Republicans

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The Republican Dilemma

If my mailbox is anything to go by Donald Trump is about to cause the Republican party a nervous breakdown. Get the couch ready.

Scarcely a day goes by without someone on the political punditry writing at length about the intricacies of a brokered convention. I am not going to regale you with the arcane nature of the procedures and rulebooks of the Republican party. I don’t care enough to steep myself in them. One thing I will comment on, however, is the democratic mess the Grand Old Party finds itself in.

It is now clear that of all the current and still standing candidates in the GOP primary process, only Trump has the possibility of acquiring sufficient delegates to win the party’s nomination. If he does reasonably well in tomorrow’s primaries, he will only have to win between 40% and 45% the rest of the way to wrap things up. No one else is anywhere near close enough to win outright. So anyone hoping that the Republican nominee isn’t Trump has to focus on stopping him from achieving an outright win, and then throw their hopes onto the uncertainties of a brokered convention.

A rising theme amidst the panic within the GOP is that the party elders and betters have to stop Trump ‘for the good of the country’.

Think about this for a moment. There are a few problems with it. Here are two:

First: let’s all be honest, stopping Trump isn’t for the good of the country. It is for the good of the party. A Trump nomination would split the GOP apart. Whatever is left of its old centrist tendency would be sorely pressed to support someone as extreme in his rhetoric as Trump. The more dominant hard core conservative wing loathes Trump’s soft and middling opinions of social policies. And the plutocratic wing just can’t stand Trump’s anti-free trade attitude nor his apparent liking for higher taxes on the rich. No, a Trump candidacy isn’t just bad for the country, it’s a lot worse for the Republicans themselves.

Second: and ought not the voice of the party’s voters have some say in the election of the party’s candidate? To prevent that voice from its democratic expression in the name of some ‘higher’ principle, as if the voters are clueless as to what that principle might be, smacks of old world smoke filled autocratic rule. It’s hardly the kind of smack down of democracy that sends a good message about the understanding the GOP leaders have of the wishes of their own people. It calls into question the entire primary process: why have one if you ignore a result you don’t like?

My own view is that the GOP leadership ought to allow Trump to win the nomination, if that’s what the voters want, and then campaign against him in the election in November. That way they validate their democratic worthiness by acceding to the voter’s wishes, and then they protect the interest of the country by preventing someone they think unfit for office from winning election.

Of course they won’t do this. They’ll opt to protect the party above all else.

I have a view on that too: what kind of party is it that allows a demagogue to get this far in its own internal selection process? It seems to me that the GOP is so saddled with rotten policy objectives, stuck with poor alternative candidates, and a tangled contradictory set of factions, that it has ceased to exist as a coherent party at all. The GOP is already lost. A whole swathe of its own supporters apparently don’t like it. So what’s to save?

Except face?

 

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Follow up on Clinton

Let me be brief.

One of the fascinations in the current presidential election campaign is that both parties are being challenged by relative outsiders. Let’s set aside just how ‘outside’ some of the challengers are, and focus on why this challenge is getting the traction it is.

From my point of view it is quite obvious: neither party is delivering, or has delivered, what its base or core voters want.

One the one side Republicans are being challenged because they have failed to bring about the downfall of large scale government. This is a serious flaw for their more committed right wing supporters. Not only this, but those supporters must surely feel badly betrayed since none of their efforts, going all the way back to Reagan, have accomplished the goal of slashing government programs. Worse: those programs have not only survived, but in some cases have been augmented by Republicans – e.g. Bush and the expansion of Medicare, not to mention the failure to overturn Obamacare.

I don’t want to dwell on the Republicans because they have had vastly more success than the Democrats have since 1980, but I can easily understand why some of their more vocal supporters are at their wits end. We don’t have a ‘small government’, and are highly unlikely to have one any time soon: modern complex and democratic economies need a mix of public and private action, not just one or the other.

Now this Republican failure is not because of the Democrats. Why? Because, with the exception of Obamacare, the Democrats have stuck with their own variant of neoliberalism since the 1980’s. Look at the legislative record rather than at the rhetoric. After the Reagan revolution the Democrats have had two successful eight year presidential administrations during which they could have pushed back against the neoliberal intellectual edifice and prevented the further rightward drift we ended up experiencing.

They didn’t try. Indeed Clinton simply tracked a little to the left of wherever the Republicans were and advocated policies that are, in retrospect at least, more moderate Republican than moderate Democrat. Free trade treaties, financial deregulation, absence of support for unions, and welfare reform could all be characterized as right of center. They certainly are not part of an effort to reverse Reaganism.

The Obama years promised more, and the adoption of Obamacare is a small step towards a better health care future, but the bitterness of the partisan opposition since 2009 engulfed that promise and left the country tired and angry at the lack of progress. At least when viewed from a left of center perspective.

So both parties have failed their core constituencies. No wonder this election is so contorted.

Which brings me to Hillary herself.

Her supporters, which include pretty much the entire Democratic party establishment, are in a bit of a huff because she polled so badly amongst younger voters. Her performance was pitiful. She has been completely unable to create a message that resonates with younger people.

One story I have heard her supporters tell is that this is because she has been at work in the ‘progressive’ cause so long that all these younger folk weren’t around to see it. Her efforts on health care and family issues are cited as being sufficient to earn her progressive credibility, but the young are simply too young to know about it.

Or not.

And this is what the establishment is missing.

The United States lags a long way behind the kind of progress that most western nations have made on exactly those issues that Hillary has supposedly been beavering away at all these years. So, we can surmise, her efforts have either been inept or insufficient. Why, then, would younger people give her their support? She ranks as failure not as a success. Forty years of incrementalism is hardly a rallying cry for the future. But that’s what Hillary offers. It’s what her friends and supporters offer.

And I find that decidedly uninspiring.

In many ways Hillary represents her age cohort perfectly: technocratically gifted; ambitious but in a bureaucratic way; policy wonkish and thriving on detail; willing to compromise endlessly to achieve minor victories; willing also to drift wherever the tide goes; and, crucially, lacking a grand vision to provide coherence to her work. She is the perfect insider. The perfect technician. The perfect empathetic articulation of small scale effort.

What she is not is a leader.

She has no post-Reagan vision. She cannot envisage America as a social democracy. So she cannot lead us there. Yet social democracy is the antidote to Reagan. It is the cure to neoliberalism. Without this vision Hillary is trapped and can offer only pragmatic resistance within a framework she accepts as irreplaceable, but which offends her sense of right. She is conflicted and worn down by her inability to rally behind post-Reagan notions of society, so she, instead, plods along tinkering with Reaganism rather than replacing it.

And younger people want to replace it.

She and her supporters in the Democratic party establishment ought not patronize the young. Embittered by the decades of infighting and social schism that is the experience of her generation, she and they ought listen to the young.

For there is another way.

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Santa Claus, Taxes and Deficits

“Deficits don’t matter”, to borrow a phrase made famous by Dick Cheney. Hardly a left of center guy, Cheney was defending the sea of red ink Ronald Reagan created in the early 1980’s. Reagan, please recall, was the first president to plunge the US into deficits that were not related to war, economic downturn, or macro-economic management. They were simply an outcome of an ideologically driven set of policies. So Cheney was right: they didn’t matter.

According to the modern Republican party they especially don’t matter when the slashing of Federal revenues is done at the behest of business. That’s because the tax cuts involved are “pro-growth”, and, so we are assured, the increased growth presumed to be stimulated by the cuts will more than offset the red ink.

That’s never happened, but such is the allure of the magic of markets that otherwise sensible people can fall for fairy tales. The University of Chicago is thick with such folk.

Anyway, for those who aren’t obsessing over the rise of Trump and the imminent invasion of America by ISIS – both of which dominate our febrile media – I would like to draw your attention to Washington where a big government funding bill is in the process of wending its hapless way through Congress.

The good part of the bill is that it provides funding to keep government running. So we have no fiscal cliffhanger this year. Sorry, I know they are so much fun, but with the media’s attention elsewhere there’s no point in having a cliffhanger this year.

The bad part of the bill is pretty much everything else.

It includes an astonishing array of tax breaks for business, and its net effect is to add about $680 billion to the national deficit.

Now I think it’s slightly hypocritical for any of us to get too upset over this: we were all berating the Republicans for being stupid about the deficit back in the dark days of 2009/2010. That was when the deficit was rising quickly and looked to be out of control. It wasn’t, it was simply a function of the crisis we created by being so attached to rotten economics for the past few decades.

Still, it is rather quaint to watch was the Republicans, even the most trenchant “austerians” amongst them, rattle off dozens of well worn reasons why adding $680 billion to the deficit is no big deal.

Here’s one such comment, by Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas):

“We’re making permanent some very key pro-growth provisions that are going to grow the economy, these are tax provisions we’re extending one year at a time; making the pro-growth provisions permanent doesn’t add any level of funding to our deficit. It’s simply honest budgeting going forward.”

Honest budgeting. I like that.

Brady is a math whizz too, he also said that the cost of these tax cuts over a decade is about the same as one year multiplied by ten. Presumably the cost of interest and so on isn’t a factor in Texas.

Then there’s the old line about making it up in volume, or, in this case, getting the lost revenue back from all that magical growth down the line, Bill Flores, also from Texas tells us not to worry about figuring out the deficit impact – known as “scoring” in Washington speak:

“We don’t score them because economic growth helps them. … We’ll get that back multiple times over in economic growth,”

Just like we always have. Never.

Listen, I am in a radical mood for a change. This entire charade is simply a giveaway to business. Congress is pretty much run by business through its lobbying and election donations. So I have a plan. Call it my “holiday gift plan”.

Get rid of corporate taxes.

Yes. You read that correctly. Just do away with corporate tax.

No, I am not nuts. There are strings attached to this.

Getting rid of corporate taxes will reduce the stranglehold business has on our politics in terms of the stupidity and pretense that surrounds the budget process. But they would still lobby like crazy over social legislation: things like work and labor regulation, family leave, product safety, and so on. All the things businesses have tried to tell us make it hard to do business.

Well: the same bill that eliminates corporate tax will include provisions restoring all the rules and regulations done away with over the last forty years. It will also include rules making it easy for workers to set up unions and a return to collective bargaining for wages and work conditions. Let’s toss in family leave as well. Oh, and obligatory paid annual vacation time. Businesses will be able to afford all sorts of pro-worker goodies now that they can fire their tax departments and not pay all those fees to lawyers looking for loopholes. Not to mention the extra cash from the taxes they no longer pay.

I am sure we can come up with a good long list of things that business has taken away from us in the name of being “pro-growth”. Let’s be imaginative.

And, hey, It’s Christmas isn’t it? Well holidays are upon us. So we, aren’t done yet.

Let’s also throw in the abolition of the capital gains tax.

Gulp.

No: listen to me. We will simply tax capital gains as income. At income tax rates. Income is income, whatever its source. The privilege given to capital owners needs to go. And let’s get the estate tax rate back to a level where it inhibits the growth of a rentier class. That’s why we have an estate tax after all. Well I think so.

And why not reform the income tax for all of us? Get rid of all deductions, lower all the rates at the bottom, add a couple of new higher rates at the top – those top income earners have all the income anyway – and, just for good measure, replace all our hodgepodge of welfare and poverty programs by a simple annual check from the government for anyone earning under some ratio of the median wage.

We can pay for that by adding a little rule that extracts a penalty – not a tax – from any business paying its CEO and top executives a wage/pay package of more than 40 times the lowest wage the business pays. We could be generous to our poor CEO’s and make the ratio set to the average wage, but that’s a detail we can negotiate later.

None of this is controversial at all. Really. At least in a country that thinks Donald Trump is qualified to be president. So we ought to add a lot more.

After all it’s “pro-growth”. And that’s all that counts. At least that’s what everyone seems to think.

 

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Paris and Refugees

One more quick word:

How wrong is it to reduce or stop entirely our willingness to accommodate refugees fleeing from the middle east? The knee jerk reaction on the right has been to call for a total halt to that willingness. What a horrible and un-American reaction.

Since 9/11 America has steadily exhibited a cowardice and retreat from its values that defies its swagger on the international stage. It’s reaction to being attacked was to turn world bully and to corrupt those values by diluting the freedom of its own citizens and by engaging in arbitrary violence around the world.

Now this defeatist petulance has been given new life by the Paris attacks. We are being urged, once more, to close the borders. This time even to those who deserve and need out help.

Why?

Fear. We cower in fear. We shake with national cowardice.

Instead of standing up and proclaiming the worth of our values, and instead of defying terror with our relentless attachment to freedom, we surrender it quickly and hide behind the false wall of security. While I understand the need to be alert and to protect ourselves – obviously – this ought be balanced with a pride in what we are supposed to stand for.

And what is this?

Our belief in modernity which brings with it a bundle of values not found in the homelands of the terrorists. Tolerance. Openness. Freedom. Equality of citizenship. And all the other attributes that add to to what we call democracy.

This is crucial.

You will notice we are not defending or standing up for our economic system. We are standing up for something far more important: democracy.

But we aren’t are we? We are quivering behind the chair or in the basement. We are stocking up with guns so we can shoot at ghosts. We are afraid instead of defiant. We are supine instead of erect. We are terrorized instead of strong.

And this defeatism is reflected in the Republican calls to close the borders. This is in stark contrast the usual braggadocio and bombast we get from the right who are usually so trigger happy and willing to bomb our ‘enemies’ that they scarcely ever stop to think about the unintended consequences.

Like encouraging terrorists.

 

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One Word: Guns!

This is off topic, but really?

One of the defining characteristics of the modern Republican party is its gun worship.  Any time we have a major crime involving shooting – which is far too frequent for an erstwhile civilized country – somewhere one of the Republican candidates for the presidency will pop up and argue how it would all have been so different had the kids in the classroom or their teachers, or the bystanders elsewhere, been armed to the teeth.

Because that makes so much sense.

I have no idea where this obsession with violence came from. I imagine it must be American history.

It makes no sense at all. None.

It takes about two seconds, maybe less, to realize just how stupid the idea is. Imagine the scene in the cinema where a recent shooting took place. The crazy gunman enters intent on mayhem. Do we seriously think that someone that deranged and irrational will suddenly stop at the door and turn away because of the possibility that someone inside has a gun on them?

Of course not.

The more probable outcome would be even more chaos and greater loss of life.

Why?

Because the kind of person who walks around with a gun is also someone who is inclined to use it. They are predisposed to violence. Why else own a gun? Even if they proclaim it is in self-defense, their predilection is clear: violence has to be met with counter-violence. What other calculus is there for owning a gun? After all, guns have one purpose: to do harm. So even by owning one you have declared your willingness to do harm. Any other reason you may come up with quickly resolves to this same answer: gun owners have declared their willingness to do harm.

So, what these crazy people who advocate greater gun ownership are really arguing is that they would encourage shoot-out justice. Like the wild west of yore.

This has always been true, but why are we afflicted with gun disease in particular presently?

Paranoia. Fear. Racism. And more fear.

Owning a gun to defend your home – think about the fear embedded in that statement – has been shown to be ineffective. It doesn’t stop crime and instead increases mightily your chance of doing self-harm via an accident.

Owning a gun in public is even more absurd. Think about it. Are you going to engage in a gunfight at the local mall? The local bar? In the classroom full of kids? No, you’re not. And if you are, then you are a potential criminal. What happens if you shoot the ‘wrong’ person? How do you know who to shoot? Would you be able to react properly? No. Of course you wouldn’t. As we know from the spate of police shootings here even the people we train to know what to do often screw it up. So why would an average gun-nut be better? They wouldn’t.

Then there’s the American urge to export its gun mania. This is even more parochial and stupid. Most countries have grown up beyond gun obsession.

Take Donald Trump. Please. His answer to the horrible terrorism in Paris is simply to say that if the people at the concert had guns it wouldn’t have happened.

As if terrorists would be put off by the thought of concert-goers armed to the teeth. These terrorists we looking for death and to cause the greatest harm along the way. What better way for them to go down but by taking a whole lot of gun toting concert-goers in a massive bloodbath of a shoot-out?

The whole idea is so ridiculous that it scarcely requires comment.

Except in America it has strong political traction on the right. Which is testimony to the depth to which American culture can descend sometimes. America has an exceptional attachment to violence. Which when stoked by demagogues and fear mongering can erupt into a very ugly and dangerous social cancer.

Exceptional indeed. An embarrassment certainly. And so few politicians want to stand up against it. So, instead, we have one word to say in times of crisis: guns!

 

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