Teacher Strikes: Exposing the GOP’s Achilles Heel

Oklahoma Gov. Fallin trashes teachers.

For many years now the Republican Party has pushed an agenda of huge tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations best illustrated by the $1.5 trillion give away last December under the GOP/Trump tax bill.  Typically, Republican voters are induced to support this agenda by falling for the GOP's appeals to racism and/or right wing Christian religious extremism.  But constant tax cuts can go on for only so long before the larger public wakes up to the reality that this tax cut agenda is wreaking havoc on public education, state infrastructures, and other social services that average Americans want and support.  Paul Ryan may blame the federal budget debt on "entitlement spending" but even the dumbest soccer mom can grasp the reality that it was the GOP tax cuts that are the real root of the problem.  Now, teacher strikes in red states are helping to expose the GOP's Achilles heel: voters do not want public schools and necessary government programs gutted. The big question is whether Democrats can play on this growing realization that the GOP agenda does nothing for average voters.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

On the surface, the wave of teacher strikes that has rippled through red America over the past month looks like a labor story; an object lesson in the power of solidarity, and the hazards of underpaying workers and then leaving them no source of leverage save walking off the job. And it certainly is that kind of story — but it is also a political one. After all, public workers can only gain leverage through a strike if a significant portion of the public rallies behind their picket line. It took the fortitude of West Virginia teachers to get this strike wave started — but it required the political weakness of the GOP’s prevailing ideology to keep it rolling.

Teachers scored improbable victories in West Virginia and Oklahoma by exploiting the biggest open secret in American politics today: The Republican Party and its voters have radically different political views.

The former has made cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations its top economic priority on both the state and federal levels; the latter oppose such tax cuts by overwhelming margins. GOP office-holders have worked tirelessly (if unsuccessfully) to reduce federal spending on health care; most GOP voters would like to see such spending increased. Nearly all House Republicans have repeatedly affirmed their support for financing ever-lower taxes on the rich with draconian cuts to public investment in virtually everything but the military, including Medicare benefits; when pollsters referenced this reality to right-leaning voters in a 2012 focus group, the respondents found Paul Ryan’s agenda so absurdly offensive, they “simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”

The GOP has not made support for tax cuts (no matter the economic conditions, geopolitical circumstances, or resulting consequences for social spending) the first principle of its domestic agenda because that is a popular and rational governing ideal — but because it is an excellent value proposition to offer to well-heeled reactionaries in search of a medium-risk, high-return investment opportunity.

To this point, the GOP has paid no great electoral price for the fact that there is no significant constituency for its economic agenda; over the past decade, Republicans have managed to grow more fanatically committed to fiscal policies that their voters find abhorrent — and more politically powerful. A variety of factors have abetted this odd achievement, not least the fact that most voters pay far less attention to the details of policy than to identity-based appeals. Through “culture war” rhetoric and legislation, the GOP has established itself as the party of rural Americans, cultural traditionalists, gun enthusiasts, and the (proudly) white and native-born. The broad appeal of this reactionary brand of identity politics (combined with copious Koch network cash, the right’s vast propaganda apparatus, and a touch of voter suppression) has allowed the Republican Party to have its fringe fiscal agenda, and its electoral majorities, too.

Donald Trump tried to pay for his supply-side tax cuts by decimating Obamacare — but once doing the latter proved untenable, he and his allies were content to put the former on the nation’s credit card, just as George W. Bush had done with his tax cuts, years earlier.

But Oklahoma can’t print its own currency. On the state level, budgets have to balance. Congressional Republicans can obscure (and/or defer) the trade-offs inherent to “starving the beast” — GOP governors have no such luxury. And eight years after the tea party wave lifted far-right Republicans to unprecedented power in states all across the country, those trade-offs have become unmistakeable — especially to anyone with an investment in a (typical) red state’s public-school system.

The idea that the government has a responsibility to provide a quality K–12 education to all of its young people is among the least controversial in our politics. And yet, it is a notion that is nearly impossible to reconcile with the contemporary GOP’s theological commitment to ever-lower taxes. Talented educators must be wooed with competitive pay and benefits; textbooks must be regularly updated; curricula, revised. The disparity between the actual fiscal cost of guaranteeing universal access to a public education — and what conservative Republicans are prepared to spend on schools — is currently fueling a constitutional crisis in Kansas: The Sunflower State’s founding document requires its legislature to make “suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state” — a requirement that Republican legislators have routinely failed to meet, in the estimation of the Kansas Supreme Court.

Between 2008 and 2015, per-student education spending in Kentucky fell by 11.4 percent; in Oklahoma, by 15.6; and in Arizona, by 17.5. In all of these states, Republican legislators paired such disinvestment from education with tax cuts for high-earners and business interests. Even in these “conservative” states, it is highly doubtful that voters would have ever directly endorsed supply-side tax cuts financed by reductions in school spending, were such a matter put to the ballot. But now that the former have failed to produce the miraculous growth that Republicans promised — while the latter have yielded decaying textbooks, four-day school weeks, and teacher shortages — support for a change in fiscal priorities is overwhelming in deep-red Oklahoma.

The fact that the unpopular consequences of right-wing governance are becoming increasingly visible in red states does not guarantee the conservative movement’s imminent collapse; but it does create an opportunity for opponents of conservatism to launch a few wrecking balls in its direction.

This is the lesson that the striking educators are teaching us. When a well-organized movement — with genuine roots in “conservative” communities (and no plausible ties to George Soros or Nancy Pelosi) forces the GOP’s fiscal agenda to the center of public debate, the political terrain shifts — and conservatives struggle to stand their ground. Suddenly, Oklahoma Republicans can vote to take money from oil companies and give it to teachers; and those teachers can meet their offer with protests instead of gratitude.