Cromwell

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.

George W. Bush had strong connections with the Reactionaries (fundamentalist religion) and the PBPs (tax cuts and deregulation), but he basically ran as a unifying CD in 2000. At the time, the CDs were a large percentage, similar to the PBPs, of the GOP, and were disproportionately represented within the leadership. Bush’s failures in Iraq and with the Great Recession changed the balance within the party by discrediting the CD faction and the leadership as a whole in the eyes of party activists and the electorate as a whole. Republican voters were consequently ready to embrace a dramatic change in both tone and substance at the end of the second Bush term. As you know only too well, they got it.

On the Democrat senator Joe.

To the left, he’s their reason for woe.

While he’s not a progressive

(You could call him regressive)

He’s the best that we’ve got, don’t you know.

Right-wingers in this country who reject mask mandates typically frame the issue as one of personal choice and responsibility. Well, I feel the same way about women and their right to abortion. How about them apples!

I suspect that most people who hold these obviously conflicting views would justify their apparent hypocrisy on two grounds, neither of which is particularly persuasive. The first would be that abortion always results in death, whereas appearing in public without a mask, and even possibly spreading the virus, may not damage anyone’s health. But sometimes it does, and can even kill; from society’s perspective, is the benefit of ditching a mask even remotely worth the risk? Second, the aborted fetus has no ability to protect itself, while the potential victims of maskless virus spreaders do. That isn’t really true, either; since you never know who is spreading the virus, the only way you can protect yourself with certainty is to completely shut yourself up at home. The ability to protect one’s self is thus contingent upon giving up any semblance of a normal life. Is the difference between death and a painful and unnatural way of life sufficient to justify the contradictory positions?

Rupert Murdoch made huge amounts of money running right-wing populist newspapers in the UK, Australia, and New York. He presumably thought a cable TV channel which operated on the same principles would also be successful. Financially, it was, but it is also a monster.

The right-wing populist formula had a different impact when it became available to a vastly larger audience in a country that was already badly divided on issues of culture. Fox News threw gas on the fire. Instead of providing harmless entertainment and helping frustrated reactionaries blow off steam, it effectively promoted civil war for profit.

Today, a frighteningly large segment of the America public gets its ideas about politics and culture almost exclusively from Fox News. It sets the agenda and tells people what to believe. It is Rush Limbaugh to the nth power.

Unless the Murdochs see the light, Fox will continue to present a clear and present danger to liberal democracy in America. It is thus a key player in the devolution of the GOP into, as Ben Sasse put it, “the weird worship of one dude.”

As I’ve noted before, George H.W. Bush was the last prominent genuine conservative in the GOP. He didn’t do the “vision thing;” he used his best judgment to deal with circumstances as they occurred. He went back on his promise never to raise taxes because conditions changed. He paid for it at the polls.

Gingrich, his successor as leader of the GOP, was a completely different animal. Gingrich was at the forefront of the successful effort to turn tax cutting into a GOP religion. He saw the opportunities provided by the new media landscape and took full advantage of them. He thought civility was for wimps. He made the notion of the “conservative” bomb thrower something other than an oxymoron. He played to the base before anyone used either the term or the tactic.

All of these are, of course, attributes of today’s GOP. It is no wonder that Gingrich supported Trump, and still does.

The central paradox of today’s GOP is that it both whines and swaggers. The paradox, however, is easily explained. The party swaggers because it is run by and for testosterone-drenched white men; it whines because they know they are losing, as a result of demographic and economic changes.

In this landscape, Donald Trump, with his allegations about voter fraud and the rigged election, fits perfectly. You would think that the GOP would drop someone who had just lost an election by seven million votes, and probably directly cost them the Senate, like a hot potato. Instead, he is serving as a stand-in for their grievances about the changing world. They are embracing him as a loser instead of running away from him.

It’s a dangerous picture, because it leads to attempts to enshrine minority rule, either by breaking or gaming the system. There are no other obvious alternatives except mass surrender.

Rush Limbaugh was to Ronald Reagan what “My City Was Gone” is to “the shining city on the hill.” The two would have agreed on most issues, but their styles and attitudes were completely different. Reagan lived in a happy nostalgic haze; Limbaugh saw a changing world and hated it.

Limbaugh wasn’t the first right-wing radio guy to make a mark on America. I can still remember Paul Harvey, for example. Harvey, however, was a relatively genial figure. Limbaugh’s real predecessor probably was the fascist Father Coughlin, but that was before my time.

Limbaugh brought anger, toxic masculinity, and the culture wars to a large audience of reactionaries. They lapped it up, and made him a millionaire. Everyone won except liberal democracy and the American people.

More than any single individual, Limbaugh was the prototype for Donald Trump. We will be feeling his influence, for good or ill, for many years to come.

Just kidding. It’s only for ill.

Donald Trump was hardly unique in his unwillingness to take the virus seriously in its early days. What sets him apart is his actions after the severity of the crisis became obvious to everyone: his refusal to wear a mask; his demands to open up states that were not ready for it; his repeated efforts to downplay the issue; his indifference to the suffering caused by the virus; and his refusal to take responsibility for mitigation measures that were clearly within his jurisdiction. His failures caused tens, and possibly hundreds, of thousands of unnecessary deaths. He was judged harshly by the electorate for it, and justly so.

Now that he is out of office, the MSM are discovering that a number of very visible Democratic governors did not exactly cover themselves in glory, either. Their mistakes pale, both in terms of kind and degree, next to Trump’s. Will these news stories nonetheless have the effect of rehabilitating Trump, at least to a limited extent?

Unfortunately, the most likely answer to that question is yes. On a more positive note, Biden will not be impacted, as he bore no responsibility for the crisis before taking office. If he makes mistakes in office, and the pandemic gets worse, that is legitimately on him.

The “genius” of Donald Trump, if you can call it that, was his ability to package completely orthodox GOP views on tax cuts and the economy in a way that appealed to reactionary voters regardless of their financial interests. His “populism” was limited to his swaggering style and culture war issues, but it was enough to convince the vast majority of GOP voters.

Ron DeSantis, in spite of his embarrassing fealty to Trump and their common ability to own the libs, is different on substance–more of a genuine populist. Instead of telling old Floridians to die and get out of the way, he put them first in line for the vaccine. He put state resources into the protection of water quality because he knew it was an important issue to the voters. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he didn’t use the pandemic as a convenient pretext to cut spending and bash public employees; he decided to rely on optimistic revenue projections and the possibility of federal aid to keep the ship moving in the same comfortable direction. It remains to be seen whether the Florida Legislature will follow him on this last point, but you get the picture.

Recent polls show DeSantis far ahead of Rick Scott in their home state. It is well known that the two men despise each other. What, if anything, will Scott (a man of sincere, if odious, principles) do to try to torpedo his rival? Will he work behind the scenes to defeat him in 2022? Will the populist ultimately prevail over the Bond villain? We’ll have more information after the 2022 gubernatorial election.