Cromwell

Immigration is one of the chief issues that divides PBPs and Reactionaries. If the Senate used a secret ballot on a comprehensive immigration reform bill, there would be enough PBP votes for it to overcome a filibuster. What does that mean for Biden’s chances of success with his bill?

Nothing, because the Senate doesn’t use a secret ballot. Illegal immigration is one of the signature issues for the Reactionaries. Given the passion of the extreme right on the question, the PBPs have learned to sit down and shut up. No matter what they might think privately, and regardless of whether they supported the Obama bill, they aren’t going to risk irrevocably splitting the GOP and facing a primary by acquiescing to the Biden bill. If you don’t believe me, just ask Marco Rubio.

Biden has a better chance with narrow issues, such as protection of the Dreamers. There, public support is so strong, the PBPs might be willing to step out of line. My guess is that we will see a Dreamer bill in a matter of a few months, after the comprehensive bill dies a quick death.

Obama was frequently attacked as the “deporter-in-chief” by immigration activists during the 2020 campaign. Biden, of course, was guilty by association. Is the accusation fair?

Not really. The deportations were an attempt to build credibility with the GOP in the legislative process; strict border enforcement was offered in exchange for votes for comprehensive immigration reform. It almost worked; a reasonable bill passed the Senate with the requisite GOP votes. The problem, unfortunately, was timing; the Democrats had lost control of the House in the meantime, and the Hastert Rule was applied by the House GOP leadership to prevent a vote on the Senate bill. Once it became clear that the bill was dead, Obama completely switched gears on enforcement, and the rest is history.

What does this mean for Biden’s chances for a comprehensive bill? More on that issue in my next post.

The great sovereign state of Texas is the home of fossil fuels, rugged individuals, and the free market. Consistent with those concepts, the state built a power grid which is designed to be self-sufficient, and which provides an option for consumers to pay wildly higher rates during times of peak demand. Furthermore, there was no effort to winterize facilities, because climate change is, of course, nothing but a hoax, and because spending money for maintenance would drive up prices in the short run.

Now, of course, the bills are coming due, and guess who’s going to pay? Blue America, of course, through disaster relief. Expect the representatives of the great sovereign state to express their gratitude, much as they do after hurricanes, by objecting to state and local government pandemic relief as a “blue state bailout.”

It started with Rush Limbaugh. Fox News gave it a much wider audience. Sarah Palin brought it to light in a presidential campaign. Donald Trump perfected it. It’s hard to imagine any of the 2024 Republicans winning primaries without it in his tool kit. Yes, owning the libs is now a huge part of the job description for GOP candidates. Actually providing solutions to problems is an afterthought compared to scoring culture war points.

Could we ever see a Democrat with a similar skill set? Can you imagine a Rachel Maddow clone owning the cons all the way to the White House?

Sure, you can. She already exists. You know her by her initials.

About twenty years ago, there was a bit of a flap about Augusta National’s policy of not admitting women as members. The spokesperson for the complaining parties asserted confidently that men spent a lot of time talking about women on the golf course. When my wife agreed with that statement, I assured her that, unlike her, I had plenty of experience talking to men on the golf course, and that women rarely came up during the discussion. The most common topic of conversation, in reality, was golf.

What does this have to do with Rush Limbaugh? He made a fortune by telling red Americans who didn’t know better that blue America despises them, and that they should hate blue America in response. In reality, blue America is vaguely, if somewhat ineffectually, sympathetic to most of the reds. It is the WSJ crowd that is contemptuous of them, not people like me.

Limbaugh was the first truly successful culture warrior during my lifetime. He effectively monetized hate and division with his heavy metal, take no prisoners rhetoric. He so successfully stoked the anger of the right with lies and conspiracy theories that GOP candidates are now compelled to run against the snooty elites even in jurisdictions they completely control. He was the template for Donald Trump. Trump is inconceivable without him. So is January 6.

That’s a lot to answer for.

CDs: Government exists to provide essential goods and services to all citizens in the event the market cannot be relied upon to supply them.

CLs: Government should be the minimum size required to secure life, liberty, and property. Any other role infringes on freedom, and will probably be performed poorly in any event.

PBPs: The business of government is business. Government should encourage business through tax cuts, deregulation, and subsidies where necessary.

Reactionaries: Government should protect the interests of real Americans: white Christians. Our current government hates real Americans. It needs to be destroyed and replaced by something completely different.

Reactionaries are the biggest faction; hence, the nihilism of the party as a whole.

A responsible right-wing party identifies problems and proposes governmental solutions to them that are based on the use of the free market and traditional values. Today’s GOP has no interest in doing that; its mission is to prove that government can’t do anything right, even when Republicans are in charge. And so, for example, instead of suggesting market-based approaches to climate change, the mainstream of the GOP simply denies that it exists.

If you were wondering why the GOP did nothing of note when it had complete control of the federal government in 2017-2018 other than cut taxes for the wealthy, that is the reason. It is also the reason it didn’t bother with a platform in 2020. The actual, unspoken platform was for Trump to finish destroying the “deep state,” not to do anything positive for the American people.

This is nihilism, not conservatism, based on the culture war concept that the government is at war with the values of real Americans and the unenlightened self-interest of the tax-hating donor class.

The EU has thus far reacted diffidently to Biden’s calls for unity against the Chinese. This leaves an opening for Boris Johnson, who desperately needs some additional leverage against the EU for future trade disputes. Will the US and the UK move closer in spite of Britain’s embrace of Trumpism? Will BoJo play the America card against the EU?

I’ll be astonished if he doesn’t.

There was a school of thought in the 20th century to the effect that the Constitution was the product of wealthy landowners and businessmen who were primarily concerned about protecting their property from the radical redistributive desires of struggling small backwoods farmers. Is there a reasonable basis for this argument?

No, for two reasons. First, the drafting of the Constitution was driven by longstanding concerns that the country was ungovernable, and could never reach its full potential, under the Articles of Confederation. Shays’ Rebellion, often cited as the catalyst for the Constitutional Convention, was actually just a talking point to support it ; Washington, Hamilton, and Madison had expressed their concerns about the flaws in the Articles much earlier. Second, if the FFs had desired a truly reactionary document, they would have limited the franchise for the House in Article I. Instead, they left the voting qualifications issue to the states, and gave the House the exclusive right to initiate money bills, which suggests an analogy to the House of Commons in the UK. The Constitution, in that sense, was neither progressive or reactionary; a more appropriate word would be “normal,” as it neither broke new ground nor turned the clock back.

The right, inevitably, is blaming the energy shortfalls in Texas on the failures of sources of renewable energy. It’s a ludicrous argument, given the concurrent and much more important failures with natural gas production and distribution, but even if you assume it is true, who is to blame here? Democrats don’t bear any responsibility for the workings of the grid in Texas, which is under the complete control of the GOP. Is this an admission by Texas Republicans that they made a serious mistake by relying on renewables, and that they are consequently responsible for the crisis?

On a somewhat related note, Ted Cruz is being mocked for going to Cancun and avoiding his neighbors’ misery. Look for him to try to turn lemons into lemonade by finding some reason to blame the libs for his ill-timed vacation. When in doubt, stoke the culture wars . . .

I speculated two years ago that the combination of the toxic connection between Trump and protectionism and the schedule for the primaries, which put the protectionist states at the end, might lead the Democrats back to free trade. It hasn’t happened. The party as a whole sees protectionism as a vote winner, and workers negatively impacted by trade deals as swing voters. Nothing is going to change very quickly.

Trade issues can be divided into two parts: China; and everyone else. With China, trade presents serious geopolitical issues; as a result, some forms of protection are inevitable, and possibly even wise. I will discuss those in a future post. As to everyone else, protection is basically unnecessary and counterproductive. There is no realistic possibility of creating a united front against China until the Trump days have been buried, and the stupid tariffs eliminated. That should be done as soon as possible.

The Founding Fathers–every one of them, regardless of where they stood on the political issues of the day–were Enlightenment men. They believed in manners, self-restraint, science, and the power of reason. They feared enthusiasms of any kind (including religious), and government by demagogues and mobs.

You might think initially that Jefferson, with his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, was an exception, but you would be wrong. Jefferson was the quintessential Enlightenment man; not surprisingly, he hated urban mobs. He was sympathetic to notions of democracy because he saw America as a paradise for sensible yeoman farmers with a strong stake in the system who would never abuse his trust. His vision of America doesn’t bear much resemblance to its condition today, but it was plausible enough in his lifetime.

In Freudian terms, the FFs were heavy on the superego and light on the id. What would they have made of Donald Trump–a/k/a The Wizard of Id? How would they have felt about a guy in furs and a Viking hat storming the Capitol?

It was their worst nightmare come to life. Remember that when you hear right-wingers talk about how they are fighting for what they erroneously think is the constitutional order.

It is fair to say that both parties supported free trade prior to 2016. In general, the Democrats thought free trade agreements should include provisions ensuring a level playing field on issues such as the protection of workers’ rights and the environment, and that industries and workers which could not survive the increased competition should be compensated, but their efforts in these areas were, in the long run, ineffective. The Republicans, for their part, welcomed free trade as a mechanism to reward both successful businesses (with higher profits) and consumers (with lower prices); businesses that could no longer compete, along with their workers, were simply dismissed as losers.

Trump changed everything with his weird fixation on trade deficits. The GOP mainstream gritted its teeth and went along for the protectionist ride. What happens now?

Free trade is one of the principal issues, along with immigration, which divides the PBP faction of the Republican Party from the Reactionaries. It is likely to be a flash point in the 2024 primaries if Trump doesn’t run again. Most of the candidates will undoubtedly follow the Trump line and support tariffs over the objections of the donor class, because there are far more Reactionaries than PBPs. My tentative prediction at this point is that a candidate who supports free trade, and has the support of the PBPs, will prevail in the primaries, largely because there will be less competition in the free trade lane.

Should the Constitution be viewed as a sort of extension of the ideas in the Declaration, as suggested in the Gettysburg Address and innumerable times thereafter? I would say no, for the following reasons:

1. The Declaration was war propaganda. It was designed to make a case for independence to wavering colonists and the governments of European nations. Other than making the statement that “all men are created equal,” which obviously flew in the face of slavery, it says little about the kind of government that should be created in the newly free colonies, or how the individual colonies should relate to each other.
2. The Constitution was written 11 years later, by a different group of people, with the experience of the Articles of Confederation in mind. It was about the enhancement and allocation of central government power, not the right to self-determination. Unlike the Declaration, it went through a ratification process. Far more people were involved in its ultimate approval.

In short, the documents are just too different, both in process and substance, to warrant considering them as parts of a single unified whole.

Trump is fully responsible for the riot, according to Mitch McConnell. Somebody needs to do something about it. Just don’t ask him to be part of the solution, because he has too much at stake to take that kind of a risk. After all, who else can hold the mainstream and extremist wings of the GOP together? Better to make empty gestures to appease both sides, and then move on.

If you ever wondered how a small, but ruthless extremist minority can win in the end, this is your answer.