks full of sh–.

Mitt Romney is a PBP on economic issues, but a CD on everything else. It is clear from the campaign commercials that he is now viewed as a hate figure–Judas for the 21st Century–by the mainstream of the Republican Party. What does that tell you about the future of the GOP?

That CDs, who used to make up a large percentage of GOP voters, are no longer welcome there. That the Reactionaries don’t want a big tent party. And, most of all, that the GOP is going to rely on friendly judges, the federal system, and vote suppression to stay in power. If they’re not even interested in keeping the voters they already had, what chance do they have to being a majority in this country?

Reactionary defenders of Trump’s response to the virus make the following arguments in his favor:

1. The virus is an act of God. No one can really do anything about it; and
2. Trump was acting as a principled federalist by acknowledging that the primary responsibility for dealing with public health issues belongs to the states, not him. He cannot be blamed for the failures of others.

This fatalistic approach (“It is what it is”) is, of course, a load of crap. The European countries and Canada (with comparable political and socio-economic systems) have done a vastly better job of keeping the virus under control, let alone China, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia. And Trump’s idea of federalism, as I’ve noted many times before, is to take credit for successes and allocate blame to everyone else. At times, he has argued that he has complete control over public health issues as a “wartime president;” at others, he is just a poor, helpless giant whose only role in the process is to point fingers at Democrats and experts who are ultimately accountable to him.

That said, it is true that a variety of actors were responsible for our collective response to the virus, and not all of them covered themselves with glory. How much blame does Trump really deserve? A lot, as follows:

1. He did nothing to guarantee that the necessary resources were stockpiled and distributed to deal with the virus during the period of six weeks or so after the Chinese travel ban was put in place;
2. He is probably personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths by making mask wearing a culture war issue, repeatedly minimizing the seriousness of the problem, and openly supporting the opponents of lockdowns. Does anyone seriously contend that his statements on these subjects do not influence his base?; and
3. Similarly, his repeated insistence that states open up as quickly as possible undoubtedly has contributed to what I would call Wave 1.5.

It isn’t just his ridiculous, but ultimately meaningless, statements about science (e.g., go eat some bleach!) that condemn him. It is the practical, fully intended consequences of the statements described above that will stand as his legacy on the subject. He will be judged by them in November.

Imagine that you’re Joe Biden, and you’re trying to design a set for your acceptance speech that is consistent with the times and creates the maximum contrast with Trump’s bombast. What do you do?

I would hire a small Protestant church for the speech. All of the overtly religious items should be removed from view, but the context would be clear from the pews. The audience should be a racially diverse group of friends, ostentatiously socially distanced, and wearing masks.

The speech itself should be intimate, positive, and quietly uplifting. Leave most of the negative stuff for the other speakers. Hope, competence, and unity are the message here.

Nothing could be less like the man on golf cart.