Sunday, March 07, 2021
Never Trumpers Are Becoming Pro-Democracy Republicans
One of the most predictable developments of the post-Trump era was that the small band of anti-Trump conservative intellectuals and Republican officials would quickly melt away. They had been repulsed by Donald Trump’s combination of grotesque character and ideological heterodoxy — opposing American alliances, free trade, and so on – but when given the chance to support Republicans who believed in traditional Reaganite principles and weren’t career criminals, politics would go back to normal and they would return to the fold.
Instead, something surprising has happened. Anti-Trump Republicans are refashioning their identity as pro-democracy conservatives.
Here are a few examples to give a flavor of their thinking. It’s not close to an exhaustive list:
David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who was one of the first conservatives to recognize the party’s collapse into revanchism, wrote a column for The Atlantic arguing that Trump’s rise reflects not the tendency of a demagogue to inflame the majority, as the Founders feared, but the power of a minority. Frum called for democratic reforms to stop the conservative minority, given disproportionate representation by the House, Senate, and Electoral College, from exercising control. “The retreat from majority rule has not only weakened the American system’s fairness, it has also wobbled that system’s stability,” he argued. “The path back to constitutional normality depends upon a reinvigoration of the majoritarian principle.”
Anne Applebaum has argued for granting statehood to the District of Columbia. The Bulwark, a magazine that has become a hub of anti-Trump conservatism, has crusaded in favor of protecting and expanding voting rights. Its editor, Jonathan Last, argues that Democrats should prioritize pro-democracy reforms . . .
Any bill to expand voting rights would be subject to a filibuster and stand no chance of enactment in any form. Therefore, democratization requires eliminating or at least scaling back the filibuster, which is itself an impediment to democracy. Several anti-Trump conservatives, like Max Boot and David Brooks, have already endorsed this step.
Gary Schmitt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the former executive director of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, has argued that the Senate filibuster prevents rather than enables deliberation and debate. Schmitt made this case four years ago and reiterated it last month.
Why have a group of conservatives who not many years ago were prepared to happily vote for the likes of Ted Cruz come to embrace a cause that few of them displayed any interest in? For political elites, Trump’s unconcealed desire to follow the path of figures like Orban, Erdogan, and Putin became the primary stakes of the era’s political conflict. Their activism put them in touch with scholars of authoritarianism and democracy who studied democratic backsliding, and the insights of those thinkers became increasingly evident in the Never Trumpers’ polemics.
Trump’s exploitation of Republican voter-fraud paranoia made it perfectly clear to anybody not in his thrall that the entire Republican agenda of restricting ballot access is part and parcel of Trump’s authoritarian ambition. The connection has grown more obvious still, as Republicans seized on Trump’s vote-fraud propaganda as a pretext to enact vote-suppression measures across the country.
Anti-Trump conservatives have a second motive for embracing democratization. Many of them hope to reclaim and reform the Republican Party as a sane vehicle for center-right governing. They won’t have an opportunity to do so until the party realizes Trumpism is a political dead end. . . . . Democratization, and its promise of forcing Republicans to compete for a majority or something close to it, is the most potent tool to force the party to the center.
Obviously, anti-Trump conservatives correspond to a small sliver of the voting public. None of these people has a vote in the Senate, which is the body that will ultimately decide whether or not to implement pro-democracy reform.
But their influence is not negligible. The main argument against curtailing the filibuster and implementing reforms like automatic voter registration, nonpartisan redistricting, and statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico is that it would be a Democratic Party “power grab.” The Never Trumpers can supply a high-profile media voice to credibly articulate nonpartisan reasons to bolster the democratic character of the electoral system.
As Trump’s clumsy effort to cancel the election and seize an unelected second term sputtered to its end, a realization settled on all parties that we are merely living in a temporary armistice. Trump was elected because most Republicans refuse to accept the legitimate right of a majority of democratic voters to govern. He launched — or more precisely, escalated — a war against democracy. Everybody can see the stakes. There is no going back to “normal” now.
Saturday, March 06, 2021
The Fake Anger of Neanderthal Republicans
Neanderthals went extinct about 30,000 years ago, but that did not stop Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) from speaking affectionately about them on Thursday in the present tense. “Neanderthals are hunter-gatherers,” she said on Fox Business. “They’re protectors of their family. They are resilient. They’re resourceful. They tend to their own. So I think Joe Biden needs to rethink what he is saying.”
What President Biden said, correctly, is that the Republican governors of Texas and Mississippi are making “a big mistake” by rescinding mask mandates when new coronavirus variants are spreading. “The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking,” Biden said on a day when 2,492 more Americans died of the contagion. Conservative media figures and their GOP guests rushed to strip the president’s comment of context and feign injury, presenting the remark as if Biden had referred to all Republicans as Neanderthals. “Simply giving freedoms causes Joe Biden — ‘the great uniter’ — to call us Neanderthals,” former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on her debut appearance as a paid Fox analyst.
Leave aside the irony of people such as Blackburn, who does not accept the theory of evolution, expressing performative outrage on behalf of an extinct species whose very existence she rejects. Further irony: Evidence suggests that viruses thinned the Neanderthal population and they went extinct after failing to adapt to a changing climate.
The familiar chorus of faux indignation from the bad-faith brigade illustrates more than just how reflexive and juvenile the discourse has become. This week also put into stark relief how leading Republicans hope to fight their way out of the wilderness by leaning into grievance and picking culture war battles.
This is what the new echo chamber sounds like: “If you disagree with him, you’re a Neanderthal,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). “Basically, what he’s doing is calling us stupid,” said Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.).
Republican politicians and their cable partners toss out this red meat because they believe it is what their shared audience, or base, wants to eat. On Thursday alone, the word “Neanderthal” was mentioned at least 98 times on Fox News and another 35 times on Fox Business. Thirteen of Fox News’s 15 shows devoted airtime to Neander-gate, as did six of the nine shows on Fox Business, according to Media Matters for America.
Fox News led its website with a story about the backlash its hosts had ginned up. The banner headline called it “JOE’S ‘DEPLORABLE’ MOMENT.” And that’s what gave away their cynical game. . . . . She explained that half of Trump supporters who “feel that government has let them down” deserved genuine empathy, but that Trump had “lifted” up others who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” It’s hard to argue with her underlying point after watching what Trump’s presidency unleashed, from Charlottesville to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Fox News hosts and guests this week also compared Biden’s warning against “Neanderthal thinking” to Barack Obama’s 2008 remark that small-town voters who have struggled economically “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
“We were the deplorables, we were smelly Walmart people, then we were chumps for Trump, bitter clingers, now it’s Neanderthal,” said “Fox & Friends” host Pete Hegseth, who went into television after a failed Senate bid in Minnesota and whose elite pedigree includes degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
The cable empire keeps pumping from this well of resentment because doing so has proven profitable, keeping viewers angry and tuned in. . . . Fox News’s efforts to capitalize on the cultural epidemic of grievance and victimhood are, however irresponsible, entirely rational. The same is true for the GOP: Trump’s success taught a new generation of Republicans the continuing potency of us-against-them, anti-elitist messaging — even if it was more rhetoric than reality.
Republicans now face the familiar challenge of keeping their populist base riled up while opposing policies that would benefit many of those core supporters — this time without Trump. Indeed, even as Republicans tried to convince their voters to take offense at Biden’s Neanderthal label, they were voting en masse against a measure to extend unemployment benefits and send $1,400 checks to millions of households, while arguing against a $15 an hour minimum wage.
The challenge for Democrats is to figure out how to make the fight for the working class a debate over real-world policies, not phony culture war distractions.
"Drained-Pool Politics" Harms Everyone
If you're a White person who thinks racism only hurts people of color, the story behind an empty, abandoned swimming pool in Missouri might just change your mind.
The Fairground Park pool in St. Louis was the largest public pool in the US when it was built in 1919. It featured sand from a beach, a fancy diving board and enough room for up to 10,000 swimmers. It was dug during a pool-building boom when cities and towns competed to provide their citizens with public amenities that promoted civic pride and symbolized a perk of the American dream.
These public pools, of course, were for Whites only. But when civil rights leaders successfully pushed for them to be integrated, many cities either sold the pools to private entities or, in the case of Fairground Park, eventually drained them and closed them down for good.
These closures didn't just hurt Black people, though -- they also denied the pleasures of the pool to White people.
Heather McGhee tells the story of the Fairground Park pool in her powerful new book, "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together." McGhee employs the metaphor of a drained, cracked public pool to make a larger point: White refusal to share resources available to all US citizens doesn't just hurt people of color. It damages their families and their future, too.
McGhee has a name for this pain. She calls it "drained-pool politics." If you want to know why the US has one of the most inefficient health care systems among advanced nations, some of the worst infrastructure and a dysfunctional political system, blame drained-pool politics, she says.
Those politics are built on a lie that many White Americans have bought for centuries: When Black or brown people gain something, White people lose.
"The narrative that White people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America," McGhee writes in her book. "Until we destroy the idea, opponents of progress can always unearth it, and use it to block any collective action that benefits us all."
But McGhee's book doesn't just make the familiar "White people are voting against their economic interests" argument that many of us have heard before. She fills it with personal stories from her life and the people she encountered during three years of visiting churches, union halls and small towns across America.
When you think about the picture that Ronald Reagan was trying to paint of government mismanagement and government's poor judgment, you'd already had a decade of the War on Poverty, which was an extension of public benefits across the color line -- from it being up until the 1960s largely for White people.
You think about the ways in which government provided for the common good during the 1930s, '40s and '50s and in ways that built the White middle class. My book includes a section where it lists all the free stuff that the government gave to White families to help them have intergenerational wealth and economic security and how once we began to desegregate, government became stingier and that impacted everybody.
There are some success stories in the country's pandemic response and in places where the vaccine is being delivered well. . . . . And that's the kind of sight to we need to see more of so that we can restore our faith in the possibility of what we can do together. The exact counter to that is in Texas, a state cut off from the federal government to avoid being regulated, to avoid the kinds of safeguards that would have stopped the power outages, a state government that was totally absent from prevention to mitigation and taking care of its people. That was a very clear example of drained pool politics, of anti-government sentiment being put into policies that hurt everyone. It cost lives.
MAGA Has Never Been About Economics
Republicans like to bill themselves as a “working-class” party. But just as their refusal to take seriously the real threat behind the deaths and injuries of law enforcement personnel on Jan. 6 strips them of the pretense of being “pro police” or defenders of “law and order,” so too does their economic agenda dispense with the fiction that they are attuned to the interests of working- and middle-class Americans.
The New York Times gives the GOP too much credit when it declares that “Republicans have offered very little to advance the economic interests of blue-collar workers.” The phrase “offered very little” suggests they have been trying but just haven’t managed to come up with something. In reality, they have not been trying to enact a populist agenda. Let’s review: Republicans backed a tax cut under the last administration that primarily benefited the rich and corporations; attempted to strip health-care coverage from tens of millions of Americans by repealing the Affordable Care Act; and insisted that front-line workers, the elderly and others prioritize the “economy” (i.e. the stock market) over their own health while downplaying the pandemic that has disproportionately affected lower-wage workers. (There are hundreds of examples, including rolling back labor regulations to deprive millions of workers of overtime pay.)Since President Biden’s inauguration, Republicans have picked up where they left off. They opposed giving middle- and lower-class workers $1,400 checks, raising the unemployment subsidy (for fear their working-class friends would prefer lying on their couches to getting work), providing millions with food subsidies, and supporting states and localities that employ police, firefighters, teachers and other middle- and working-class employees.
It is not simply that Republicans have fallen short in advancing middle- and working-class interests; they have acted in ways directly contrary to the interests of those they claim to represent.
And let us be clear: The MAGA phenomenon was never about economic dislocation. In 2018, a study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “White, Christian and male voters ... turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.” An Iowa study found, “Economic distress is not a significant factor in explaining the shift in Iowa voters from Democrat to Republican between 2008 and 2016. The election outcomes do not signify [a revolt] among working-class voters left behind by globalization.”
The MAGA Republican Party has never represented the interests of working- and middle-class Americans; it and their cult leader have represented the “interests” of those motivated by xenophobia, racism and misogyny — whatever their economic status. We know that statistically voting for Trump correlates most closely with the belief that Whites, not African Americans, are discriminated against and with watching Fox News.
What is the GOP’s “agenda” now? Voter suppression to deter minorities from voting, angry memes that tell the base that elites have contempt for them and Jan. 6 denial. None of this has to do with working-class “interests.” It is about white supremacy.
Republicans use White grievance to rile their base while pursuing economic interests that benefit the wealthy donor class. It is not an anomaly; it is standard operating procedure for the party of White grievance.
The Rise of the Biden Republicans
[I]f you want to take the pulse of white middle America, go to its de facto national capital — Macomb County, Michigan.
It’s been this way since the mid-1980s, when a Yale-based academic and pollster named Stanley Greenberg turned his attention from studying the interplay of class and race in apartheid South Africa to try and explain what was happening in Macomb. In 1960, it was the most heavily Democratic suburban county in the United States. By 1984, it was landslide territory for Ronald Reagan. The population was overwhelmingly white and thoroughly middle class, largely living in tract homes and driving their cars to industrial jobs throughout metro Detroit. They were, by all appearances, Democrats. But they weren’t voting like it. Why not?
After convening a series of focus groups, Greenberg coined a term for these voters — “Reagan Democrats” — and a theory of the case. In these voters’ eyes, “the leaders who were supposed to fight for them seemed to care more about the blacks in Detroit and the protesters on campus; they seemed to care more about equal rights and abortion than about mortgage payments and crime,” Greenberg later wrote. “The old politics has failed them. What they really want is a new political contract — and the freedom to dream the American dream again.” Macomb, he said, “is the site of an historic upheaval that has wrecked the old and promises a new volatile kind of politics.”
For four decades now, that historic upheaval and the quest for the support of “Reagan Democrats” has defined American politics, from the rise of Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats” — which Greenberg, as Clinton’s pollster, had a central role in crafting — to George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” to Barack Obama’s poll-tested evisceration of Mitt Romney’s venture capital experience, to Donald Trump’s white-grievance mongering and tirades against NAFTA. After Obama won Macomb in 2008 and 2012, Trump captured it in both 2016 and 2020.
Then something important happened: In leaning too hard into white identity politics — and perhaps being too focused on what he thought Reagan Democrats wanted — Trump accelerated the rise of a new voting bloc that is, in many ways, the mirror image of the Reagan Democrats.
Call them the Biden Republicans.
Like the Reagan Democrats, they’re heavily white and live in suburbs. But where the Reagan Dems are blue-collar and culturally conservative, Greenberg sees the Biden Republicans as more affluent, highly educated and supportive of diversity. Historically, they identified with the Republican Party as their political home. But the leaders who were supposed to fight for them seem to care more about white grievance and keeping out immigrants; seem to care more about social issues and “owning the libs” than about childcare payments and college tuition. They don’t consider themselves Democrats — at least not yet — but they are voting for them, delivering them majorities in the House and Senate, and making Joe Biden just the fourth candidate in the last century to defeat an incumbent president.
Now, with the support of Biden Republicans shored up — at least for the time being — Joe Biden is embarking on an audacious gambit that’s gone largely unnoticed, but, if successful, could kneecap national Republicans for a decade: Recapturing the support of the Reagan Democrats.
“Biden is very self-consciously campaigning for Macomb County-type, white working-class voters [for whom] race is not the only thing driving their vote, but who went to Trump [in 2016] because of globalization and their belief that Democrats are not fighting for American workers,” says Greenberg
And that puts Republicans in a strategically difficult position. . . . . In both 2016 and 2020, Trump brought in new voters — people animated by “white nationalism and racial resentment, and whose overwhelming motivation is a deep worry that Black people and immigrants will control the country,” and who are “voting straight-ticket [Republican] to ‘save the country,’” says Greenberg. But by courting those votes, Republicans risk pushing the Biden Republicans further into the Democratic ledger.
“Trump voters, a large portion of them, want a welfare state that is dependable for working people,” says Greenberg. And Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion Covid relief package could make a tangible difference in their lives. Do the Reagan Democrats stick with non-Trump Republicans if Biden’s Democrats deliver reopened schools, a strong economy, a huge investment in infrastructure and a $3,600-per-child benefit to families on top of a $1,400 stimulus check?
For Republicans, Greenberg sees a reality not unlike the one Democrats faced when he first decamped to Macomb County: “They are going to have to lose a few elections before there can be a new dynamic within the Republican Party — just as the Democrats lost a lot of national elections before Bill Clinton was able to change the party.”
I’m actually stunned by how much consensus there is around using the government to really deliver for people. I think the Biden administration buys that. The gap between the progressive wing and the Biden wing—if that is a wing—is small. You look at the relief package, and there’s like one piece they’re arguing about. But if you look at what they’re agreeing on, introducing a child benefit—not just child care, but also a child benefit, which is more of a European kind of safety net—combined with a great expansion on health care, I think you’re dealing with a big change.
Right now, everyone thinks that government needs to deliver in a big way. I think that scares Republicans. And it will be interesting to see. People are going to see real benefits, not just the $2,000 stimulus piece, but something more enduring. If you look at the proposed $3,600 per child; that’s delivered [in installments] monthly into people’s checking accounts. That not only reduces child poverty; it’s virtually every middle-class person that we are talking about.
Friday, March 05, 2021
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