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.