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If you take the long view, you can see that the country faces two threats that are more or less existential: climate change and China. The dangers from the former include more frequent and much worse natural disasters, loss of agricultural productivity, massive internal migration, and millions of desperate climate refugees at the border. The latter threatens us with, at best, the division of the globe into roughly equal spheres of influence, and at worst, with subordination to a nation with values far different than our own.

What links these two issues is the absence of any “rugged individual” solution. As with the pandemic, our response will require effective collective action. That is ominous for small government, negative freedom loving members of the GOP.

The Republicans will ultimately have to make some compromises to remain relevant. What should they be willing to sacrifice, and what is essential? That will be the subject of my next post.

When you think about it carefully, what really stands out with the Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head controversies is the distance between the supposed disease and any plausible remedy. Both cases involve purely private behavior; neither the government nor any tech company played any role. What would the right have the American public do about this? How can the Seuss estate be compelled to continue to publish the books in question? How can the manufacturers of Mr. Potato Head be required to return to the company’s rightful name?

As far as I can see, there are only two possible answers to these questions:

1. The CPAC crowd wants to gain a monopoly of power in order to restructure our political, economic, and legal systems. This would include a substantial rewriting of the First Amendment to serve only conservative interests; or
2. “Conservatives” (actually, Reactionaries) live in an echo chamber, and love to hear loud applause from the base. This is about preening and blowing off steam–nothing more.

No one within the right has shown anything like the intellectual ability to create a road map for #1. Don’t give them too much credit. The correct answer is #2.

The Biden recovery bill is intended to accomplish two broad objectives in addition to facilitating pandemic recovery. One is to reduce inequality, by sending the vast majority of the benefits to the less affluent; the second is to convince pocketbook voters among the Trump supporters in the working class that a government run by Democrats can and will work for them.

How many of the Trump working class voters are actually motivated by financial considerations, as opposed to the culture wars? We’ll know more in 2022. In the meantime, the rest of them can gorge themselves on Mr. Potato Head.

The woman who lives next door likes to play country music while she is working in her yard. One of her apparent favorites is “I Walk the Line,” by Johnny Cash. A few days ago, I did a search on the computer and confirmed what I thought I knew: Cash wrote the song for his first wife, but he ultimately blew up the relationship with drugs, alcohol, and a series of flaming affairs, including one with June Carter, whom he ultimately married.

At first glance, you might call Cash a hypocrite, but that would be unfair. There is no reason to believe that Cash didn’t mean what he said; he simply wasn’t able to live up to his own standard, in spite of his best efforts. That makes him human, not a hypocrite.

No, hypocrisy means setting a standard for third parties that you know you have no intention of meeting yourself. For example, when Mitch McConnell complains that the Democrats aren’t being adequately bipartisan, and are ramming through legislation over the GOP’s objections. Or when Ross Douthat, the proud heir to a Catholic tradition that includes the Index of Prohibited Books and the Inquisition, bangs on about liberals failing to defend free speech.

The next time Ross wants to complain about “cancel culture,” tell him to go discuss it with Galileo.

As we know, for a variety of reasons, Joe Manchin doesn’t want to dump the filibuster. The new House voting rights bill will provide him with a test, however. The bill is a perfectly reasonable response to the process issues presented over the last decade as a result of GOP overreaching. If it is approved, it will strengthen Manchin’s position in his home state.

It is, in short, a prize worth fighting for.

If I’m Manchin, I would approach a group of relatively moderate GOP senators and tell them that they need to work in good faith with the Democrats on election reform; otherwise, I might change my mind on the filibuster. The man has leverage with both sides, not just the Democrats. He would be foolish not to use it.

I was never besotted by Andrew Cuomo. I was never a “Cuomosexual.” I never thought having him replace Biden on the ticket made any sense. And the allegations against him are credible. He deserves to pay some kind of a price for his mistakes.

But the punishment has to fit the crime. The acts of which he is accused were offensive, but did not involve assaults or employment retaliation. The harm was relatively minimal. Are we really expected to use any bandwidth on condemning this kind of behavior in an era in which Donald Trump gets away scot-free? Do we really want to hand the right a stick with which to beat the left, but not its erring own?

The polls indicate that New Yorkers don’t think Cuomo should resign, but do not particularly want him to run for a fourth term. That strikes me as about right.

With this poisonous legacy in place, where does the GOP go now? Here are the possibilities:

1. BECOME A RESPONSIBLE CENTER-RIGHT PARTY: After they won House seats in what a majority of Republican voters think was a rigged election in 2020? Don’t hold your breath.
2. KEEP GAMING THE SYSTEM: Keep the unpopular ideas about regressive tax cuts, deregulation, and the culture war, but rely on the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and mild measures of vote suppression to remain relevant.
3. ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY: A more extreme and authoritarian version of #2. Ratchet up the vote suppression and gerrymandering, start imposing censorship, and further politicize law enforcement and the judiciary. With this degree of control, blue victories in national elections become impossible.
4. OUTRIGHT FASCISM: The militias are brought under control and become an active wing of the party under the command of a charismatic leader.

The most likely outcomes at this point are #2 and #3. The only one that can be dismissed is #1, at least until the GOP experiences the kind of horrendous electoral defeat that did not occur last year.

The $15 minimum wage provision of the recovery bill failed miserably, yet progressives are still banging on about how we need to end the filibuster to get it approved. What’s the point? The votes aren’t there, either way.

To me, the real test of the filibuster is the voting rights bill. It might be worth killing the filibuster for that one. We’ll see how Manchin reacts when it fails.

To summarize, here is what Trump inherited from his predecessors in 2016:

1. Reagan: Swagger; tax cuts and deregulation; playing to the white Christian base.
2. Limbaugh: Anger; never-ending culture wars.
3. Gingrich: Civility is for wimps; use of the new media landscape.
4. Murdoch: A mass audience for reactionary swaggering and whining.
5. George W. Bush: An establishment in disrepute after Iraq and the Great Recession.
6. Palin: Culture warriors with no interest in policy can get on the ticket and prosper.
7. Anton: The apocalypse is nigh; it is OK to use any means necessary to save “real America.”

Trump’s contributions to this toxic mix were the constant use of social media to own the libs, corruption and incompetence as disruption of the “deep state,” and a cult of personality. Put them all together, and you have the dangerous mess that is the GOP today.

So where is this going? I will talk about the GOP’s options in the final post in this series.

To me, and probably to you, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden come across as eminently reasonable, moderate, center-left politicians. To Michael Anton, however, they are just different manifestations of the Beast of the Apocalypse. The right was consequently justified in doing anything necessary, regardless of the risk to liberal democracy, to keep them out of office.

Can you imagine what he would think if, say, AOC were the Democratic nominee?

It is difficult to tell to what extent Anton molds, as opposed to merely reflecting, opinion on the right. What is certain is that his vision of America going to hell in a handbasket motivated millions of Trump voters and the January 6 rioters, and will continue to influence the GOP unless and until it is generally accepted by the right that the left does not intend to destroy their culture and way of life.

The Biden recovery bill is making its way through the Senate as I am writing this. Given its price tag, you would think the GOP would be treating it in public as an existential threat to the country. The problem for the leadership, of course, is that the bill is popular, even among Republicans. So, instead, we’re hearing a lot of talk about . . . Dr. Seuss!

As is typical with these kinds of episodes, this one involves a purely private actor taking action voluntarily to protect its long term economic interests. There was no coercion here by the government, the woke left, or the big tech companies. Nevertheless, the GOP is making it out to be another milestone in the history of the odious “cancel culture.”

Back in the day, when you heard stories about censorship, they typically involved some stupid small town librarian who refused to stock books about Shakespeare or Darwin or whatever because the very conservative community didn’t approve. In a similar vein, Donald Trump periodically threatened to defund governments and school systems that took the blue side in the culture wars in order to please his base. In other words, don’t be fooled by right-wing talk about free speech; the right, historically, has been far more apt to engage in “cancel culture” than the left. This is fundamentally a battle over power, not speech.

On the one hand, you have the woke left trying to use its intellectual and demographic power through social media and liberal local governments to treat elements of traditional American culture as illegitimate. On the other hand, you have the right trying to use political power as a vehicle for censorship of blue culture. In the middle, you have people like us, who actually believe in free speech, and who want all of this crap to just go away. Good luck with that.

The country’s ruling class was legally privileged, and did everything in its power to protect those privileges. Its members mixed easily with members of the ruling class of other nations, and even spoke the same language. They were openly contemptuous of the lower classes, who had no political or cultural power. Social mobility was nonexistent.

Is it France in 1100 or the US today? Many GOP leaders would say it could be either.

John McCain was behind, and he knew it. He needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat. As a result, he picked an obscure politician from Alaska to be his running mate in the summer of 2009. The repercussions of that decision are still being felt today.

Sarah Palin was, and is, a pure reactionary. She knew nothing, and cared less, about policy. She was, however, very good at ripping off sharp, sarcastic lines about the culture wars. She knew how to own the libs. She claimed to speak for average Americans in flyover country against a failed, overeducated urban establishment. The base loved her for it, and cried for more.

McCain was crushed, but the far right wasn’t. For the first time, a genuine reactionary populist had been on the ticket. It would not be the last.

Assume, for purposes of argument, that the combination of loose monetary policy and the Biden fiscal and regulatory agendas leads to a significant increase in wages for working people and a sharp decline in the real estate, stock, and bond markets. What would that mean for our politics?

You can break that down into three questions:

1. How do business owners react?
2. How do professional, middle class people react?
3. How do workers react?

The answer to #1 is obvious: they will vote for the GOP. That was always likely in any event. #2 and #3 are tougher questions. My guess is that the culture wars are so strongly embedded in our collective DNA that the second group would continue to vote Democratic in spite of their financial losses, and that the third group would continue to vote for the GOP in spite of their gains.

Will we find out? I honestly don’t know, but it is certainly possible.

Universal programs have three important advantages. They don’t create work disincentives through benefit cliffs; they can create a sense of social solidarity; and they are popular with middle-class white people who see targeted programs as “welfare” designed to assist lazy minorities. Their chief disadvantage, of course, is cost.

So when is it appropriate to create a universal program? Here are some of the considerations:

1. How universal is the demand for the goods or services in question?
2. Does the market provide them adequately for people of means?
3. How big a priority is the program, relative to other uses for the money?
4. What are the economic impacts in terms of interest costs, “crowding out,” etc. of creating a large new program?
5. How badly do you need to generate as much political support as possible among white middle-class people for the program? Can it be sold successfully as a targeted program?

As you can see, this is a complicated, fact-intensive analysis. Each program has to be viewed individually; there is no applicable general rule.

For the GOP, on the other hand, defeating new or expanded safety net programs is a two-part process. First, you complain that the proposed universal program costs too much, and will burden our successors forever; then, if you prevail on that point, you make the argument to your constituents (probably only implicitly) that this is just another example of the Democrats preferring lazy minorities to hardworking “real Americans.”

It doesn’t require much imagination, but it usually works.