The Emperor Has No Clothes

            Republican frontrunner Donald J. Trump has done us all a favor.  He’s laid bare, for all the world to see, that rank and file Republicans simply don’t want what Republican elites like Paul Ryan, say they do.

            I’m not talking about the racism, fascism, xenophobia and authoritarianism that surround his campaign.  Plenty of other people have done that.  Screeds against Mr. Trump are almost de rigueur.  Even the Republican establishment and the distasteful Ted Cruz have jumped on that particular bandwagon.

            I’m talking about the Republican economic theory that has dominated conservative politics since the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1961.

            Let’s be clear, first of all, about what that policy is.  It is a forthright libertarian tinged belief that government taxes too much, spends too much and intervenes too much in the economy.  Its most important proponents and beneficiaries are people in the wealthiest portions of American society.  They don’t need the welfare state, thank you very much, because they can afford to buy the education, security, health care and child care services they need on their own.  And they are also capable of protecting themselves against the adversity a recession, old age, bad luck, or poor health can bring.

           

            Because they can opt out of the protective web of state services upon which most other people have to rely, they often resent having to pay more of their income to the state (regardless of who the state supports), and they dislike the fact that the public can interfere with their autonomy through law and regulation.

            Of course, low taxes and skimpy regulations are generally not in the interests of most people.  Most people need the services benefits those taxes pay for and benefit from the protections that government regulations bring.  That’s what a government is for and that’s what a democracy is supposed to do.

            So why have Republican policies over the last 50 years emphasized low taxes, less regulation, and smaller government together with an associated menu of free trade, union-busting, expanded militarization and a disregard for the environment?  Because the wealthy have been able to link their preferred agenda to racial animus, and that animus has motivated all but the poorest Republicans to vote against their own interests.

            We never talk about the subsidies the (largely white) middle class gets.  The home mortgage interest deduction, for example, is a tax expenditure that  subsidizes housing for people wealthy enough to afford to buy a house and get a mortgage. That subsidy, by the way, is completely dependent on using borrowed money, and so the deduction also subsidizes the lending industry.  And even though Republicans presently like to talk about cutting Social Security and Medicare, none of their proposals would affect people currently receiving or close to receiving those benefits.   

           No, instead we talk about welfare queens and the undeserving poor.  As Martin Gillens has shown in Why Americans Hate Welfare, public assistance has been racialized so that the popular conception of it is as a transfer of wealth from hard working whites to lazy African-Americans and others who are not “real Americans.”  Yet the percentage of public assistance going to African-Americans and others is a relatively small compared to the amount spent on the home mortgage interest deduction, Social Security or Medicare.

            If you can get voters who are worried about their own economic prospects to focus on government handouts to people they don’t like, and if you can blame their sorry state on government preferences and indulgences toward people they don’t like, it’s easy to argue that the solution to all of their problems is to cut government spending on those kinds of transfers and reduce the size and power of government.  And, of course, since there will be less spending (and a smaller budget deficit, if any) you can also argue that those “hardworking Americans” will also get a cut in income taxes.

            If you look carefully at Mr. Trump’s support and at his rhetoric, what you see is that Mr. Trump isn’t talking about and his supporters aren’t demanding a smaller government, big tax cuts and freer markets the way Republican elites do.  Mr. Trump has insisted that he would protect Social Security and Medicare while making it harder for businesses located outside of the U.S. to make and sell things here.

           

            And he also doesn’t support big portions of the prevailing Republican agenda.  Though Mr. Trump has paid the usual Republican lip service to ending Obamacare, he seems to favor a single-payer system akin to what other countries have.  And how could the roundup, deportation and readmission of all illegal aliens into the U.S. through legal processes be accomplished except through a bigger more intrusive government?

            In fact, in an NBC News poll published last August before the Trump bandwagon started to roll, only 18% of Trump’s supporters self-identified as “very conservative,” and only 45% of Trump supporters think there should be stricter limits on abortion compared to 60% of non-Trump supporters.  Since then, Trump has not materially changed his pitch.

            Jonah Goldberg of the National Review complains that in trying to extend his support base to “blue-collar Reagan Democrats,” Trump has abandoned any attempt to “win a mandate for conservative policies.  Instead of converting voters to conservatism, Trump is succeeding at converting conservatives to statism on everything from health care and entitlements to trade.”

            What this means is that the rank and file Republican voters propelling Mr. Trump toward the nomination don’t buy into the Republican economic program, if, in fact, they ever did.  Trump Republicans seem to want programs like Social Security and Medicare protected and they’re not clamoring for big tax cuts for the wealthy to spur the economy.  They abhor “crony capitalism” and they don’t believe that any of the special deals the government has targeted at the wealthy benefit them.  They surely don’t like tax money being spent on the “undeserving poor,” but that’s not the same thing as saying the government needs to be shrunk to a size so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub.

            The Reagan Revolution is over, and contrary to the insistence of the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Review, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, it’s not likely to make a resurgence any time soon.  The Trump voters will see to that.

            And that’s a good thing.  Across the partisan divide, we can now clearly see that the real battle isn’t between Democrats and Republicans.  It’s between the plutocrats and everyone else.

                       

            

You Tell Me It's the Institution. Well, you know . . .

            As I said in the last post, I think Bernie Sanders, who is calling for a “political revolution,” has his heart in the right place.  But our governing institutions are set up in such a way as to make such a revolution, brought about by a single presidential election, highly unlikely.

            Bernie’s idea is that good people around the United States will, on election day, stand up to the wealthiest 1% of our population who have polluted our politics and captured our government by to electing him president..

            Well, you know . . .

            Even if a majority of Americans wholeheartedly agree with every plank in his platform, there is almost no chance that those good people will be able to give Bernie everything he wants.  Our system of governance, as currently configured, is simply not designed to give a clear majority of our population the power to get, through democratic means, the policies it wants.  Preventing sweeping change through democracy is a design “feature” of our system and not a “bug.” 

            The Senate was specifically designed to be a speed bump—and that’s before we even begin to discuss the filibuster.  Before the adoption of the 17^th Amendment, each state’s legislature would decide who would represent the state in the Senate.  That served to insulate Senators from popular opinion.

The 17^th Amendment provided for the popular election of Senators, but that doesn’t solve Bernie’s problem with the Senate.  Senators have 6-year terms and only a third of them ever stand for re-election during any national election. That means that even if Bernie’s revolution completely succeeds, two-thirds of the Senate will still be in the hands of the ancient regime when the dust from the 2016 election settles.  It will take at least one more election after 2016 before a majority of the Senate could be controlled by Bernie’s revolutionaries.

            That’s all theoretical, though, it and doesn’t account for the facts on the ground.  For purposes of argument, lets ignore the fact that not all Democrats or Republicans hold the mean ideological positions of their respective parties and assume that all Democrats who hold Senate seats in the next Congress would rubber-stamp all of Bernie’s proposals while also assuming that all Republicans holding Senate seats in the next Congress would uniformly oppose them.

            There are currently 46 Senate Democrats and 54 Senate Republicans.  Of the 34 Senate seats up for grabs in 2016, only 10 are held by Democrats while 24 are held by Republicans.  Seven of those Republicans occupy seats from “blue” States that twice voted for Barack Obama.  None of the Democrats occupy seats from the “red” states that voted for the Republican candidate in the last two presidential elections.

            Since this is Bernie’s fantasy, let’s assume that even though incumbents tend to have electoral advantages over challengers, every blue state Senate seat flips, and Democrats end up controlling 52 Senate seats in 2017.

            That’s enough to gain control of the Senate committee structure and floor schedule, but sadly, it’s not enough to pass legislation.  The de facto threshold for legislating is 60 votes, which is the number of votes required to end a filibuster.  The Bernieites would be 8 votes shy of that number, and so the Republican forces of reaction (this is Bernie’s fantasy, after all) would easily be able to block anything suggested by Sanders.

            The Constitution does not provide for filibusters.  They are, instead, creatures of the Senate’s arcane rules.  In theory, it is possible for a majority of the Senate to change the rules regarding filibusters.  In the real world, neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown much stomach for disallowing filibusters (though the Democrats did “go nuclear” by outlawing filibusters against presidential appointees other than Supreme Court nominees).  Both sides know that they may need to be able to use the filibuster when they become minority parties in the Senate.

            But again, let’s suppose that Bernie’s forces in the Senate are able to take the fateful step of dispatching the filibuster.  Even so, it’s far from certain that Bernie’s forces will be able to keep control of the Senate for all 4 years of his first term.  In 2018, the tables turn.  Democrats will be defending 25 seats, at least 5 of which are in reliably red presidential states.  And Democrats tend to do worse in mid-term elections than they do in presidential years.

            Ponder well the observation that even though the bulk of our population lives in states that reliably votes for Democratic presidential candidates, there are more states that reliably vote Republican.  Since every state has two votes in the Senate, Republicans are likely to control it more often than Democrats.

            The life of the revolution is not going to be much easier in the House of Representatives.  Though the House depends on proportional representation, that representation can be determined by the way states draw the boundaries of their congressional districts.  In states like Texas and Pennsylvania where the Republicans controlled the redistricting process after the 2010 Census, Republicans ended up controlling more House districts than their proportion in the population would call for.  States like Maryland can offset the effects of gerrymandering to some extent. But, because Democrats tend to live in more compact densely populated areas than do Republicans, there are likely to be more Republican districts than Democratic ones.

            While 2016 could be Bernie’s big year (well, you know . . . ), he’ll still be stuck with more maps favoring Republicans than Democrats.  Even if his election also sweeps a large number of revolutionaries into Congress in a Democratic wave, the tide is likely to turn in 2018 when he is not on the ballot.  Reactionaries tend to vote in off-year elections in greater proportions than do Bernie’s summer soldiers.

            The only way for the true voice of the people to be heard the way Bernie wants it to be heard is to change our institutions.  Specifically, we’d need to abolish the Senate—an institution that has less and less to do anyway--and to make House of Representative terms coterminous with that of the President.  Assuming that House members always vote with their parties, that’s the only way to insure that the people always get the policies they want.

            That would be far more democratic than what we have right now.  But democracy may not always be what we want.  I shudder to think what would happen in a truly democratic society that elects, not Bernie Sanders and his followers, but Donald Trump and his.

            Does anyone still want a revolution?     

You Say You Want a Revolution. Well, you know . . .

 . . . it is too late for establishment politics and establishment economics. It is too late for a corrupt campaign finance system and super-PACs that raise enormous amounts of money from special interests.  We need in this country a political revolution where ordinary people stand up and reclaim the government that men and women fought and died for.

Bernie Sanders

March 6, 2016, Flint, MI

            Bernie is right.  We do need a revolution.  It’s too bad his understanding of current political realities and the scope of his imagination don’t match his rhetoric.

            There’s a lot wrong with a political system that’s awash in unaccountable cash contributed by millionaires and billionaires.  And that does lead to an establishment economics that rewards investments in politicians with tax breaks, bailouts and a marketplace skewed away from the needs of most Americans.

            But with due respect, it’s going to take more than a moment in history where voters “stand up and reclaim the government.”  Revolutions require permanent changes in institutions, not merely a reshuffling of the people occupying the seats of power resulting from a single election.

            Here’s what a real revolution would look like.

            First, we have to recognize that the American government exists in its present form because of an accident of history and an outdated political theory.

            The accident of history is that when the British Crown decided to colonize the New World, it gave separate charters allowing independent companies to set up geographically defined and independent enclaves.  These enclaves became the colonies that, in turn, morphed into the independent states that formed the United States in 1776.

            There is no good reason that the British Crown should have established separate colonies or that we ought to have a union composed of separate and sovereign states possessing powers that do not derive from the national government.  The states themselves, for instance, have counties, cities and towns that derive their power from the state.  Those derivative jurisdictions often have sufficient power to accommodate local ways of life.  But they have no power to obstruct state policy formulated in the state capitals.

            Our federal system of dual sovereignty, on the other hand, has been responsible for a fair share of the mischief that mars American history.  The perpetuation of slavery and Civil War are but two examples of this mischief that readily come to mind.

            The federal system of dual sovereignty gave rise to the fear and suspicion that led to the “Connecticut Compromise” in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.  The Connecticut Compromise called for a bifurcation of national legislative power into a House of Representatives in which states would receive representation in proportion to their populations and a Senate where states would receive equal representation.  This arrangement, the framers thought, would prevent the states with large populations from imposing their wills on the states with small populations.

             But all of that would have been unnecessary had our forbearers no reason to think of themselves as citizens of separate states.  We could easily have decided to have a unicameral legislature dedicated to the general welfare. 

            And if we had done it that way, there would be no variation in the level of education we provide our children, no variation in civil rights, no variation in voting rights and no variation in the treatment of the poor because all of these would be matters of federal policy.  I have yet to see a persuasive argument that any of these variations are good things or that our nation gains other valuable things for tolerating a system in which these variations can exist.

            The logical institutional change, then, that real revolution requires, is the replacement of federalism with a national unitary system in which major policy for the nation gets written in Washington and states serve as administrative jurisdictions responsible for implementing national policy.  Washington would have the responsibility for funding these policies, and it could give limited discretion, consistent with national policy to the states.

            The outdated political theory real revolution would have to dispatch is the idea that tyranny results when all legislative, executive and judicial power resides in the same hands.  In the United States, we know the practical application of this theory as the “separation of powers” or the system of “checks and balances.”

            If we really believe in democracy, then the real check on the government ought to be a clear enumeration of matters beyond its control and the verdict of the people delivered through regular, inclusive and fair elections.  It ought not to reside in the power of a Senate minority to sustain a filibuster or even in the power of an executive to veto the actions of the legislature.  An independent judiciary would protect minority rights, while a vigilant citizenry would possess the power to replace a government that fails to deliver on its promises with another government more to its liking in the next election.

            Our close ally, the United Kingdom, has had a system without these two “bugs” for hundreds of years, and it’s done quite well.  Its government is relatively efficient, highly accountable, reasonably democratic and capable of protecting individual rights.  And it doesn’t present nearly the potential for gridlock that currently afflicts our system.

            So if you really want a revolution, let’s start with these two changes.

            Power to the people, right on!