“What It Says About The Republican Base”: There Is No Liberal Donald Trump Because Liberals Don’t Need A Donald Trump
Talking about Donald Trump can be an exhausting and pointless exercise: no sooner does he say or do one outrageous thing than he follows it up with another (the latest being an appalling and viciously misogynist menstruation-based jab at Megyn Kelly, giving Erick Erickson the excuse he wanted to disinvite Trump from the RedState gathering.)
But Trump isn’t really that interesting for his own sake. Trump’s candidacy is of interest because of what it says about the Republican base and about American conservatism itself. I’ve been hammering lately on the theme that conservatives are in such a cultural defensive crouch that they’re not seeking a policy leader so much as insurgent cultural one.
But the focus on Trump has also helped hide a fundamental lack of seriousness in the entire Republican firmament, a point effectively noted by Paul Krugman:
For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.
For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble that coincided with his time as governor….
The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.
Pundits keep pretending that Donald Trump is a media creation–a charlatan and entertainer who is crashing the otherwise serious political party to generate headlines. But he wouldn’t make those headlines without having an enormously popular appeal to the Republican base, which pundits attribute to general frustration with the political system on both sides of the aisle.
But that’s just not true. If it were true, then the Democratic Party would be just as susceptible to a liberal version of Trump. But it’s not. It’s hard to even imagine what that would look like.
The reality is that mainstream Democratic positions also happen to be broadly popular positions already without the need for demagogic bluster. Left-of-center positions tend to be based on science and a more complex, nuanced understanding of social problems. Even more importantly, liberals in the United States promote solutions that have already been shown to work elsewhere in the world. In terms of party divisions Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders simply present a more rhetorically forceful version of those positions, and where their opinions differ from centrist Democrats (especially on, say, Wall Street), their takes tend to be backed up by history and economics, and to have the support of the majority of Americans.
Once again, it’s important to note that both sides don’t, in fact, do it when it comes to political extremism. American conservatism has gone far, far off the rails. Donald Trump’s successful candidacy is only the latest–but far from the only–proof of that.
Liberals don’t have a Donald Trump because we don’t need one. Even liberal populism is a doggedly rational, evidence-based, internally consistent and broadly popular affair. Populist conservatism is anything but.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 8, 2015
“Progressive Frenemies”: It’s Always Wise To Seek The Truth In Our Opponents’ Error, And The Error In Our Own Truth
You probably think there is a big struggle over the Democratic Party’s soul and the meaning of progressivism. After all, that’s what the media talk about incessantly, often with a lot of help from the parties involved in the rumble.
Earlier this month, Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware, a proud Democratic centrist, published a thoughtful essay on The Atlantic‘s website under a very polemical headline: “Americans Need Jobs, Not Populism.” Take that, Elizabeth Warren.
The Massachusetts Democrat is clearly unpersuaded. In a powerful speech to the California Democratic Convention last weekend, she used variations on the word “fight” 21 times. “This country isn’t working for working people,” Warren declared. “It’s working only for those at the top.” If populism is a problem, Warren has not received the message.
There’s other grist for this narrative. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel was re-elected earlier this year only after a spirited battle during which his opponent, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, labeled him “Mayor 1 Percent.” And every other day, it seems, there’s a report about Hillary Clinton being under pressure either to “move left” or to resist doing so.
A storyline doesn’t develop such a deep hold without some basis in fact. There are real dividing lines within the center-left around issues such as the right way to reform public education and the best approach to public employee pension costs. There’s also trade, a matter that has so vexed Democrats that for many years, its presidential candidates have tried to hedge the issue — usually during the primaries but sometimes until after the election.
But the us-vs.-them frame on this debate has two major problems. The first affects the center-left itself, something shrewd Democrats have started to notice. A post on The Democratic Strategist website in March argued that “slinging essentially vacuous stereotypes like ‘corporate centrists’ and ‘left-wing populists’” inevitably leads to “a vicious downward spiral of mutual recrimination.”
The larger difficulty is that the epithets exaggerate the differences between two sides that in fact need each other. There is political energy in the populist critique because rising inequality and concentrated wealth really are an outrage. But the centrists offer remedies that, in most cases, the populists accept.
Both Markell and Warren, for example, have emphasized the importance of business growth and job creation. In her California speech, Warren described the need for policies that foster prosperity while “bending it toward more opportunity for everyone.” Her priorities were not far from those Markell outlined in his article.
There was nothing exotically left wing about Warren’s call for “education for our kids, roads and bridges and power so businesses could grow and get their goods to market and build good jobs here in America, research so we would have a giant pipeline of ideas that would permit our children and grandchildren to build a world we could only dream about.”
For his part, Markell freely acknowledged that “the altered economic terrain is preventing new wealth from being broadly shared,” that “income inequality is growing worse,” and that “a huge number of Americans are economically insecure.” Growth is “necessary, but not sufficient,” and he made the case for “a decent minimum wage,” “affordable and quality health care,” and support for a dignified retirement.
Sen. Warren and Gov. Markell, would you kindly give each other a call?
As for Emanuel, his inaugural address on Monday was devoted to the single subject of “preventing another lost generation of our city’s youth.” It was a powerful and unstinting look at how easy it is for the rest of society to turn its back on those for whom “their school is the street and their teachers are the gangs.”
“The truth is that years of silence and inaction have walled off a portion of our city,” he said. “It is time to stop turning our heads and turning the channel. … We cannot abandon our most vulnerable children to the gang and the gun.” If “centrists” and “populists” can’t come together on this cause, they might as well pack it in.
Yes, the populists and centrists need to fight out real differences, and that’s what we will see in the coming weeks on trade. But they would do well to remember the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s observation that it’s always wise to seek the truth in our opponents’ error, and the error in our own truth.
And as it happens, to win the presidency, one of Hillary Clinton’s central tasks will be to move both sides in the progressive argument to embrace Niebuhr’s counsel.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 21, 2015
“Rat Bait”: Beware Of Republicans Playing Games!
Because you may have missed this story over the weekend, here’s some important news for lefty critics of Hillary Clinton, via the New York Times‘ Parker and Corasaniti. It focuses on the biggest GOP oppo research operation of them all, and ever, America Rising:
For months now, America Rising has sent out a steady stream of posts on social media attacking Mrs. Clinton, some of them specifically designed to be spotted, and shared, by liberals. The posts highlight critiques of her connections to Wall Street and the Clinton Foundation and feature images of Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, interspersed with cartoon characters and pictures of Kevin Spacey, who plays the villain in “House of Cards.” And as they are read and shared, an anti-Clinton narrative is reinforced.
America Rising is not the only conservative group attacking Mrs. Clinton from the left. Another is American Crossroads, the group started by Karl Rove, which has been sending out its own digital content, including one ad using a speech Ms. Warren gave at the New Populism Conference in Washington last May.
“Powerful interests have tried to capture Washington and rig the system in their favor,” intones Ms. Warren, as images of Mrs. Clinton with foreign leaders flash by.
The new-style digital campaign captures some basic facts about 21st-century communication: Information travels at warp speed on social media, it is sometimes difficult to know where that information comes from, and most people like to read things with which they agree. The result, said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco who specializes in political advertising, is something more sophisticated.
“Politics is usually basic math,” he said, “and this is a little bit of calculus, thinking a couple steps ahead.”
You know, when it came out during Watergate that Richard Nixon’s campaign staffers were pulling this kind of crap in the 1972 Democratic primaries (mostly aimed at poor doomed Ed Muskie), it was a really big scandalous deal. Now it’s smart politics, or “calculus.” Progressives should beware playing their game.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 18, 2014
“The Left Is So Wrong On Trade”: Playing A 78 rpm Record In The Age Of Digital Downloads
The left’s success in denying President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership is ugly to behold. The case put forth by a showboating Sen. Elizabeth Warren — that Obama cannot be trusted to make a deal in the interests of American workers — is almost worse than wrong. It is irrelevant.
The Senate Democrats who turned on Obama are playing a 78 rpm record in the age of digital downloads.
Did you hear their ally, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka, the day after the Senate vote? He denounced TPP for being “patterned after CAFTA and NAFTA.” That’s not so, but never mind.
There’s this skip on the vinyl record that the North American Free Trade Agreement destroyed American manufacturing. To see how wrong that is, simply walk through any Walmart or Target and look for all those “made in Mexico” labels. You won’t find many. But you’ll see “made in China” everywhere.
Many of the jobs that did go to Mexico would have otherwise left for low-wage Asian countries. Even Mexico lost manufacturing work to China.
And what can you say about the close-to-insane obsession with CAFTA? The partners in the 2005 Central American Free Trade Agreement — five mostly impoverished Central American countries plus the Dominican Republic — had a combined economy equal to that of New Haven, Connecticut.
(By the way, less than 10 percent of the AFL-CIO’s membership is now in manufacturing.)
It’s undeniable that American manufacturing workers have suffered terrible job losses. We could never compete with pennies-an-hour wages. Those low-skilled jobs are not coming back. But we have other things to sell in the global marketplace.
In Washington state, for example, exports of everything from apples to airplanes have soared 40 percent over four years, to total nearly $91 billion in 2014, according to The Seattle Times. About 2 in 5 jobs there are now tied to trade.
Small wonder that Sen. Ron Wyden, a liberal Democrat from neighboring Oregon, has strongly supported fast-track authority.
Some liberals oddly complain that American efforts to strengthen intellectual property laws in trade deals protect the profits of U.S. entertainment and tech companies. What’s wrong with that? Should the fruits of America’s creativity (that’s labor, too) be open to plundering and piracy?
One of TPP’s main goals is to help the higher-wage partners compete with China. (The 12 countries taking part include the likes of Japan, Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and New Zealand.) In any case, Congress would get to vote the finished product up or down, so it isn’t as if the public wouldn’t get a say.
But then we have Warren stating with a straight face that handing negotiating authority to Obama would “give Republicans the very tool they need to dismantle Dodd-Frank.”
Huh? Obama swatted down the remark as wild, hypothetical speculation, noting he engaged in a “massive” fight with Wall Street to get the reforms passed. “And then I sign a provision that would unravel it?” he told political writer Matt Bai.
“This is not a partisan issue,” Warren insisted. Yes, in a twisted way, the hard left’s fixation over big corporations has joined the right’s determination to undermine Obama at every pass.
Trade agreements have a thousand moving parts. The U.S. can’t negotiate with the other countries if various domestic interests are pouncing on the details. That’s why every president has been given fast-track authority over the past 80 years or so.
Except Obama.
It sure is hard to be an intelligent leader in this country.
By: Froma Harrop, Loeb Award Finalist for Economic Commentary in 2004 and 2011, Scripps Howard Award Finalist for Commentary in 2010; The National Memo, May 14, 2015
“Not Exactly The Same As Others”: Procedural Dissolution Resolution Included For The First Time In TPA
Yesterday the Senate failed to pass a procedural vote on granting the president Trade Promotion Authority (TPA or so-called “fast-track“). As Ed Kilgore noted, this is probably not the end of the line for TPA. It will likely be brought up again very soon.
As I read commentary about the debate on this legislation, I often see an assumption that this TPA bill is exactly the same as others that have been approved in the past. Statements like this one from Senator Elizabeth Warren are regularly repeated.
The president has committed only to letting the public see this deal after Congress votes to authorize fast track. At that point it will be impossible for us to amend the agreement or to block any part of it without tanking the whole TPP. The TPP is basically done.
Here’s Steve Benen saying basically the same thing.
At issue is something called “trade-promotion authority” – also known as “fast-track” – which is intended to streamline the process. As we discussed a month ago, the proposal would empower President Obama to move forward on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiating its specific provisions. If successful, the White House would then present a finished TPP to Congress for an up-or-down vote – with no amendments.
Lawmakers would effectively have a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity.
And finally, here’s Caitlin MacNeal:
“Fast track” authority would limit Congress to a simple up or down vote on the TPP without amending the deal.
That’s pretty much how TPA is being described across the board. Those statements would be accurate if we were talking about trade promotion authority that has been approved in the past. But for the first time, the current TPA bill (you can download it from that link) contains the ability for Congress to pass a “procedural disapproval resolution” after a particular trade agreement is presented to them. Such a resolution can be presented for several reasons, but the most likely would be that it fails to adhere to the “trade negotiation objectives” outlined in the bill (IOW, a pretty open door). If such a resolution were to pass, it negates trade promotion authority and consideration of the agreement would then be open to amendments and a filibuster.
All of this is available to Congress AFTER a negotiated trade deal has been finalized and made available to the public. In other words, lawmakers would have three options:
1. Approve the trade deal
2. Reject the trade deal
3. Pass a procedural disapproval resolution and open up debate on amendments
Such a resolution would require 60 votes in the Senate to pass. But given that the opponents of TPA required 60 votes to approve it, the fact that dissolving it also requires 60 votes makes sense.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 13, 2015
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