The Shape of Republican Things to Come

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Michael Lind, a FNew America Foundation, in the May edition of Politico Magazine, offers us a description of our current politics and then serves up a vision of what the politics of the intermediate future looks like.

ellow at the centrist

            Lind’s big idea is that we’ve reached the end of a period of partisan realignment that began in the early 1960s in which the Democrats became a “coalition of relatively upscale whites with racial and ethnic minorities, concentrated in an archipelago of densely populated blue cities,” while the Republican Party became “predominantly a Midwestern, white working-class party with its geographic epicenter in the South and interior West.”

            For Lind, the driving force for the shift was the “culture war” over issues of “sexuality, gender or reproduction” that took place between religious conservatives and secular liberals over the last 40 years.  Cultural conservatives migrated to the Republican party while people with a more secular outlook migrated to the Democratic party.

            For neither group of migrants was their new party a blank slate.  Newly arrived Democrats found a party focused on the working class economic issues that gave rise to Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition while newly arrived Republicans found a party with policies less favorable to them than to the affluent business-oriented partisans they would eventually displace.

            Donald Trump’s capture of the Republican party marks the beginning of what Lind calls a policy realignment in which parties shed past policy commitments they made to people who no longer control the party in favor of commitments to the people who do. 

            For example, Lind notes that for the last couple of decades, Republican politicians have called for the restructuring of Social Security, ostensibly to make the program more solvent, but more practically, to avoid having to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for it.  Donald Trump, on the other hand has said he would leave the program exactly as it is, without benefit cutbacks or increases in the retirement age.

            Similarly, the Republican establishment, for economic and political reasons, favors a light touch on immigration policies that allow for guest and specialized workers, and some accommodation for the undocumented workers who are already here.  But Republican voters have enthusiastically supported Donald Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented aliens, build a wall along our border with Mexico and prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. until we are certain that they are not terrorists.

            Lind’s Democratic example is less convincing.  He points to a disconnect between the attitudes of Democratic voters toward free trade—53% of all Democratic voters and 67% of millennials (who, he notes tend to favor Democrats) think free trade is good for the U.S.—while Democratic politicians like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, are currently opposing new free trade deals in solidarity with working class voters who have already migrated to the Republican party.

            When the dust settles, Lind thinks we’ll have a Republican party that will be composed of southern, western, suburban and exurban working class whites who will favor “universal contributory social insurance systems that benefit them and their families and reward work effort, but oppose “means tested programs for the poor whose benefits they and families cannot enjoy.”  They will also continue to oppose legal and illegal immigration “because of ethnic prejudice” or “fear of economic competition.”

            The Democratic coalition “will be even more of an alliance of upscale, progressive whites with blacks and Latinos, based in large and diverse cities.”  They’ll embrace free trade, oppose universal social insurance, but they “will agree to moderately redistributive taxes which pay for means tested benefits . . . for the disproportionately poor and foreign born urban workforce.”  Lind thinks they’ll support “employer-friendly, and finance-friendly libertarianism” just as the Republicans now do.

            I think Lind’s got it wrong.

            First of all, the engine that moved people from one party to the other was not the culture war. It was race.  Harry Truman nearly lost the 1948 election because of an intraparty rebellion staged by white Democratic southerners who couldn’t abide Truman’s racial policies.  The apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson’s remarks about how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would cost the Democrats the “Solid South” have proved prophetic in that now, Dixie has become a Republican bastion.

             It’s more historically accurate to say that the Republican Party became more culturally conservative because of its influx of southern whites fleeing a more racially diverse Democratic party than it is to say that the Republicans became the party of whites because of an influx of cultural conservatives fleeing a more secular Democratic party.  The culture war didn’t get started in earnest until at least the Carter Administration over 10 years after the southern exodus from the Democratic party began.

            Second, Lind doesn’t properly account for our changing demographics.  He discounts the idea that whites will become a minority in the foreseeable future.  Most of the population growth projected in the nonwhite population will come from Hispanics, who, he notes, are now beginning to count themselves as white and Hispanic. “If increasing numbers of Hispanics identify as white and their descendants are defined as “white” in government statistics,” he argues, there may be a white majority in the U.S. throughout the 21^st century.”  Seeing themselves as white, Lind intimates, they may very well feel comfortable moving to the Republican party.

            The problem with this second argument is that it fails to accept the fact that a significant proportion of whites simply don’t accept anyone who isn’t actually white and protestant as a legitimate American.  And until they do, it’s not likely that the voters behind the Republican party are going to adopt the kinds of policies that will make people of Hispanic ancestry want to support Republican politicians regardless of how they identify themselves to the Census Bureau.

            That racism or xenophobia, of course, will at least lock the Republican party out of the White House indefinitely if it continues to define itself with policies in opposition to people without the same pedigrees its white members have.  It remains to be seen whether an American political party without a realistic chance of winning the Presidency can survive as a local or Congress-based party.   

             It seems to me to be far more likely that sooner or later, strategic politicians in the Republican party will have little choice but to drop their dependence on disgruntled whites.  They will have no choice but to become advocates of policies that can attract non-whites on some ground that also appeal to whites.  At the very least, they’ll have to stop opposing policies that offer assistance to people whose recent ethnicity doesn’t derive from northern and western Europe.

            If that happens, the new group of voters Republicans need to compete for the presidency will displace the current shrinking core group of racially motived Republican whites.  Those new voters—the younger ones in particular—are likely to have little interest in relitigating the culture war issues that Lind describes.

            With race finally neutralized, we’ll hear fewer arguments against redistribution in favor of the “undeserving poor.”  Without culture on the menu, the electorate can spend more time thinking about what a Supreme Court nominee’s attitude about the ability of the state to control concentrated economic power and less time worrying about his or her attitudes about abortion, religion and LBGT rights.  There will be less to distract voters from the economic agenda of the people who are currently bankrolling both political parties.

            And maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to negotiate a social compact that enables us to share the bounty of this country fairly, enables every person to make the most of his or her life, and makes us more of a nation.

Sex and the Single Judicial Appointment

           When I was a kid, the adults talked about sex, if at all, in euphemisms and metaphors.  There were euphemisms for body parts and code words or phrases for various sexual activities.  They left us puzzling about why they didn’t sleep in separate beds like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo did.

            Our elders were largely the defenders of the old order in the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s.  They understood the facts of life—and we kids were living proof of that—but they weren’t then willing to talk about the integral part sex plays in human life and culture.  Sex, for many of them was l mostly an embarrassing activity that took place behind closed doors. Silence or coded language, they must have thought, could banish the subject, in all its prurience, from day to day experience.  Perhaps if they didn't talk about it, nobody would think about it.
            Didn't work. 

            I couldn’t help but think of this as I read the Washington Post’s condemnation of Donald Trump’s release of a list of judges he said he would consider nominating to the Supreme Court if elected president.

            Trump apparently received a significant amount of help compiling the list from the conservative Heritage Foundation. The Post didn’t object to any of the names on the list.  Instead, it complained that “Mr. Trump is damaging the country’s institutional fabric, in this case by further politicizing the judiciary.”

            For good measure, it also criticized Bernie Sanders’ promise to name justices who would reverse the Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to campaign spending by corporations and unions and Hillary Clinton’s promise to subject prospective Supreme Court nominees to “a bunch of litmus tests” on abortion, LBGT rights, voting rights and campaign finance law.

            “Litmus tests,” the Post opined, “subvert the independence of the judiciary.”  If politicians make the policy judges create fair game in considering whom to appoint, “the freedom of judges to decide specific cases would erode, and any assurance that those before the court could get a fair hearing would vanish.”  Judges hoping to be appointed to higher courts, it argues, will write their opinions so as to curry favor with the politicians at large or to avoid creating an adverse paper trail on controversial issues.

            This strikes me as a naive dismissal of the facts of political life.  Everyone knows that these litmus tests exist. But the Post apparently believes that if we don’t discuss them, we can ignore their reality.

            When Supreme Court justices make decisions on constitutional grounds, their decisions can only be undone by a politically implausible constitutional amendment, an unlikely change of heart on the part of one of the justices, or a change in Court personnel.  Because they have life tenure, they never have to worry about what voters think of their decisions. With all that time and democratically unaccountable power, judges in general and Supreme Court justices in particular can have an outsized impact on public policy.

            The Post is invoking fantasy when it assumes that a judge takes his or her seat on any court without pre-existing convictions on controversial matters.  Any person who graduates from law school without having received a healthy introduction to constitutional law, criminal law and civil rights and civil liberties law demonstrates, by his or her disinterest in those subjects, his or her unfitness for the bench.  It is simply implausible that any college graduate, much less a law school graduate, has not spent innumerable hours discussing civil rights, civil liberties, criminal law and the reach of governmental power.

            Voters have a right to know what a judicial nominee thinks about the legal principles—but not the cases—he or she is likely to encounter once he or she takes a seat on a court.  I certainly want to know whether a nominee thinks the Constitution protects a woman’s right to get an abortion, whether individuals have a constitutional right to own handguns, whether prohibiting same sex couples from marrying is permitted by the constitution and whether Congress can require everyone to buy health insurance.

            Rest assured that after Justices Earl Warren, William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, all of whom disappointed the Republican presidents who appointed them by eventually becoming stalwarts of the Supreme Court’s liberal block, no President is going to appoint anyone without being absolutely certain where a potential nominee stands on the major issues their bases care about.  Given the power of the Supreme Court, in a democracy, it’s just as irresponsible to deny voters information about who a presidential candidate might nominate for a seat on the Supreme Court as it is to let teenagers reach puberty without teaching them how to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

            So let’s stop speaking in euphemisms, metaphors and other coded language when it comes to judicial appointments.  Let’s avoid the strategic evasions about “privacy” and “super duper precedents” when what we want to know is whether a judicial nominee is going to protect a woman’s right to have an abortion under most circumstances.  Let’s face the issues head on.  We’re all grown-ups here.

            The Constitution gives the president the power to nominate judges and under our system, that is part of what is at stake during any presidential election.  Just as we voters are entitled to pass on the policies politicians propose to enact if elected, democracy requires that voters get a chance to consider the changes in policy likely to occur if a president gets to appoint the judges of his choice.

The Rise and Fall of the Christian Soldiers

            

            Whatever else Donald Trump may be, he is not a Reagan conservative.  That is why movement conservatives have not piled onto his bandwagon after his decisive primary win in Indiana last week.  In fact, movement conservatives are running in the opposite direction.

            Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination has subjected conservatives who care about policy to a moment of truth.  I hope that conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin’s remarkable May 6 column in the Washington Post is the shape of things to come.

            For once, Rubin had the courage to say what should be apparent to all: There is no majority supporting the Reagan agenda people like Paul Ryan have been attempting to foist on the rest of us.  The collapse of Ted Cruz’s campaign should tell us Americans in general and Republican voters are not looking for a reprise of the policies that Ronald Reagan championed to address the problems of the 1980s.

            What conservatives need instead, she argues, is a platform that does not included

•        Opposition to gay rights
•       Large tax cuts for the rich
•       Protectionism in trade
•       Expelling women from combat in a volunteer army
•       Rooting gays out of the military
•       Obsessing over bathroom assignments
•       Fixating on local ordinances about wedding services
•       Keeping the status quo on entitlements
•       Cutting out (as opposed to reforming) the safety net
•       Never, ever raising taxes on anyone
•       Mass deportation

            She also insists that conservatives must change their tactics by telling the truth.  Conservatives can no longer insist that climate change is not happening.  They have to stop telling working class whites that their problems stem from immigration or that millions of jobs went to China.  All of these things, she says, are “lies.”

            And they also have to “end their infatuation with phony news, crank conspiracy theories, demonization of well-meaning leaders and mean rhetoric.”  Says Rubin “It’s time to grow up, turn off Sean Hannity, get off toxic social media and start learning about the world as it is. (Read a book authored by someone without a talk show, spend time with non-Republicans, take an online course in economics.)”

            All of this is positively breathtaking, particularly coming from someone as partisan and sharp-tongued as Rubin.  For now, it’s not clear that anyone from else from the right buys her prescription.

            And yet . . .

            Rubin’s column is both a brave acknowledgement by a conservative that the Republican party has been tainted by xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-intellectualism as well as a call to abandon these things as foreign to political conservatism.  And she also acknowledges that aligning itself with the rich by continuing to insist on tax cuts that lead to cuts in spending are ultimately not in her party’s interest. Conservatives she says, must stop “imagining that there is a market for pre-New-Deal size government.” 

            Instead, she argues, Republicans should try to develop a “comprehensive approach to poverty and focus on upward mobility.

            All of this is a repudiation of deal with the devil Republicans made in 1964 when it invited southern moral and racial traditionalists into its tent.  In return for supporting its business and neoconservative wings, these new “Christian Soldiers” would get support for their views on race and morality.  But for the need to keep the Christian Soldiers in the coalition, there is no reason that concerns about abortion, gay rights, and immigration naturally go with concerns about economic policy or national national defense.

            What Jennifer Rubin sees in the Trump candidacy is the revolt of the Christian Soldiers.  They’re no longer willing to settle for the lip service establishment Republican politicians have been giving them since they struck this bargain.

            A discerning look back over the last 40-50 years suggests that much of the intractability that makes our politics so toxic flows from the tensions inherent in that coalitional bargain.  There is an argument that Republican concern about social issues such as race, abortion, gay rights, women’s rights and religious rights were attempts by what would otherwise have been a more libertarian Republican party to appease the Christian Soldiers.

            And though keeping taxes low and size of government small were part of the Republican cannon before 1964, it would not be unfair to say that part of what has energized Republican policy on federal spending, particularly on safety net programs, has been a determination to prevent redistributions to the “undeserving poor” (non-whites, as Martin Gilens argues). 

            So what would Republican politics look like were the business and neocon wings of the Republican party to separate from the Christian Soldiers.

            Without the anti-intellectualism that emanates from the Christian Soldiers, it will be much harder for business interests concerned about regulation to obscure their policy preferences under nonsensical appeals to some abstract notion of liberty.  Rubin, for example, suggests that without their “intellectual isolation and self-delusion,” the “extent and the proposed solutions” to climate change “can be rationally discussed.”

            Without the racism and xenophobia that animate the “lies” about immigration, it might be possible for the political parties to come together in order to fix an immigration system that everyone believes is broken. 

            We can also begin to have sensible discussions about how much of a safety net we should have in a dynamic and entrepreneurial economic system that thrives on creative destruction but often leaves some people, through no fault of their own, behind.   Instead of arguing about the low wage jobs that left the U.S. over the last 40 years—and are now leaving China for other low wage destinations—we could find a way to encourage the creation of high wage knowledge-based jobs and help our population train for them.

            Without having to worry about redistribution to the “undeserving poor” we could have a sensible discussion about the fairest way to allocate the tax burden.  And without a Republican party adamantly committed to a flat-out ban on abortion and opposition to LGBT rights, we might even be able to confirm a Supreme Court justice or two.

            It’s time for everyone to recognize that we’ve had the debate about racial and moral issues that the Christian Soldiers thought they could win by allying themselves with the business conservatives and the neocons.  They lost, and now it’s time to move on.   It’s also time for conservative politicians to put their economic and national defense policies, shorn of the trappings of racial and moral traditionalism, into the marketplace of ideas to see if anybody is willing to buy them.

More Lipstick for the Pig

            James Penthokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute thinks that capitalism could use some rebranding.  He’s reacting to the results of the Harvard Institute of Politics Spring 2016 poll of America’s 18-29 year olds in which just 19% of the respondents were willing to identify themselves as “capitalists” and only 42% were willing to say that they supported capitalism.

            For Penthokoukis, that’s better than the scant 16% of respondents who identified as “socialists” and the 33% who said that they supported socialism.

            He finds it odd that despite the skepticism the survey implies about capitalism, many of the respondents nevertheless hold views “similar to those of any Ayn Rand-loving free marketeer.  For example less than a third believe government should play a large role in regulating the economy, reducing income inequality, or stimulating economic growth.”

            There’s nothing odd about the survey results.  What’s odd is why a smart guy like Penthokoukis feels he needs to distort his description of the results and ultimately defend a label that doesn’t have a popularly agreed meaning or connotation. 

            Most people—and particularly young people—simply don’t understand what capitalism and socialism are.  Sixty years of scientific political science and public opinion research tell us that most people do not have coherent political or economic ideologies.  They self identify with political, social or economic labels for reasons that often have little to do with a formal or thorough understanding of what the labels mean.

            What matters are the kinds of policies people support, not the labels they apply to those policies.

            Penthokoukis is absolutely correct about how respondents felt about whether the government should play a “large” role in regulating the economy, reducing income inequality or stimulating economic growth.”  The problem is that he didn’t tell the whole story.

            The poll allowed respondents to choose one of four responses to survey questions about the proper role of government in the economic sphere.  Table 1 gives a more complete report of the survey results.

Table 1

	Regulating the Economy	Regulating Wall Street	Reducing Income Inequality	Delivering  Health Care	Providing Access to Higher Education
Large	27%	30%	30%	32%	35%
Moderate	42%	37%	34%	34%	35%
Minimal	18%	18%	19%	18%	16%
No Role	9%	10%	13%	13%	11%
Decline to answer	4%	4%	5%	4%	4%

            The true “Randian free marketeer” position on all of these items would be “No Role.”  These results show that no more than 14% of the respondents took that position.  In fact, more than 60% of the respondents thought that the government ought to play at least a moderate role in managing each of these economic matters.

            The question about stimulating the economy was one of several “agree or disagree questions about government activities.  I’ve summarized the responses to the ones relevant to economic policy in Table 2.

Table 2

	Agree	Disagree	Neither Agree Nor Disagree	Decline to Answer
Tax cuts are a good way to increase economic growth	35%	23%	38%	4%
Government spending is an effective way to increase economic growth	26%	26%	44%	3%
Basic health insurance is a right	48%	21%	28%	4%
Government should spend more to reduce poverty	45%	20%	31%	3%
Basic necessities such as food and shelter are a right	47%	20%	30%	3%

Less than a third of the respondents agreed that tax cuts or increased spending would increase economic growth.  But, in both cases, the percentage of respondents who took a middle course or declined to answer exceeded the percentages of respondents who chose to take a pro or con position.  And the percentage of respondents who thought that the government should provide health insurance, basic necessities and otherwise increase spending to reduce poverty was at least double the percentage of respondents who thought government should not do these things.

            This is hardly a snapshot of a group solidly devoted to free market principles. So, yeah Jim, a large number of them are feeling the Bern.

            Penthokoukis speculates that the reason many of these survey respondents aren’t positively glowing about capitalism, “the deep magic that has made America the richest, most powerful nation on Earth,” is that it evokes the distastefulness of the “aftermath of the Great Recession and Wall Street bailout.”

            That probably does have something to do with it.  But judging from the responses to the other questions, I’m guessing that the reason the survey respondents were wary of adopting the capitalist label and supporting the capitalist system in general was the fact that capitalism, as we know it, has been subverted and used to exploit the many for the benefit of the few.

            None of my liberal brethren are longing for the gray and dysfunctional Soviet economic system or the disastrous five year plans of China’s Maoists of old.  We all understand that a functional market system is the most efficient engine for growing prosperity that has ever been invented.  And nobody disagrees with the idea that capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty or that even the poor have more creature comforts than they would have had without capitalism. So please stop trotting out those scarecrows.

           The real debate is about the extent to which the community has the right to impose rules upon the marketplace for the greater good.  Nobody has any objection to innovation or entrepreneurialism, nor does anyone begrudge anyone else the right to make a fair profit for creating or doing something that makes the world a better place.

            But we do object to “capitalists” who create large market distortions that lead to huge imbalances enabling the owners of capital to exploit others, become rent collectors, or impose negative externalities on the rest of us.

            There’s no need to put lipstick on the pig that this version of capitalism has become.  What you really need is a more equitable, transparent, and humane form of capitalism.