Cromwell

It’s definitely not about debt. Based on his performance in office, to say nothing of his actions as a developer, do you think Donald Trump gives a fig about the deficit? Did the January 6 rioters spend any time screaming about federal spending? Do MTG, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz really care about debt? Please.

No, this is a battle about power. The red base, although a relatively small minority of the electorate, believes it is entitled to run the country, and sees this is an opportunity to prove it is in charge. The Chaos Caucus in the House represents their interests; it wants to run the Republican Party. The remainder of the GOP has historically stuck with the nihilists in order to keep the left out. All of them want to prove that, regardless of what the voters said in November, the Republican Party has both the right and the ability to crash the plane if it sees fit.

The extremists haven’t even named their price yet, which should tell you everything you need to know about their real motivations. If Biden pays anything like the full ransom they are demanding, he will be sending a message to the entire country that the red base and the Chaos Caucus are in charge, and the rest of us are just hapless passengers in a bus that is heading for the ditch. It is consequently imperative for him not to give in.

It’s June. Janet Yellen has just announced that the debt ceiling cliff is less than a day away. Biden and the Democrats are refusing, at least in public, to negotiate. McCarthy is whipping his troops as if his job depends on it, which, of course, it does. He insists that Biden will cave if everyone sticks together. Trump and his burn it down allies sit back and enjoy the spectacle, because they figure they can’t lose: either Biden caves and demoralizes his party, or chaos ensues and Biden gets blamed for it. The rest of us just hold our breath and wait on events.

The spotlight turns to a handful of GOP House members from Biden districts. They tell Biden they are willing to lift the debt ceiling, but only if he gives them something that looks substantial in return. Agreeing to get rid of the new IRS agents is thrown out as a possibility. Mitch and most of the GOP senators are in their camp.

What happens now? If Biden stands firm and the GOP splits, Biden wins a huge victory, and the debt ceiling gun is retired once and for all. If Biden gives in to the GOP moderates, the immediate crisis is averted, but the hostage takers get a small reward, and are incentivized to try again later. If no deal is reached and Biden refuses to pay the bills, markets will crash all over the world, the burn it down folks will be happy, and both sides will point fingers at the other. If no deal is reached and Biden continues to pay the bills, the markets will react strongly, but there will be no crash, and the crisis will be contained.

I have predicted Biden will make a deal with the moderates, but let’s be honest here: I don’t know that for sure, and neither does anyone else, including the players in the drama. All I can say is, don’t wake me up until it’s over.

The GOP is our testosterone-fueled Daddy Party, so the factions universally support high levels of defense spending, albeit for somewhat different reasons. CLs accept it, for the most part, because they view defense as one of the few legitimate functions of government; PBPs support it because it is directed largely at communist states they abhor; CDs want to use the military to bring democracy and prosperity to the entire world; and Reactionaries like displays of patriotism and swagger.

Of course, the factions don’t necessarily agree on what the military is actually supposed to do. CDs and PBPs generally have an internationalist outlook; CLs and Reactionaries lean towards isolationism. This is a battle that emerged during the Trump years and will become more conspicuous during the 2024 primaries.

Donald Trump never showed any interest in cutting the budget during his days in office. Why is he cheering for a GOP hard line on spending and a debt ceiling crisis?

Part of it is just his vengeful id, of course, but there may be an element of calculation, as well. Creating chaos is his brand; paradoxically, he may think the public will be longing for a strongman (i.e., himself) to put an end to the instability caused by his acolytes once and for all. In other words, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Some commentators think the discovery of government records at various unsecured locations associated with Biden has made Merrick Garland’s decision on charging Trump more difficult. I think it has made the decision infinitely easier. Why?

Because Garland’s decision, like Comey’s in 2016, will inevitably be influenced by politics. The one thing he could do to unite the GOP electorate behind Trump and his faltering campaign is to bring criminal charges against him. Now he doesn’t have to, and he can tell the left that Biden’s mistakes are to blame. They won’t have much of an answer to that.

If you define “wokeness” as a series of identity deterministic beliefs which portray straight white American Christians as being irredeemably evil, all of the GOP factions are united against it. With that definition, “wokeness” is a wedge issue for Democrats, but not Republicans, which is why GOP politicians like to talk about it. But trouble lurks for Republicans when they get into the details.

How far does “wokeness” extend? For example, does it include women advocating for abortion rights? Does it encompass concern about climate change? Does it include the use of vaccines? How does it relate to January 6 and the “rigged” election? And how far should government go to fight it? Should censorship be imposed in some way in spite of the First Amendment? Is legal discrimination against the LGBTQ population acceptable? These questions will divide Reactionaries from the rest of the GOP electorate; we will only know what the predominant opinion within the party is after the 2024 primaries.

While the GOP has shown on innumerable occasions that it has no interest in a balanced budget, the party collectively has a strong interest in making the lives of the poor–particularly women, children, and minorities–as miserable as possible. Why is that?

Here is where the factions stand on the matter:

1. CLs believe that taxation is theft, wealth redistribution is a loss of freedom, and the welfare state only encourages lazy people to lounge in the hammock of dependency. Cutting the safety net to the bone is a form of tough love.
2. PBPs want to trim the welfare state for two reasons. First, they resent having to pay their share of the cost, because that reduces profits. Second, PBPs want a motivated, well-trained, docile, and poorly paid workforce. Reducing the strength of the safety net gives the unemployed less leverage with employers and thus helps to accomplish these goals.
3. In the eyes of Reactionaries, “welfare” is only there to assist people who are not “real Americans.” It can and should be cut as far as possible. Social Security and Medicare, on the other hand, are relied upon by millions of “real Americans” and consequently are sacrosanct.
4. The CDs, once again, don’t favor cutting the welfare state, but they are no longer real Republicans, and they don’t count.

The real issue with budget cuts is with Social Security and Medicare. Given the positions of the CLs and PBPs, there will always be a degree of interest among Republicans in cutting these programs, but the power lies with the Reactionaries, and they have every reason not to go along. Will that change over time? Not if they have any sense.

As I’ve noted many times before, the Reactionaries believe in a strong state and a comprehensive safety net, at least for “real Americans.” They don’t care in the least about a balanced budget. Why, then, are they being so militant about the debt ceiling?

Because they can’t do anything about wokeness as long as Biden is president and the Senate is controlled by the Democrats, but they can create chaos by voting against lifting the debt ceiling. It’s a really good step towards burning it down, and, as a practical matter, they may actually have the power to get it done. So why not? Wokeness can wait for a better day.

The stated reason for tax cuts on capital is that they result in increased investment, which increases productivity and ultimately trickles down to workers in the form of slightly higher wages. Experience over the last 40 years has repeatedly told us that this proposition is false, at least under current conditions. Even if it is doubtful that Republicans actually believe it, however, it remains the default GOP position as of today. Why?

Consider the issue from the perspective of the GOP factions:

1. For PBPs, promoting tax cuts on capital is a matter of compelling material self-interest. In addition, it is a gesture of official respect for their invaluable services as job-creating economic supermen. Nothing upsets a PBP more than the suggestion that he didn’t really make that by himself.
2. For CLs, all taxes are a burden on liberty, and should be cut to a bare minimum. CLs also cling to the forlorn hope that tax cuts will force the federal government to starve the beast. It didn’t work for Reagan, and it won’t work now.
3. The Reactionary position is complicated. On the one hand, the typical Reactionary worker is resentful of plutocrats, and gains little from tax cuts on capital, since he doesn’t have much. On the other hand, many Reactionaries are small business owners, who profit to some extent from these tax cuts, and in any event, support for tax cuts has been a critical part of the bargain that keeps the GOP united against the left. Lose the support of big capital, and you lose elections and the existential battle against wokeness–at least, so goes the theory.
4. CDs don’t really support tax cuts for business, but they aren’t really voting for the GOP at this point, anyway, so they don’t count.

The big question for the GOP going forward is whether the Reactionary/PBP bargain will hold in a changed environment in which the Reactionaries numerically dominate the party and increasingly call the shots. Will the Reactionaries embrace New Right economic thought and simply demand that business fall in line? I don’t think that will happen in the next election cycle, but we’ll see.

To reactionaries, MLK was purely a crusader for equal legal rights. Once the battle was won, and de jure segregation was a thing of the past, his job was done. If he had lived, he would have gone home and taken a long, well-deserved nap. To the left, however, MLK was fighting for practical equality. He would have been a strong advocate for affirmative action programs and, ultimately, for reparations.

Which one of these views is historically correct? King was murdered when he was trying to assist with a garbage strike. He fought, mostly unsuccessfully, for fair housing. He opposed the Vietnam War. There is thus no reason to believe he would have stopped with the Civil Rights Acts, or that he would have ended his days siding with the radical right and screaming about socialism and the evils of wokeness.

And yet, I’m quite certain John Roberts will say exactly that when he writes the opinion outlawing affirmative action in admissions later this year.

Balanced budget plans, huge spending cuts, and a looming debt ceiling crisis–it all seems painfully familiar. Does the GOP really want to party like it’s 2011 again, or is something else going on here?

There are a number of significant differences between then and now:

1. You could argue that the GOP had some sort of a mandate to cut spending after the 2010 election, but not today;
2. Obama was sympathetic to the idea of entitlement cuts. There is no talk of a grand bargain today;
3. The GOP has even less credibility on balancing the budget today than it did in 2011;
4. The red base is much more interested in fighting wokeness than in cutting the budget, which was not a consideration in 2011;
5. It is doubtful that the Tea Party really wanted to force a default in 2011. Today, the Chaos Caucus would probably welcome one as a first step in burning it down; and
6. The GOP House leadership was willing to ignore the GOP extremists in 2011, but McCarthy owes his job to them.

What these differences mean in their totality is that a default is more likely today than in 2011, but not for any reasons relating to fiscal prudence. This battle will be all about burning it down.

As I’ve taken great pains to point out over the years, the GOP is badly divided on most of the important issues of the day. In addition, many of its more prominent members are far more interested in becoming social media celebrities than in moving legislation. For those reasons, it is often said that the GOP has few, if any, ideas about policy.

While that observation is true, it is slightly misleading; while the Republicans don’t have much in the way of actual ideas, they do have prejudices and lowest common denominators that unite them against the left. I will be identifying and analyzing these in a series of posts over the next week.

The last round of globalization should have been a win-win-win. Producers reduced their labor costs and increased their profits; consumers enjoyed lower prices; and displaced workers were supposed to be compensated by the producer and consumer groups, using the government as a channel, through direct repayments and effective training programs. The first two parts of the equation functioned as planned, but the third did not, and we are paying for it in the form of right-wing populism today. What went wrong?

A number of things. First of all, business owners who frequently believed they were job-creating supermen saw no reason to pay higher taxes to fund the programs necessary to compensate globalization victims, and they had the political clout to get what they wanted. To some extent, this was accomplished by feeding workers a steady diet of nostalgia and culture wars. For their part, the workers, whose social status depended largely on their previous employment, didn’t want government handouts; they permitted themselves to be convinced by opportunistic right-wing voices that the government had stolen their jobs, and that a vote for Republicans would bring them back. Finally, the displaced workers found it difficult to find jobs that fit their skills. It just isn’t that easy to turn a coal miner into a coder, and government funds for infrastructure and education in unremarkable rural areas don’t guarantee an economic rebirth.

Ron DeSantis’ new tag line is “Florida is the state where woke goes to die.” His intent is to use the power of the state to crush an ideology, however ill-defined. What does history tell us about his ability to accomplish his objective? Could it work in the nation as a whole?

If you’re the leader of a totalitarian state, the job is easy to define, if somewhat difficult to accomplish in practice: you identify the woke people and either shoot them or put them in prison. If you’re the head of state of a liberal democracy, it requires vast amounts of persistence, energy, and patience, probably over a decade or more. If you’re running an illiberal democracy, you will rely on measures that fall between these two poles: censorship; regulatory harassment; the loss of government benefits; and forced unemployment.

DeSantis, as you would expect, is choosing Option 3. Even he would probably shrink from Option 1, and he doesn’t have the time and patience for Option 2. Can it work, particularly in blue states? Probably only well enough to keep the right in power, which would be the actual ultimate objective. Just ask Viktor Orban.

When Republicans control the White House, they cut taxes on capital and watch indifferently as the deficit soars. When a Democrat is president, however, the GOP gets fiscal religion and insists the budget must be balanced. It is happening again. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

But even the deficit scold organizations concede that there is no realistic way to balance the budget in ten years. In the process of creating the now-mandated blueprint, the GOP House will have to propose huge cuts in defense, Social Security, and Medicare, because that’s where the money is. Cutting defense in these times looks like a huge risk; cutting Social Security and Medicare will disproportionately impact old white people who mostly vote Republican. The latter group has historically blown off claims from the Democrats that entitlements are at risk; it will be much harder to do that when the new blueprint is in place.

This is an enormous unforced error in the making. I doubt that any of the GOP presidential candidates, including Trump and DeSantis, will support it; after all, the electorate doesn’t really care about deficits. So what’s the point?

If it’s to get Democrats elected, I’m all for it.