Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
Today's GOP: Soft Corruption and False Populism
One of the most amazing and disturbing things about today's Republican Party and its base is how willing much of the MAGA base - especially working class whites - continues to support the GOP's agenda which favors the very wealthy and large corporations. Time and time again, that agenda boils down (i) to tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations and (ii) slashing safety and labor regulations while seeking to inflict drastic cuts on programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid which support working and middle class Americans. All the while, Republicans rail against "elites" - even though many hold Ivy League degrees themselves - all things "woke," and socialism even as they seek to knife working Americans in the back financially. Sadly, much of the MAGA base is so consumed by hatred of others (think blacks, Hispanics, gays, and non-Christians) and often low intelligence/information that they routinely support a party that is in reality a threat to their financial wellbeing. The false populism of the GOP is so glaring that one needs to be blind or consumed with hate not to see it. Throw in the love of high level Republicans for graft and perk from billionaires and the deceptive picture is complete. A column in the New York Times looks at the sad phenomenon. Here are excerpts:
There are currently two clown shows — sorry, but let’s be honest — going on in the Republican Party. One is the intraparty fighting that seems extremely likely to cause a government shutdown a few days from now. The other is the fight over who will come a distant second to Donald Trump in the presidential primaries.
There are many strange aspects to both shows. But here’s the one that has long puzzled me: Everyone says that with the rise of MAGA, the G.O.P. has been taken over by populists. So why is the Republican Party’s economic ideology so elitist and antipopulist?
Listen to the rhetoric of the people making Kevin McCarthy look like a fool or of the presidential candidates, and it’s full of attacks on elites — but also of promises to cut taxes for the rich and slash government spending that benefits the working class. For example, Nikki Haley — who is making a credible bid to be Trump’s also-ran, given Ron DeSantis’s implosion — is calling for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
As I write this, McCarthy is reportedly trying to appease MAGA dissidents with a temporary funding bill that would cut nonmilitary discretionary spending outside of Veterans Affairs by 27 percent — meaning savage cuts to things like the administration of Social Security (as opposed to the benefits themselves).
The thing is, such proposals are deeply unpopular. It’s true that Americans tell pollsters that the government spends too much, but if you ask them about specific types of spending, the only area on which they say we spend too much is foreign aid, which is a trivial part of the budget. Oh, and most Americans still support aid to Ukraine.
So there would seem to be an opening for politicians who are right wing on social issues like immigration and wokeness but are also genuinely populist in their spending priorities. Such politicians exist in other countries.
So why aren’t there such figures in the G.O.P.? To be fair, during the 2016 campaign Trump sometimes sounded as if he might turn his back on Republican economic orthodoxy, but once in office he pursued the usual agenda of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy combined with benefit cuts for the rest.
Part of the answer may lie in the American right’s general mind-set, which valorizes harshness, not empathy. People who are drawn to MAGA tend to imagine that solving society’s problems should involve punishing people, not helping them.
Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of ignorance: MAGA politicians, who generally disdain any kind of expertise, may not have any clear idea of what the federal government does and where tax dollars go.
Finally, there’s the Clarence Thomas factor.
What I mean is that part of the explanation for the absence of genuine Republican populists may involve the gravitational pull of big money, which is both broader and subtler than the way it’s often portrayed.
If the accusations against Senator Robert Menendez are true — and it’s not looking good — old-fashioned bribery, payments to politicians in exchange for favors, hasn’t gone away. But it’s probably not shaping party ideology.
Campaign contributions, on the other hand, definitely do shape ideology; DeSantis was touted as a rival to Trump because he got a lot of support from big donors who believed he would serve their interests and had real political skills. (Being rich doesn’t necessarily come with good judgment.)
[T]he fact is that public figures whom the very rich see as being on their side can reap considerable personal rewards from their positions.
Recent revelations about Justice Thomas show how this works. ProPublica reports that he has received many favors from ultrawealthy conservatives, notably lavish free vacations. These reports are shocking because we don’t expect such behavior from a Supreme Court justice, and Thomas may have violated the law by failing to disclose these gifts. But does anyone doubt that many politicians who favor tax cuts for the rich and reduced benefits for the working class, even as they rail against elites, receive similar favors?
And the hermetic information space of the American right surely facilitates this soft corruption. Suggestions of improper influence on right-wing officials and politicians won’t get much coverage on Fox News, except possibly for claims that they’re the victims of a liberal smear campaign.
Now, I don’t know how important these different factors are to the fact that America’s “populists” are anything but populist in practice. But we do need to ask why people who denounce elites somehow always manage to avoid targeting corporations not named Disney and billionaires not named George Soros.
Monday, September 25, 2023
Climate Change is Coming for America’s Real Estate Market
FOR DECADES Americans have been moving to beautiful places that are vulnerable to extreme weather. Florida, once a swampy frontier, is now America’s third-most populous state. It is also the state most often hit by hurricanes. By 2015, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts boasted more than $13trn of real estate. Look West and the story is similar. Homes are proliferating in the wildland-urban interface, where nature and development anxiously coexist and wildfire season seems never to end.
It is climate change that makes extreme weather more common. But the financial cost of storms and fires depends, more than anything else, on how many homes people choose to build in risky places. After adjusting for inflation, there have been more billion-dollar disasters so far in 2023 than any year since America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began keeping records. Losses as a proportion of GDP have kept stable over the past four decades. But there are big local exceptions: last year hurricane damage cost Florida between 7.5% and 10% of the state’s GDP.
Those who enjoy the benefits of living in high-risk areas (such as a majestic ocean view) should shoulder the costs. However, both federal and state governments ensure that they do not, by subsidising or suppressing property insurance rates in such places. This has encouraged reckless building. A new report from the First Street Foundation, a non-profit research group, finds that if proper account is taken of climate risk, nearly a quarter of all properties in the continental United States are overvalued. These 39m properties represent a climate-insurance bubble inflated by government.
Private insurers burned by huge payouts after disasters are abandoning risky markets such as Florida and California. Homeowners are turning to state-backed insurers of last resort, which offer less coverage for a higher price. When these plans cannot cover claims, taxpayers are often left with the bill. As climate change continues, the uninsurable parts of America will only grow.
At the federal level the National Flood Insurance Programme, which offers subsidised flood insurance to homeowners in hazardous places, is drowning in debt. America’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which runs the programme, is in the process of raising rates to keep it solvent. But property-owners are rebelling by cancelling their policies, and the politicians who represent them are threatening to intervene.
Such intransigence is bipartisan. State and national politicians, Democrats and Republicans, prefer to keep rates artificially low, constituents happy and their tax bases intact. This is short-sighted. So long as disaster risk is underpriced, people will take too much of it. And it is unclear how long taxpayers who live in comparatively safe places will be happy to subsidise insurance for those who don’t, especially when the subsidy-guzzlers are rich. . . . . Taxpayers should not be helping the Real Housewives of Miami build seaside castles.
Instead, policymakers should allow private insurers to set actuarially sound rates, so they can keep writing coverage. Realistic premiums would deter reckless new construction. They would also hurt existing homeowners, so politicians would probably have to keep offering government flood insurance, at least temporarily, to those who cannot afford anything else.
Eventually, though, some Americans will need to move to keep safe from rising seas, roaring floods and fast-encroaching flames. The government should ease the transition: for example, FEMA could offer buyouts to homeowners who cannot afford their insurance. But make no mistake: the longer politicians subsidise building in dangerous places, the worse the pain will be, and the bigger the final bill.
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Trump's GOP Rivals Are Letting Him Win
To understand why Donald Trump is once again skipping a Republican presidential debate, realize that the conventional way of looking at the GOP’s nomination contest has things largely backward. Trump’s standing in the polls is less about his strength than about the weakness of the rest of the field — and the traditional Republican Party.
Trump wants his foes to stay weak. By not showing up, he reduces them to squabbling bit players trying to bring each other down while the major contenders offer pale imitations of his own message and values.
Republican voters once open to someone other than the former president are concluding that if they’re going to get Trumpism, they might as well go with the guy who invented it. And they’re getting little useful advice from party leaders who — as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told his biographer McKay Coppins — see Trump as a disaster but are too timid to say so publicly.
It didn’t have to be like this, because the strength of Trump’s lock on the party is vastly exaggerated.
Sure, Trump has an unshakable base, those who would stick with him if he were indicted a dozen more times. But that hard core accounts for no more than about 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate. There really is (or was) room for someone else to break through.
But not one of them has inspired real excitement, and the politician who once seemed best placed to take Trump on, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has had a miserable year.
As a result, Trump has been able to combine his base with a fair share of the largest group of Republicans: those with a more or less positive view of the former president but willing to support someone else.
Not so long ago, such Republicans were flocking to others, particularly DeSantis. Trump seemed anything but inevitable at the beginning of 2023. Many in the party blamed him (and the candidates he backed) for its disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms.
A mid-January poll for the Bulwark by North Star Opinion Research and GOP pollster Whit Ayres found that when Republicans were offered a choice among DeSantis, Trump and “another candidate,” 44 percent picked DeSantis to 28 percent for Trump and 10 percent for the unnamed alternative. When the other potential GOP candidates were listed by name, DeSantis led Trump by 39 percent to 28 percent.
Other polling early in the year generally showed Trump ahead, but mostly not by his currently prohibitive margin.
The sad news for the country is that Republicans let a real chance to end Trump’s career slip away. The opportunity may not come around again. Critics of the GOP enjoy observing that the more Trump is indicted, the more Republican voters flock to him. The timelines of his growing lead and his expanding list of felony counts do overlap, but there are better explanations for his comeback.
The most obvious is that his primary foes have plainly failed to impress voters. At least as important, they and Trump’s (often secret) party critics were unwilling to risk enraging him and his supporters. So they held back from throwing knockout punches when Trump was on the ropes. That’s no way to beat a brawler who’ll do anything to win.
Congressional leaders also seem to have calculated that their hopes of keeping their narrow House majority and winning back the Senate depend on voters whom Trump can draw to the polls — and traditional conservatives cannot. Trump is rubbing that in by forgoing the Wednesday debate in favor of a trip to Michigan, where he’ll pretend to be a friend of the state’s autoworkers. He was, in fact, a very antilabor president, but he sure knows how to play roles on TV.
The party’s paralyzing Trump dependency has only grown with its ongoing loss of middle-of-the-road suburban voters, small-c conservatives temperamentally who are skeptical of a contemporary Big-C Conservatism increasingly shaped by the Far Right.
The journey of suburban Montgomery County outside of Philadelphia is a microcosm of the GOP’s troubles. In 1988, George H.W. Bush, the paragon of old-style moderate conservatism, won 60 percent of the county’s vote, carrying Pennsylvania and the presidential election. In 2020, Trump got just over 36 percent, losing the state and the presidency.
In the short term, Republican strategists see no path to rebuilding a more moderate coalition. The party’s primary electorate is concluding that in a closely divided country, Trump is about as electable as any of his less-than-stellar rivals. The candidates who gather on Wednesday at the Reagan Library need to grasp that they’re on the verge of allowing the most dangerous man in American politics one more shot at power.
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