Month: May 2021

Reactionary thought in America is typically associated with states’ rights. Fascism, on the other hand, by definition involves a direct tie between the country’s leader and the nation as a whole. If the GOP takes power and successfully implements the Orban Option, how would this contradiction be resolved?

There would be a substantial degree of decentralization. Slightly reformed red state governments could be relied upon to impose and enforce the religious and racial tests that would be at the heart of the new regime, while censorship would be handled at the national level. But what about the blue states?

The military would have to be purged and used as an occupying force, but that, by itself, would not be enough to run the blue states. Local collaborators, mostly from rural areas, would have to be recruited. Finally, talented reactionaries would have to be mobilized in red states in large numbers, carefully organized, and sent to the blue states to run state and local governments and crush any remaining opposition.

Think of carpetbaggers, only in reverse.

Assume that the Biden boom is still in full swing in 2024. Do the Republicans respond by nominating someone (e.g., Josh Hawley) with a similar populist agenda and fight the election purely on culture and identity issues?

I doubt it. The GOP would effectively be conceding that regressive tax cuts and deregulation aren’t always the answer, and that not every election is a rerun of 1980. The rank and file might already accept that, but the intellectual and institutional leadership does not, and probably never will.

Inertia is a powerful thing. My guess is that it will take at least two election cycles to put an end to the enduring image of Reagan and morning in America within the GOP.

This is far from a given, but assume that the Biden economy is a roaring success. How will the GOP respond?

Here are the choices:

1. Whine about the deficit and how we’re burdening our grandchildren.
2. Ramp up the culture wars to 11.
3. Engage in vandalism and hostage taking. Demand massive spending cuts in exchange for voting to keep the government open and increasing the debt ceiling. Stick to your guns when Biden refuses and see if he blinks.
4. Pick a presidential candidate with a genuinely populist economic agenda similar to Biden’s in 2024, and fight the election on cultural/identity issues.

#1 and #2 are a given; they’re already doing that. I will address #4 in my next post. The one you should be really concerned about is #3. That issue will come up in a few months. My prediction is that the base will be pushing for a showdown over the debt limit, and that the possibility of default will dominate the political discussion for weeks, if not months.

Inspired by the performance of our economy in 2019, the availability of cheap money, the persistence of inequality, the structural issues exposed by the pandemic, and the fear of the Orban Option in 2024, Biden has staked his political future on an attempt to grow the welfare state at the expense of the wealthy. This isn’t socialism; it is pure populism, as opposed to the faux variety offered by Trump and the GOP.

While this program has a sound basis in economics, it is based primarily on a bet about the electorate. It raises two questions:

1. Will a significant number of reactionary white workers eschew identity politics and vote their economic self-interest if the economy is roaring and wages are rising in 2024?
2. Will Biden lose the votes of affluent blue-leaning professionals with his tax increases and potential losses in the markets?

The math is simple: the increased reactionary worker vote has to exceed the decreased blue professional vote for this gamble to succeed.

What is the prognosis? I’m cautiously optimistic, but nobody knows for sure.

How will the GOP respond? I’ll discuss that in my next post.

Following Nikki Haley, Tim Scott argues that America is not a racist country. It would be easy to dismiss his comments as an opportunistic effort by “Uncle Tim” to suck up to his party’s base for self-interested reasons. It may even be true. However, let’s evaluate his opinion on its merits and see where it goes.

I will start with three propositions on which all parties to the debate should be able to agree:

1. Black people were enslaved prior to 1863 and subjected to ferocious and wide-ranging legal discrimination until the middle 1960s.
2. There are no government regulations anywhere in the country today which facially discriminate against black people.
3. By any indicator you care to name–wealth, unemployment, incarceration, education, drug use, and violent deaths, just to name a few–black people are significantly worse off than white people today.

The obvious question to ask a member of the GOP, such as Scott, is why #3 is the case. For a Democrat, the answer is easy: it is the lingering effects of #1, in addition to some ongoing racism today. That argument is both logical and factually plausible. Some Republicans might privately think that the correct answer is that “black people are worse off because they are inherently inferior,” but, in spite of their frequent harangues about PC, they know they cannot say such a thing in public. The Democratic response is also unacceptable, because it makes the case for affirmative action. The GOP member is consequently driven to take the position that decades of poor social policy driven by the Democrats have caused the problem. If you could just take the hammock of dependency away and force black people to stand on their feet without assistance, the inequality problem would disappear.

This is the Paul Ryan argument. It has no basis in logic or experience. The American safety net (at least pre-Biden) is about as far from a comfortable hammock as you can get, and the GOP has already had numerous opportunities to implement its position over the past several decades. Was there any improvement? None that I can see.

The bottom line is that the overwhelming evidence indicates that there is still plenty of as-applied racism in this country, and that the vestiges of hundreds of years of discrimination cannot be disposed of quickly. You don’t have to be woke to see that.

Yesterday, we packed up our car and made the long drive to our North Carolina mountain home. Spring is in full swing here, as opposed to Florida, which only has the wet and dry seasons.

It occurred to me this morning that part of the emotional appeal of Easter is the fact that it takes place during the spring; the theme of death and resurrection is manifested in the natural world at just the right time. But what happens in the Southern Hemisphere? Would Easter have the same meaning in the fall?

I would think not.