Cromwell

So the covid relief bill is done.

With support from the left save for one.

Will rampant inflation

Soon threaten the nation?

Well, for now, celebrate what’s been won.

Mitt Romney probably thought he had a winner. Providing more money for families with children would be popular with social conservatives. Making the program nearly universal eliminates any possible stench of “welfare” for lazy minorities. Finally, the program was to be funded by the elimination of overlapping subsidies and the SALT deduction, much used and loved in blue states. From the reactionary perspective, it looked like he had hit the trifecta.

But Romney didn’t reckon with the GOP’s Victorian side. The program was portrayed by Lee and Rubio, along with their allies, purely as an anti-poverty mechanism. It was then rejected on the basis that the recipients of the aid weren’t required to work. Only paying work, it seems, can really lift people out of poverty.

Romney had the better of the argument. The program was not purely an anti-poverty scheme; it was designed to help middle class people take better care of their children (and possibly have more), as well. And some of the premises of Rubio/Lee on the anti-poverty issue are definitely debatable. What if times are hard, and there are no minimum wage jobs to be had? And would the combination of a minimum wage job and a Rubio/Lee benefit really make the recipient of the benefit better off than a stay-at-home parent, after considering the substantial added cost of child care? I have my doubts.

When it is all said and done, I suspect the real problem with this program is the identity of the author. Romney is a pariah among the GOP. Anything he proposes is automatically suspect with the base and his more ambitious colleagues.

I don’t usually devote any of my bandwidth to something as trivial as the royals, but the Harry and Meghan interview is roiling the world, so here are my thoughts:

1. As anyone who watches “The Crown” knows, members of the royal family enjoy privileged lives, but do not possess freedoms that the rest of us take for granted. As a result, all of them rebel at some point in time. In the end, some of them embrace the terms of the deal (it’s easier if you’re the monarch); some struggle against it, but are ultimately crushed by the machine and surrender; and some of them cross the line by demanding too much freedom, and are cast into darkness. Harry is now in the last category, along with his mother and the Duke of Windsor.
2. There are obvious similarities between Harry and the Duke. The differences are: Harry is not the heir to the throne; the Duke’s mother didn’t die under controversial circumstances when he was young; and Harry never hung out with Nazis. On the whole, the differences are more compelling than the similarities.
3. “The Crown” tells us both that the Duke was treated harshly by the rest of the family, and that he was a bit of a grifter. Since Harry has celebrity, but no obvious talents, he may wind up resorting to a similar kind of lifestyle as the Duke–only with the opportunities provided in the internet age.
4. Potential conflicts between the American actress and the royals should have been obvious to everyone from the beginning. This situation was a disaster waiting to happen. One wonders if Harry saw that from the beginning and used his wife to make a point that he had been dying to make for years, given his bitterness about his mother’s fate.
5. My advice to both sides would be to just shut up and move on. Nobody wins by continuing the conflict.

Trump’s responses to the challenges presented by climate change and the Chinese were to completely deny the former and to use bluster and tariffs on the latter. Neither approach, of course, had any success at all. The GOP will have to come up with something better, even though it will require unwelcome government intervention in the economy. What should they do to avoid spoiling their brand?

In the case of climate change, the clear winner is a carbon tax. Sure, the GOP hates taxes, but this one could be offset by reductions in the income tax. The carbon tax would be the most minimal intervention in the economy possible. It does not require subsidies and regulations. Just establish the price and let the market do its magic!

In the case of China, the broad choices are to beat them or join them. Joining them means adopting Chinese interventionist economic approaches, including tariffs, regulations, and subsidies. Beating them means relying on your existing strengths, which include luring talented people to your country from overseas. Change the immigration system to make the US more attractive to tech investors and inventors. That’s less intrusive than regulations and subsidies.

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.