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As I’ve noted in several previous posts, many reactionaries view guns, not as objects, but as symbols of independence, strength, virility, and traditional values.  Almost as icons, you could say.  That makes it difficult to have even a reasonable conversation about regulating them, much less to get legislation through the system, even though every poll I’ve ever seen shows strong national support for controls at a national level.

The Realo position on guns is to support additional controls, but at a state and local level.  Bernie Sanders has historically been a Realo on this issue; he views gun control as an unwelcome distraction from the “revolution,” which is directed at Wall Street, not serial killers.  The Fundi position, of course, is to promote the strictest regime possible at the federal level.  In spite of a wave of massacres over the last decade, it has accomplished essentially nothing.

Barring the abolition of the filibuster or a huge blue wave election, there is no  prospect of any really meaningful action on guns in Congress in the foreseeable future.  Nevertheless, you can expect the Fundi position to prevail during the primaries, due to the strong emotions understandably raised by the issue, and the Democrats’ chances of winning the Senate to diminish as a result.

Reactionaries dream of recreating a glorious past that only exists in their imagination.  They think it can be done purely as an act of will.  They are contemptuous of experts.  Finally, they blame evil outsiders and traitor elitists when they fail.

And they do inevitably fail, since they are swimming against the tide of history.  The question in a democratic system then is, what comes afterwards?  There are only two possibilities.  Either the liberal democratic system holds, and the left comes in to clean up the mess, or the Reactionaries turn into fascists and completely reshape the system in order to hang onto power.

Those are the stakes between now and November, 2020.

Lyin’ Eyes

City boys just seem to find out early

The world is just a nasty, lonely place.

He’ll get rich, and he won’t have to worry.

And everyone in town will know his face.

 

The first step is construct lots of new buildings

And every single one will bear his name.

Then he’ll ghost a book and buy casinos.

His wealth exceeded only by his fame.

 

No one said this process would be painless.

He’ll have to screw some folks along the way.

The world only rewards those who are ruthless

And strong enough to fight another day.

 

(Chorus)

You can’t trust your lyin’ eyes.

‘Cause the truth is in disguise.

I thought by now you’d realize

You can’t afford to trust your lyin’ eyes.

 

Wealth is not enough, so power beckons.

He’ll run to be the leader of the land.

The truth will be a casualty, I reckon.

He’ll have the base eating out of his hand.

 

The country’s split in two over his antics.

He lies and lies; the base just doesn’t care.

The opposition’s getting kind of frantic.

But checking facts just seems to lead nowhere.

 

(Repeat chorus)

 

Parody of “Lyin’ Eyes” by Don Henley and Glenn Frey.

At some point during the 2020 primaries, a debate moderator is going to ask a question about reparations.   The white candidates will all express their solidarity with African-Americans, but will not support reparations.  Cory Booker will say that his trust fund plan is a better, color-blind way of addressing wealth inequities resulting from race.  The spotlight will then turn to Kamala Harris.  Her response will, to a large extent, shape both the primaries and the general election.

It will be tempting for Harris to support reparations.  It would set her apart from the other candidates and endear her to many liberal activists and African-Americans.  It would help her in her quest to win the nomination.  If she were to be nominated under those circumstances, however, the GOP would hammer her mercilessly on the issue during the general election, and appalled white swing voters would turn away from the Democrats.  It would be pure electoral poison.

So which will she choose?  I have no idea.  My guess is we’ll know in about a year.

Theresa May has her deal with the EU, but she got it by caving on the backstop.  She has survived thus far by kicking the can, but a decision can no longer be avoided. Will she be able to sell the deal to the Cabinet and Parliament?  This time, I think not.  We’ll find out later today.

The Realo/Fundi and class/identity splits do not overlap;  they are the x- and y-axes on a graph.  It is perfectly possible for candidates to land in any of the four quadrants.  That said, Fundi positions tend to line up with class on economic and welfare state issues, but with identity on social justice issues.

Immigration is a good example of the latter.  The Fundi position on immigration (i.e., to abolish ICE and have essentially open borders; anything else is racism) is completely associated with identity, and is diametrically opposed to the interests of the class group, many of whom believe, as Trump does, that immigrants depress wages and steal the jobs of the white working class.  Bernie Sanders, to cite one prominent example, has said that open borders are a Koch brothers fantasy.

The Fundis will find that open borders may sound great to immigration activists, but not to the vast majority of Democratic voters, let alone the entire American voting public.  It’s electoral suicide.  One has to hope that the Realo position of enforcing the law, but working for a compromise that provides a reasonable path to citizenship and a landing place for genuine refugees, will prevail in the primaries.

The Realos almost prevailed during the Obama years, since all of the GOP factions except the Reactionaries are open to reform.  The problem was timing; by the time the immigration bill passed the Senate, the GOP controlled the House, and the Hastert Rule prevented a vote on the Senate compromise.  It is perfectly possible that a similar bill could get through the system after 2020 if the Democrats have control of both houses.

On the 45th President Trump.

The election made him quite a grump.

He’s pissed at his staff.

Wants to split wheat from chaff.

So then who will be next to be dumped?

Mitt Romney ran in 2012 as a CD/PBP, not a Reactionary, even though the Reactionaries were (and are) the largest faction within the GOP.  He nonetheless won the nomination for two reasons.  First, he was shrewd enough to appropriate the immigration issue up front and thus make himself minimally acceptable to the Reactionaries;  Donald Trump would learn from this and follow his lead in 2016.  Second, he was unchallenged in his lane, while multiple candidates scrambled for Reactionary votes.  The math was in his favor, and he took advantage of it.

If Biden runs in 2020, he could benefit from a similar dynamic.  He won’t sparkle in debates, and he won’t have the support of young liberal activists.  He will, however, have the Realo/White Guy lane to himself;  there are still plenty of voters in that lane, even if they aren’t necessarily activists.  He’s also at least minimally acceptable to the rest of the party.   It could be enough to get him over the line as a transitional figure intended to heal the damage caused by Trump.

Michael Bloomberg could upset this apple cart, but I don’t think that would happen.  More on him in a future post.

Back in 2008, the Realo/Fundi split on climate change was obvious.  A carbon tax was a tax, and everyone knew that Republicans wouldn’t tolerate new taxes.  Cap-and-trade, on the other hand, was a market-based mechanism, not a tax, and had the support of John McCain.  That was the way to go if you wanted to get something done.

We all know what happened.  The Republicans changed their position and unanimously opposed cap-and-trade.  Obama’s legislation passed the House, but could not survive the combination of the filibuster and opposition from both Republicans and energy-state Democrats in the Senate.  Whatever progress was made during the Obama years was the result of the energy investment component of the stimulus and regulations, not legislation.

Joe Manchin and Jon Tester will never vote for either a carbon tax or cap-and-trade.  The filibuster is still in place.  The likelihood of getting more than 60 Democrats in the Senate is very low.  What are the Democrats to do?

It may be counter-intuitive, but a carbon tax, combined with more regulations and investments, has a better chance of success than cap-and-trade.  A carbon tax is simpler and generates less bureaucracy;  the funds can also be used for Republican-friendly causes, such as the preservation of some of the Trump tax cuts.  Some GOP economists and energy companies have actually supported such a tax.  It’s a long shot, but it’s not impossible.

After all, even Republicans have to understand we are already paying for climate change.  We’re just doing it by picking up the pieces after disasters instead of providing mitigation up front.   Does that really make sense as a national strategy?

The Democrats won back the House by staying on message, disregarding Trump’s provocations, and giving individual candidates the latitude to depart from the usual party line when necessary.   But what now?  What kinds of legislation should they be pursuing?

They should have two broad objectives:  first, to help Americans who really need the assistance, regardless of party affiliation; and second, to make it easier to win in 2020.  This does not particularly mean base mobilization; Trump takes care of that when he throws red meat to his own base on a daily basis.  The emphasis should be on identifying measures to win over swing voters, particularly in the Midwest.

The likely swing voters in 2020 are:  (a) business people concerned about Trump’s incompetence and corruption and their impacts on the market; (b) elderly voters concerned about potential future GOP entitlement cuts; and (c) white union members in the Rust Belt who supported Trump in 2016, but dislike his fondness for plutocrats.

With that in mind, I would suggest that the leadership emphasize the following:

1.  While I have serious reservations about increases in the minimum wage on a national level, they make good politics.  The GOP’s inevitable refusal to go along with this will be difficult to explain to white workers in 2020.  The likely tradeoff in lost votes from business people is probably worth it.  $15 per hour on a national level is too high, however; the final number should be substantially less than that.
2.  Legislation to shore up individual health insurance markets and provide an additional layer of legal protection for people with pre-existing conditions would help average people and might get bipartisan support.  If not, it’s another black mark for the GOP, whose candidates lied consistently about their position on pre-existing conditions in the past campaign.
3.  Rolling back at least the most egregious parts of the Trump tax cut and using the funds to address the deficits in Social Security and Medicare would also put the GOP in a very awkward position.  Republicans would be forced to choose between their business and elderly constituents.  Who would win that battle?  Wouldn’t it be entertaining to find out?

This is the first of three weekly series on the Democrats and the 2020 election that I will be running between now and the end of the year. “Realos and Fundis” will focus on issues other than the welfare state;  “The Welfare State in 2020” will address the various Democratic proposals to expand the welfare state; and “Mind the Gap in 2020” will talk about the profound fissures in American politics and how the Democratic Party can try to heal them.

Free trade, on its face, presents a dilemma for the Democratic Party.  On the one hand, free trade polls well with the blue base, Trump will probably have made protectionism toxic within the party and the country as a whole by 2020, and free trade is sound economics and geopolitics.  On the other hand, it is quite likely that the 2020 general election will be decided in the Rust Belt, where there is strong support for protectionism, as evidenced by the success of both Trump and Sherrod Brown.  That is the reason Hillary Clinton dishonestly opposed the TPP.  It did her little good in the long run.

The Sanders wing of the Democratic Party sounds a lot like Trump on free trade.  Realos oppose protectionism.  Where is the party to go?

Fortunately, there is a way to marry effective opposition to Trump on trade issues with sound economic policy–refocus the debate on China and its violations of international norms.  If I were, say, Joe Biden, I would argue that Trump has been right to take a hard line with the Chinese, but that he has done it in a completely inept way;  in particular, it was a mistake to alienate our allies first.  The best way to deal with China is to work with our partners to create new trade deals and reform the WTO, not to impose mindless tariffs on Europe and Canada which make it vastly harder to present a united front against the Chinese.

In other words, bring back Obama’s positions on trade.  If packaged properly, they square the circle.

To elaborate a bit on Macron’s comments, a patriot loves his country, while a nationalist despises everyone else.  A patriot is willing to sacrifice for his country.  A nationalist wants to bully the rest of the world.

Trump has described himself as a nationalist.  Given that he used bone spurs to avoid military service, became extremely wealthy by screwing people over, and won power by demonizing immigrants and Muslims, for once, I would have to agree with him.

House Democrats now have subpoena power!  Great!  But how will they use it?  One of Trump’s talents is making himself look like a victim, and overreaching could backfire.

Here is a partial list of the issues that will come up, and how they should be handled:

1.  Trump’s tax returns:  Go for it!  This is likely to turn into a long and difficult process, but it will be worth it.  Trump is violating previous promises and longstanding norms by refusing to release the returns, the blue base will insist, there is a sound legal basis for the request, and the returns can provide answers to perfectly legitimate questions outside of Mueller’s scope of work about Trump’s sources of income and how they relate to his foreign policy decisions.

2.  Misfeasance, excessive business influence, and simple grifting within federal agencies:  Absolutely.  That’s the whole point of having this power, and there’s plenty to investigate.

3.  Restarting the Russia investigation:  Only if Mueller is prevented from finishing his work.  Leave this one to the professionals.

4.  Investigating the Kushners:  Probably not.  It’s too collateral, and the risks of a backlash outweigh the benefits.

 

If you ever spend any time driving around France, you will note that virtually every little village has its own poignant World War I memorial.  If you count the number of names on each memorial and compare it to the size of the village, you will have a better understanding of what a catastrophe the war was.  And that doesn’t even include its side effects–Soviet communism, the rise of the Nazi and fascist states, and World War II.

Trump was scheduled to make an appearance at a cemetery full of American war dead at Belleau Wood yesterday.  Instead, allegedly due to bad weather (the other world leaders somehow didn’t have this problem), he spent the day watching Fox News and tweeting.  Why wouldn’t he?  He has no sense of tragedy, or responsibility to anyone other than himself, and he approves of the kind of nationalism that directly led to the war.

It was a disgrace.  Or, as he would say, BAD!

The Democrats won clear victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania on Tuesday.  If they can repeat this in 2020, they will win the presidency even if Trump prevails in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa, all of which will be in play.

A generic Democrat would consequently begin the 2020 race as a clear favorite over Trump.  The issue, of course, is that Trump will be running against an actual flesh-and-blood candidate, not Mr. or Ms. Generic.  The party’s task, therefore, is to make sure that it doesn’t nominate someone who is less popular than Mr. or Ms. Generic.

How can that be done?  I’ll be discussing that in three separate weekly series over the rest of the year.