Few Voters Think Trump Cares About "People Like Me"

I continue to be shocked by how lacking in intelligence many Americans appear to be - like the supposed 49% who think Donald Trump is doing a "good job" handling the coronavirus crisis.  How can this be when some news outlets are beginning to cease coverage of his press conferences because they are so filled with lies and untruths.  Meanwhile, Trump wants to end social distancing perhaps by the end of net week to spur on the economy even though medical experts say this could lead to a large number of deaths. The only positive news is that Americans as a whole are coming to realize that Trump cares nothing for what these citizens would describe as "people like me."    A piece in the Washington Post looks at this realization that is long, long overdue.  Trump may pander to the racism and/or religious extremism of his base, but he cares nothing about them as living, breathing people.  Here are article highlights:

As both a presidential candidate and president, Donald Trump has been said to have a special connection to “ordinary Americans” or “average Americans” while his “elitist” opponents are said to look down on them.

Of course, Trump’s fame and wealth make him as much an elite as, say, the party’s previous presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. But Romney was widely derided as an out-of-touch plutocrat, a characterization that squared with decades of polling on voter beliefs about the class interests of GOP politicians. Trump, by contrast, was called “the people’s billionaire” and credited for his populist appeal, . . . .

But three years into his presidency, most Americans do not perceive Trump as particularly concerned about the middle class, the poor or people like them. They do see him as concerned about the wealthy, however. In fact, Trump is perceived no differently than Romney was at the end of the 2012 presidential campaign. Instead, it is Trump’s likely Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, who is more widely perceived as sympathetic to the middle class. A president who once seemed ready to remake the GOP brand has been recast in its image — and that could have consequences for his reelection.

One way to show how voters perceive the interests of politicians is to ask Americans how well different leaders are described by the phrases “cares about the wealthy,” “cares about the middle class,” “cares about the poor” and “cares about people like me.” When respondents were asked these questions about Romney in a YouGov survey conducted right before Election Day in 2012, 88 percent said that “cares about the wealthy” described Romney somewhat well or very well.

By contrast, 56 percent of Americans thought that Obama cared about the wealthy. Compared to Romney, more said that Obama cared about the middle class (57 percent), the poor (61 percent) and “people like me” (54 percent). In 2016, it looked as if Trump might be different than Romney. . . . . But as of today, Trump does not look much different than Romney did. In a March 2020 Democracy Fund-UCLA Nationscape survey, the vast majority of Americans (83 percent) said that Trump cares about the wealthy — many more than said he cares about the middle class (45 percent), poor (38 percent), and “people like me” (40 percent). Indeed, 74 percent of independents and even 23 percent of Republicans said that Trump did not care about “people like me.” If anything, Americans may see Trump as less in touch with ordinary Americans than Romney was. Meanwhile, many fewer Americans view Biden and especially Sanders as sympathetic to the wealthy (61 percent and 41 percent, respectively). More Americans describe them as sympathetic to the middle class, the poor, and people like me. These differences in how Americans perceive Democratic and Republican candidates reflect broader images of the two political parties. Early on, it appeared that Trump could change the GOP’s image. In his speech announcing his candidacy, he famously promised to protect Social Security and Medicare, which are crucial to many Americans of modest means. But Trump has governed much like a traditional Republican. The tax law he signed gave the largest tax breaks to the wealthy. His administration has proposed changes that could reduce the number of poor people eligible for Medicaid and for food stamps. He has even flirted with cuts to Medicare and Social Security, . . . . Today Trump embodies the GOP’s long-standing image as the party of the rich. The likely economic devastation caused by the coronavirus complicates Trump’s ability to claim, as he did in his State of the Union address barely two months ago, that we were in the midst of a “blue-collar boom.”

And Trump’s struggle to communicate sympathy for people with the virus or fearful of its effects makes it difficult for him to project a different image as a leader. Democrats were already arguing that, as Biden put it, Trump has “no empathy” for the middle class. That line of attack may be even more tempting if the virus and ensuing recession continue to wreak havoc in the lives of ordinary Americans.

[P]erceptions of the presidential candidates’ empathy are no magical predictor of who will win the election. . . . . But public perception of Trump matters whether he wins or loses in November. The apparent fragility of his populist image shows how even politicians who appear to be “outsiders” flouting the norms and orthodoxies of their political party struggle to escape long-standing party stereotypes.

Is America Going the Way of the Roman Republic?

History - a subject increasing ignored in America's education system and of which far too many Americans are woefully ignorant - can teach us lessons.  Some will argue that what happened in the past has little relevance to today, yet over the centuries, human nature has not changed as much as some would like to think and megalomania, narcissism, and tribalism remain alive and well under the veneer of civility.  Moreover, many remain an easy target for demagoguery and toxic forms of populism that stir mankind's worse instincts.  Throw in propaganda such as what one sees on Fox News - which today incredibly blamed liberals for fanning hate and division - and the same dangers from the past lurk ready to undermine democratic government and, I would argue, common decency. In a very long piece in New York Magazine Andrew Sullivan looks at the parallels between America in 2019 and the Roman Republic of over two millennia ago and notes the danger signs that ought to disturb true American patriots who put the U.S. Constitution and the rule as a top priority.  Here are article excerpts:

[O]ne obvious and arguably apposite parallel exists: the Roman Republic, whose fate the Founding Fathers were extremely conscious of when they designed the U.S. Constitution. That tremendously successful republic began, like ours, by throwing off monarchy, and went on to last for the better part of 500 years. It practiced slavery as an integral and fast-growing part of its economy. It became embroiled in bitter and bloody civil wars, even as its territory kept expanding and its population took off. It won its own hot-and-cold war with its original nemesis, Carthage, bringing it into unexpected dominance over the entire Mediterranean as well as the whole Italian peninsula and Spain.

And the unprecedented wealth it acquired by essentially looting or taxing every city and territory it won and occupied soon created not just the first superpower but a superwealthy micro-elite — a one percent of its day — that used its money to control the political process and, over time, more to advance its own interests than the public good.

As the republic grew and grew in size and population and wealth, these elites generated intense and increasing resentment and hatred from the lower orders, and two deeply hostile factions eventually emerged, largely on class lines, to be exploited by canny and charismatic opportunists. Well, you get the point.

Of course, in so many ways, ancient Rome is profoundly different from the modern U.S. . . . But there is a reason the Founding Fathers thought it was worth deep study. They saw the destabilizing consequences of a slaveholding republic expanding its territory and becoming a vast, regional hegemon. And they were acutely aware of how, in its final century and a half, an astonishing republican success story unraveled into a profoundly polarized polity, increasingly beset by violence, shedding one established republican norm after another, its elites fighting among themselves in a zero-sum struggle for power. And they saw how the weakening of those norms and the inability to compromise and mounting inequalities slowly corroded republican institutions. And saw, too, with the benefit of hindsight, where that ultimately led: to strongman rule, a dictatorship.

So when, one wonders, will our Caesars finally arrive? Or has one already?

Drawing parallels between Rome’s fate and America’s is not new, of course — from Gore Vidal’s trenchant critique of American imperialism in the Cold War, to Patrick Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire in the late ’90s, to Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome? in the aughts. But the emergence of Trump adds a darker twist to the tale of imperial overreach and republican decline: that the process is accelerating, and we may be nearing a point of no return.

The story of Rome is as unlikely as America’s. Its republic emerged from a period of rule of consecutive kings, elected for life, beginning around 750 BCE, or so later Roman historians claimed. That period lasted a couple of centuries before the last king, a despised figure called Tarquinius Superbus, was overthrown. From then on, from 509 BCE to 49 BCE, the rule of one man was anathema and the title rex a political kiss of death. A Senate and other assemblies replaced the monarch, and power was more widely distributed.

The new offices of state, including the most powerful, the consuls, were all held by at least two people, with strict term limits of one year — and with each officeholder given a mutual veto, to guard against any monarchical pretensions. The power awarded to the consuls and the Senate — representing the landed elite and, increasingly, the business class — was balanced against that of the tribunes (there were, at first, two), representing the masses, who had their own assembly with real clout. A new office of “dictator” was created — a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency assignment to one man to assume total power if civil unrest threatened the republic as a whole. But the dictator had a maximum of six months in office, after which he had to step down.

I’m crudely simplifying a complex and evolving set of arrangements, but the core idea was the dispersal and balancing of power, so that every segment of Roman society, apart from slaves, could have some input, even as the Senate effectively, if not definitively, called the shots. (It was a republic and emphatically not a modern democracy.) What kept this contraption together, without a written constitution, was something the Romans came to call the mos maiorum, the “way of the elders.” Tradition, in other words, or what we would call long-standing democratic norms — adherence to precedent, give-and-take in political negotiations, respect for proper procedures, a willingness to accept half-measures rather than imposing zero-sum solutions, and, above all, loyalty to the republic over one’s own ambition. Whenever someone seemed to push against these norms, they were demonized as a wannabe king.

The fact that Rome was in a semi-permanent war with its neighbors — a “forever war” if ever there was one — gave military commanders greater and greater clout, and the loot they hauled from Africa to Asia overwhelmingly enriched the elites beyond anything they had previously experienced.

These were decades and centuries of sudden growth in wealth and territory, but also tension. The forever war required small landowners to leave their farms untended for extended periods to fight. Romans saw many of these small estates fall into decay or ruin and begin to be bought up by wealthier landowners and consolidated into vast estates.
And into this fraught moment came the first real populists, the Gracchus brothers, who rose — from within the elites, as Trump and many others have in the millennia since — in the 130s BCE.

The first, Tiberius, . . . he went straight to the People’s Assembly. Then he tried to get his fellow tribune thrown out of office to avoid his veto, and ran for an unprecedented second term as tribune, at which point several senators, out of procedural tools, organized a small mob, grabbed whatever came to hand, entered the vote-counting arena, and clubbed Tiberius and 300 of his supporters to death.

This kind of violence seems unthinkable in America today, though it was not so unusual in the decades before the Civil War, when senators were repeatedly at each other’s literal throats on the Senate floor. But look past the violence and the situation seems a bit more familiar: deepening polarization, mutual mistrust, abandonment of norms, and trashing of precedents. Soon, it was possible to speak, very roughly, of two Romes: the rich Establishment and the rising masses, the optimates and the populares, waging a zero-sum war through Roman political institutions.

Tiberius’s cause was taken up by his younger brother, Gaius, who ran for the tribunate, won, and proposed even more distribution of land, new colonies for landless citizens, a major investment in roads and infrastructure, the removal of some senators from juries, and a subsidized grain dole for any Roman in need. It was something for everyone but the elites . . . A bloodbath ensued, in which Gaius was slaughtered along with 3,000 of his followers, their corpses thrown into the Tiber.

In The Storm Before the Storm, Duncan quotes the great Roman historian Sallust, who, looking back, pulled a “both sides” argument — “The nobles began to abuse their position and the people their liberty.” . . .  A cycle of polarization had begun.

Within a decade, though, the underlying patterns deepened, and nearly all of Sulla’s reforms collapsed. What lasted instead was his model of indefinite dictatorship, with the power to make or repeal any law. He had established a precedent that would soon swallow Rome whole.

This was no longer a republican culture protected by an austere elite, but an increasingly authoritarian one, with great military leaders and a handful of wealthy men dominating the political scene through money, legions, and military success. The ancient institutions and customs still existed but were slowly losing relevance. Worrywarts in the Senate and intelligentsia became concerned about strongmen emerging within the system — “The political situation alarms me more each day,” wrote Cicero. Two in particular stood out: Pompey, a hugely successful celebrity general who, at the tender age of 35, was made consul; and an up-and-coming Julius Caesar, rampaging through Gaul and then Britain, besting Pompey’s imperial acquisitions, and generating wide popular enthusiasm.

These two celebrity commanders had so many soldiers, had conquered so much territory and won such widespread support, that the Senate had effectively become irrelevant. It could vote, and it did, but its votes no longer mattered.

The civil war that followed lasted four years, spanned several continents, resulted in Pompey’s murder in Egypt and gave Caesar a monopoly of power. He used it on a grandiloquent scale; his parades were beyond sumptuous and displayed the humiliation of his domestic as well as his foreign enemies, as the wider public thrilled to the spectacle. He was granted the position of dictator by the Senate to stabilize the war-torn polity, then reappointed as dictator in 48 BCE for a whole year, and by 44 BCE had been formally named dictator-for-life.

His assassination — the famous murder on the Ides of March — was accomplished not by a mob but by a group of senators, who feared another rex and worried that their own attenuated power — or the republic itself — would disappear entirely. But it was a last-ditch attempt to save any kind of checks and balances within the system. After years of further civil war, Caesar’s adopted nephew, Augustus, finally destroyed his enemies, shed any pretense of republican rule, and established himself as emperor. His reign would last 40 years. Only emperors succeeded him.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes . . . . The vast American middle class that stabilized liberal democracy at the height of the 20th century never existed in Rome. We have a welfare state that provides some measure of buffer against popular revolt and a written, formal Constitution far harder to flout brazenly than the unwritten mos maiorum of the Romans.

But still. It’s impossible to review the demise of the Roman Republic and not be struck by the parallel dynamics in America in 2019. We now live, as the Romans did, in an economy of massive wealth increasingly monopolized by the very rich, in which the whole notion of principled public service has been eclipsed by the pursuit of private wealth and reality-show fame. Cynicism about the system is endemic, as in Rome. The concept of public service has evaporated as swiftly as trust in government had collapsed. When the republican virtues of a Robert Mueller collided this year with the populist pathologies of Donald Trump, we saw how easily a culture that gave us Cicero could turn into a culture that gave us Caesar.

Class conflict — which, in America, has merged with a profound cultural clash — has split the country into two core interests: the largely white lower and middle classes in the middle of the country, roughly equivalent to Rome’s populares and susceptible to populist appeals by powerful men and women; and the multicultural coastal elites, whose wealth has soared as it has stagnated for the rest, and who pride themselves on their openness and meritocracy: the optimates. And just as in late-republican Rome, each side has begun not to complement but to delegitimize the other.

The battles in this Cold Civil War take place all the time on the front lines of the two forces: in states where fights over gerrymandering and vote suppression are waged; in swing states in presidential elections; in the courts, where the notion of impartial justice has been recast in the public mind as partisan-bloc voting; in Congress, where regular order is a distant memory, disputes go constantly to the brink, the government is regularly shut down, the entire country’s credit is threatened, and long-established rules designed for republican compromise, like the filibuster, are being junked as fast as any Roman mos maiorum.

And the American system has a vulnerability Rome didn’t. We have always had a one-man executive branch, a head of state, with exclusive and total command of the armed forces. There is no need for an office like Rome’s dictator for when a systemic crisis hits, because we have an existing commander-in-chief vested with emergency powers who can, at any time, invoke them.

So what happens when a populist celebrity leverages mass resentment of elites to deploy that power — as Marius and Sulla and Pompey and Caesar did — in ever more expansive, innovative, and authoritarian ways?

When you think of how the Founders conceived the presidency, the 21st-century version is close to unrecognizable. Their phobia about monarchy placed the presidency beneath the Congress in the pecking order, stripping him of pomp and majesty. . . . . Like Roman commanders slowly acquiring the trappings of gods, presidents have long since slipped the bounds of republican austerity into a world of elected monarchs, flying the world in a massive, airborne chariot, constantly photographed, and now commanding our attention every single day through Twitter.

No one in the American system at this level [i.e., Trump] has ever behaved like this before, crudely trampling on republican practices, scoffing at the rule of law, targeting individual citizens for calumny, openly demonizing his opponents, calling a free press treasonous, deploying deceit impulsively, skirting the boundaries of mental illness, bragging of sexual assault, delegitimizing his own government when it showed even a flicker of independence — and yet he almost instantly commanded the near-total loyalty of an entire political party, and of 40 percent of the country, and this loyalty has barely wavered.

If republicanism at its core is a suspicion of one-man rule, and that suspicion is the central animating principle of the American experiment in self-government, Trump has effectively suspended it for the past three years and normalized strongman politics in America. Nothing and no one in his administration matters except him, as he constantly reminds us. . . . . He muses constantly about extending his term of office indefinitely, just as those Roman populists did.

Does he mean it? It almost doesn’t matter. He’s testing those guardrails to see just how numb a public can become to grotesque violations of ethical or rhetorical norms, and he has found them exhilaratingly wanting. And he has an unerring instinct for where the weaknesses of our republican system lie.

Is recovery possible? The Roman lesson is that it is in the short term, but that recovery is fragile because norms are so much easier to break than to build, let alone rebuild, and that the longer republican norms are trashed, the weaker they subsequently become. And much depends, of course, on what comes immediately after, whether these compounding trends can be nipped or reversed before they entrench themselves.

In Rome, it took a long while, but there were periods of much quicker erosion, as charismatic figures established a space for authoritarianism that came to be permanent. And then, of course, a sudden and unexpected collapse. In America, the question of whether this history will repeat itself hangs ominously in the air. But that sound you hear in the distance is of future Caesars preparing to make their move.

Hillary’s Economic Plan: Recommitting to Progressive Policies

If one looks at the history of America in the 20th Century, some of the things that built the middle class were progressive policies, Social Security being a major one, combined with strong unions as well as employers who truly saw their employees as capital and not a class of people to be financially raped and deemed expendable.  Today's Republican Party is at war with all of these essential elements.  In outlining her economic plan, Hillary Clinton has pledged to recommit to the progressive policies that (i) built the middle class and (ii) helped end the gross excesses of the Gilded Age (which the GOP want to restore).  A piece in Salon looks at Clinton's plan.  Here are excerpts:

Heading into Hillary Clintons’ big economic speech on Thursday, there was some concern among progressive groups that the Democratic presidential nominee was going to use the opportunity to nudge her policy agenda towards the center. She’d secured the nomination and no longer had to worry about Bernie Sanders’ challenge from the left, and her campaign was in the middle of a high-profile push to recruit Republican defectors away from GOP nominee Donald Trump, which left open the possibility that she might start moderating for the general election.

Well, Hillary’s speech seems to have put those concerns to rest. At least for the moment. She also put together an effective line of attack against Trump’s economic agenda, separating his populist rhetoric from the reality of his policy proposals.

Clinton hit a number of progressive themes and issues during her remarks in Warren, Michigan: she called for a large boost in infrastructure spending and the creation of an infrastructure bank, she committed to connecting every household in the country to broadband internet by the end of her first term, she offered a strong defense of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and she backed tuition-free college for everyone except the wealthy.

This is the stuff that activists want to hear, and the progressive groups that were slightly wary of Clinton heading into the speech were pretty ebullient over Hillary’s TPP remarks. “These were Hillary Clinton’s strongest words yet against the TPP,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green said in a statement. “For the first time, Clinton signaled she will personally work to kill the corporate-written TPP if it comes up after the election in an unaccountable lame-duck Congress.” The Roosevelt Institute also lauded Clinton’s speech in a statement released in conjunction with Democracy Corps: “With this economic speech, Secretary Clinton has made this election a choice about whether our economy works for all, not just the few, and that allows progressive economics to win a mandate in November.”

The flip side to Clinton’s renewed embrace of progressive economic policies was her dismantling of Donald Trump’s economic platform. She seized on the Trump plan’s reduction of taxes on so-called “pass-through” entities (calling it “the Trump loophole”) which would allow high-income households to pay far less in taxes on their income than they would under normal circumstances. The pass-through loophole is a massive tax break for the rich, one that would benefit Trump himself, as pass-through entities are “a cornerstone of the Trump Organization.”

Clinton also took a bite out of Trump for proposing a full repeal of the estate tax. As I wrote following Trump’s big economic speech this week, nixing what remains of the estate tax will benefit the super-rich almost exclusively. Hillary made this same point, tying estate-tax repeal to Trump personally and weaving in elements of greed. “If you believe that he’s as wealthy as he says, that alone would save the Trump family $4 billion. It would do nothing for 99.8 percent of Americans. So they’d get a $4 billion tax cut, and 99.8 percent of Americans would get nothing.”

On child care policy, her anti-Trump message was very much the same, given that Trump’s child care plan is a pro-wealthy heap of flaming trash that no one thinks is a good idea. “His plan was panned from the left, from the right, the center, because it transparently is designed for rich people like him,” Clinton said. “He would give wealthy families 30 or 40 cents on the dollar for their nannies, and little or nothing for millions of hardworking families trying to afford child care.”

These are sharp attacks because they strip away the absurd patina of populism that Trump likes to coat himself in with his protectionist ranting and broadsides against foreigners who steal our jobs. Those rhetorical flourishes have little to undergird them, and whenever Trump actually wades into policy details, he invariably ends up churning out proposals that explicitly reserve the lion’s share of benefits for people who do not need them.  

 I continue to be amazed how many Americans fall for the ruse that cuts in the estate tax would help them.  In reality, unless one's estate has a net value of well over $5 million, there is ZERO federal estate liability.  And with proper estate planning, married couples can lessen that impact.  On child care, with two working daughters, I know full well how crushing these costs are and how, unless has a truly well paying job, it can be cheaper to simply not work at all and be a stay at home mother - or father.