Cromwell

Still in thrall to Trump, the GOP has responded to its election losses by doubling down on culture war issues and allegations of election fraud. As a result, bills have been advanced in a variety of red state legislatures to make voting more difficult, at least for groups that are reliably pro-Democrat. The Democrats, for their part, have proposed to federalize election law in a manner that reflects their perceived interest in increasing turnout. Their bill is going nowhere in the Senate unless the filibuster is either eliminated altogether or modified to create a voting rights exception.

It is easily possible to exaggerate the impacts of these kinds of bills on the ground. There are recent studies which suggest that vote suppression tactics made no practical difference in the 2020 election. It is also undeniably true that the kinds of measures that are in dispute (early voting, mail ballots, etc.) were only enacted relatively recently; we managed to have elections that were viewed as fair before them. The real problem is that the margin between the GOP and the Democrats in 2020 was so small, any measure to tweak turnout can be viewed as making the difference between victory and defeat. Hence, the intensity of the dispute.

Would a voting rights exception to the filibuster be justified, based on history and logic? Could it be sustained in the long run? And how would the GOP react to it in the real world? These questions will be answered in my next post.

Self-styled “conservatives” claim to support freedom of speech against the oppressive left, but protecting right-wing free speech alone won’t turn the tide in the culture war; that can only be accomplished through censorship of the left. How would that be done?

It would be a big job. Most of it would have to be accomplished purely at the local level. You could, for example, require all teachers, professors, and librarians to pass ideological tests in order to keep working. But when you consider the vast number of jurisdictions that would be involved, and the fact that many of them are in blue states, the task is truly daunting. What can be done in one stroke at the federal level?

The easiest thing would be to enact some sort of vague internet regulation that permits a board appointed by a reactionary president to review and censor obnoxious left-wing speech on social media. The precedents for this exist in a variety of authoritarian countries overseas. At first glance, of course, this would violate the First Amendment, but with a reliably conservative judiciary, it might be possible to overcome the obvious legal problems. Shutting up the woke crowd on Twitter wouldn’t resolve the entire issue, but it would be a good place to start.

Or, of course, you could actually engage with these people and try to convert them, but that would be way too hard. The Orban Option is much easier and faster.

Bret Stephens thinks we need a new party to defend the principles of liberal democracy. We already have one–the Democratic Party. Republicans need not apply.

Stephens clearly believes the Democrats are beholden to the “woke” crowd. They’re not–any more than they despise “real Americans,” as the GOP constantly claims. “Wokeness” is mostly a social media phenomenon. It gets a lot of public attention, largely from the right, but its power over the Democrats in Congress is extremely limited.

The bottom line is that “wokeness” operates outside of national politics. Neither party is responsible for it, and neither party has any ability to stop it without dramatically changing our political system for the worse. So either fight back against it on its own terms, or let it go and hope for the best; don’t rely on politics for a solution, because you won’t find an answer there.

As I’ve noted previously, the Founding Fathers weren’t reactionaries, but they weren’t democrats, either. If you were making the case for democracy to the FFs, with the benefit of over 200 years of hindsight, what would you say?

Here are my arguments:

1. CHANGED CONDITIONS: The 18th century assumption would have been that the bulk of the populace didn’t have the education or the requisite amount of information to make informed choices about matters of state. That is not true today; if anything, we are inundated with too much information.
2. EQUALITY OF HUMANITY: While individuals are not equal in terms of intellectual talent, they are unquestionably equal in the sense that they have the same ability to experience life (the FFs, not a religious bunch, might have put this in terms of the equal value of souls, but I doubt it). If you assume, as most of the FFs did, that politics is an exercise in addressing conflicting interests, why should the interests of one individual be automatically preferred to another?
3. MADISONIAN FACTIONS: Madison made the argument that the geographical diversity of the country made it difficult for factions to combine and oppress minorities. That argument doesn’t look too great today, given the cultural and political polarization of our country, but it still has some merit.
4. WISDOM OF THE CROWD: There are even game shows based on this premise, which usually works.
5. NO BETTER ALTERNATIVE: If you wanted to identify an American aristocracy, who would be included? As noted in previous posts, you certainly can’t identify it with the “real Americans” beloved by reactionaries.

Are these arguments compelling? I would say yes, particularly when the system has liberal guardrails built in to protect individual rights. However, as we have seen over the last few years, the guardrails alone are no guarantee that the system will continue to exist and thrive; the public has to buy into them, as well.

The recovery legislation includes very substantial, but temporary, increases in the size of the welfare state. Biden is gambling that the GOP won’t have the nerve to let them expire in two years. Will it work?

The obvious precedent is the Bush tax cuts. The Democrats used the upper end tax cuts as leverage for other priorities. Look for the GOP to link the expiration of the upper end Trump tax cuts to the Biden safety net expenditures in the same way.

That’s the way it works in America today: the two parties are only capable of reaching agreements that further blow up the deficit.

It’s Ron Johnson. There can be no debate on this one.

The pandemic shut America down a year ago. It is appropriate to use the anniversary as a milestone, and to consider how we’ve adapted, what we’ve lost, and where we’re going. But do we really need to relive the whole experience? Does that really do anyone any good?

I have my doubts.

Imagine that you are a modern day James Madison. You fear the capriciousness of mobs. You want to create a political system that protects property and the best elements of society from the tyranny of the majority. How do you do it?

You would start by giving a disproportionate amount of voting power to property owners and people with education, of course.

Many members of the current GOP openly support minority rule. The problem with the classical defense of creating obstacles to majorities, however, is that the plan I have just described would give control of the country to the left-leaning, cosmopolitan business and intellectual elites the GOP despises. How about them apples?

The GOP scheme isn’t actually to somehow implement anti-democratic opinions of the Founding Fathers; it is to limit the franchise to “real Americans,” which of course means predominantly poorly-educated, white working and lower middle class Christians. They aren’t the successors to some sort of enlightened 18th century planter aristocracy. They’re average America in action.

Marco Rubio, always a reliable GOP weathervane, claims that he supports the efforts of Amazon employees in Alabama to unionize. Is this a sign that the GOP is becoming more pro-labor and less capitalist?

Of course not! Rubio doesn’t care a fig for the Amazon workers. His objectives are to: show solidarity with Trump supporters who, like the man on golf cart, have a grudge against Amazon; take a shot at allegedly “woke” companies, even though Amazon doesn’t strike me as being particularly “woke;” and pretend to be sympathetic to unions, when he isn’t. Just watch how he reacts to the pro-union bill that the House just passed if you need any evidence of his real intentions.

Pigs will fly when the GOP actually supports unions. The party loves individual reactionary union members, who frequently respond as requested to Mr. Potato Head politics, but unions themselves–not so much. They just get in the way of the donor class.

The Biden COVID recovery bill apparently included a formula which allocates some funds to states based on unemployment levels. This obviously makes sense in a piece of legislation that is focused on addressing the impacts of the virus, which include increased unemployment.

Ron DeSantis sees it differently. In his view, the formula is unfair, because it punishes states that have done a good job of minimizing unemployment.

But the GOP as a whole insists that the principal fault of the bill is that it goes way beyond the need to address COVID impacts. How can this be squared with the DeSantis objection?

It can’t, of course.

I posted many years ago about the shrewd ambiguity behind the MAGA slogan. When was America last great? Some very exacting reactionaries would say it was 1912, before Woodrow Wilson took office. Some would argue for 1932; it was the New Deal that destroyed American freedom. A few would probably clamor for the Reagan era. But most would say it was the fifties: a time of steady economic growth, American industrial primacy, substantial equality, and relative cultural unity.

And, of course, it was a time in which black Americans had no political power. It is becoming increasingly clear from the innumerable vote suppression efforts that this is the part of the fifties the GOP most wants to recreate, under the guise of preventing nonexistent “fraud.”

Hey, it could be worse. At least they aren’t trying to bring back de jure segregation. That was part of the fifties, too.

Florida’s tax revenues have predictably plunged during the pandemic. There is a large hole in the state’s budget. Ron DeSantis opted to make heroic assumptions about recovering revenues in the apparent hope that the federal government would fill in the hole. He won; today, he’s in the best possible position, because he can whine about the unfairness of the recovery bill while pocketing its proceeds and cutting taxes instead of spending. Biden has, effectively, bailed him out.

Rick Scott, on the other hand, was elected initially in 2010, and still misses the glory days of the Tea Party. He is calling on the states, including Florida, to send the Biden money back and tighten their belts. Expansionary austerity! Doesn’t that bring back lots of warm memories?

Scott undoubtedly thinks that the GOP can be united around budget cutting, just as it was in 2010. I suspect he has completely misread the room, particularly after the huge deficits in the Trump years. He won’t be able to portray most of the Biden spending–most notably, the $1,400 checks–as “welfare” for lazy minorities. But what choice does he have, realistically? Hating government and slashing budgets is his brand. It’s his way of distinguishing himself from DeSantis and Rubio. He will live or die with it in 2024.

The Biden rescue bill, which was signed today, is overwhelmingly popular with the public, which presents the GOP with a major public relations problem. So far, the responses have been:

1. Change the subject to what Americans really care about–not their jobs and income, but Mr. Potato Head.
2. Complain that the bill isn’t really COVID legislation at all; it’s a wasteful liberal wish list in the guise of a COVID bill.

Unusually for the GOP, the latter statement is actually partly true. Unfortunately, the liberal wish list is not bad policy on its face, and it has the support of the public. So what do you do now?

Stick to Mr. Potato Head, of course. Or, in a pinch, you can always lie and suggest that you and the rest of the GOP actually supported the bill, notwithstanding the unanimous vote against it.

Capitalism is a force for instability; it churns out new winners and losers every day. How should the government respond to this, particularly if you are a conservative, and therefore dislike change?

There are three broad options:

1. America was built by winners. If you subsidize losers, you just get more losers. If you keep the economy free, the strong will thrive, and everyone will gain in the long run. Ignore the short term pain for the weak and inefficient.
2. Embrace the destruction process, but build and operate a welfare state that guarantees the losers a decent way of life.
3. Stop the destruction process altogether with tariffs, subsidies, and regulations.

The first alternative is associated with the CL and PBP factions of the GOP. The second opinion is held by CDs and most of the left. The third is the Reactionary position.

Trump moved the GOP away from #1 and towards #3. Will that trend continue, as Reactionaries amass more and more power within the party? That is a known unknown for 2024.

Americans typically view Mrs. Thatcher as an uncompromising enemy of the British welfare state, but that isn’t true; her impacts on public spending were relatively minimal. Her legacy really revolved around a massive campaign of privatization and the crushing of the unions. The former was a mixed bag, but the latter, regardless of how you feel about Thatcher and the workers she humbled, was necessary. Unions had the UK over a barrel in 1979, and refused to use their power for good. Something had to be done, and she did it.

In a similar vein, Reagan sent a message to American workers by obliterating the air traffic controllers’ union in the 80s. Unions have been on a downhill slide in the US ever since. Not coincidentally, so have wages, relative to inflation and productivity.

Biden is clearly all-in for unions. His pro-labor legislation isn’t going to get through the Senate. But what if it did? Would that be a good thing for America?

Unions have a history in this country of being corrupt and socially reactionary. They also drive up costs–sometimes unnecessarily–and frequently drive employers to replace American workers with machines or foreigners. Since the economy has changed, any new unions would probably be dominated by women and people of color instead of bull walruses smoking cigars, which would be an improvement. The rest of the union package, however, would stay pretty much the same.

Personally, I would rather use government to create a truly effective welfare state than to re-energize unions as a mechanism to help struggling workers. However, given the GOP’s continuing interest in wrecking, rather than improving, government, I can understand why giving more power to unions might look like a better and more stable way to drive up the incomes of employees in the long run. Budget increases and cuts come and go with elections; union power, once established, is unlikely to disappear.

The other question, of course, is whether white male workers will reward the Democrats for their advocacy of unions at the polls. Based on recent history, I have my doubts. For most people, Mr. Potato Head rules in this country, not economic self-interest.