“GOP Is More Ayn Rand Than Strom Thurmond”: Donald Trump Is Bad, But Karl Rove And David Brooks Are Worse
Few serious observers of American politics would dare to suggest that Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican frontrunner is having a salubrious effect on America. The violent racial tensions at his rallies are enough to make many of us fear for the health and safety of our fellow citizens, and the prospect of his potential victory in a general election make us fear for the future of our democracy. His policy proposals range from vague (tax cuts that pay for themselves!) to impossible (make Mexico pay for a border wall!) to monstrous (waterboarding is for girly men too weak for real torture!)
Even despite all this, however, we can still thank Donald Trump and his supporters for doing the country a service. There is little Trump or his backers could do that would outweigh the blessing they are providing by disempowering and humiliating the traditional Republican establishment. No matter how uncomfortable Trump’s crowds may make us, they pale in comparison to the disgust we should feel at the politics of Karl Rove and David Brooks.
It’s not just that Rove, Ailes, Krauthammer, Podheretz and even ultimately Buckley himself laid the economic, social and media foundations for Trump’s racist nationalism. It’s that unless carried to its farthest extreme, racist nationalism isn’t as damaging as corporatist objectivism.
Bigotry is ugly and it can be deadly. But it is also ultimately a sin of ignorance. Prejudice has existed in many forms, it will continue to exist in the future, and there are no doubt many assumptions we take for granted as normal today that will be seen as forms of prejudice by future generations. As the human race becomes more educated, as cultures collide and the world shrinks, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain institutionalized discrimination. Progress on this front is slow, but it is also mostly constant. When we say that the moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward justice, we generally understand this to mean in terms of social justice rather than economic justice.
But while modern conservatism depends politically on the prejudices of large swaths of the public, its controlling donors and legislators enforce an agenda of ruthless objectivist philosophy. When one looks at the laws it actually passes, the Republican Party is in truth far more Ayn Rand than Strom Thurmond. Its prejudiced public policies are less for their own sake than in the service of ensuring that the super-rich take an even greater share of the wealth. Its policies toward the poor are less a function of institutional racism than of an ideological sickness that assumes the poor simply lack adequate threats of desperation and starvation to work harder to survive. It is a form of economic royalism and just world fallacy that explains the injustices of the world by asserting that they are not injustices at all, but rather that the strong dominate the weak by virtue and right.
Unlike simple prejudice, that worldview isn’t a sin of ignorance. It’s a sin of moral corruption. Given the choice between Strom Thurmond and Ayn Rand, Rand is by far the greater evil. By extension, Donald Trump is a lesser evil than Karl Rove and the kinder, gentler faces of corporate conservatism like David Brooks.
The supposedly respectable conservatives of the National Review and the Washington Post editorial pages see themselves as of a nobler and purer disposition than those they dismiss as the mouth-breathing yokels who back Trump. But it’s actually the reverse. Trump’s supporters are more interested in the advancement of their own tribe than in the promotion of an ideology of pure greed. Neither are laudable, but the former is at least morally understandable within the context of fearful ignorance. The latter is a deep seated character flaw. It’s no surprise that in more morally advanced social democracies, the conservative parties tend to be more nationalist than overtly objectivist.
In the end, the victory of the nationalists over the corporatists in the GOP will likely be beneficial to our character as a nation.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 13, 2016
“Now That It’s 2016, New Heights Of Hypocrisy”: GOP Cynicism On The Supreme Court Reaches A New Low
A spokesman for Mitch McConnell said that the Senate should confirm judicial appointees through at least the summer. The cutoff for confirming judges in an election year, known as the ‘Thurmond Rule,’ “doesn’t need to be June, especially because we’re so far behind on the legislative calendar,” he said.
Similarly, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said, “Let me say this about the Thurmond Rule. It is a myth. It does not exist. There is no reason for stopping the confirmation of judicial nominees in the second half of a year in which there is a Presidential election.”
Even a Bush spokesperson said that the “only thing clear about the so-called ‘Thurmond Rule’ is that there is no such defined rule.”
Of course, all that was in 2008, when George W. Bush was the lame-duck president and Democrats controlled the Senate.
Now that it’s 2016, and the tables are turned, McConnell has said he’d be shocked, shocked if President Obama nominated a Supreme Court justice as late as February of his final year in office.
In fact, while there’s hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle, a review of recent history reveals more of it on the Republican side.
Let’s begin at the beginning. For 166 years, Supreme Court confirmations used to be a matter of course, with rare exceptions. In the 19th century, they usually took only a few days. The current process of Judiciary committee hearings began only in 1955, in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education, with segregationists and other conservatives outraged at the “activist” Warren Court.
The custom of not confirming judges in a presidential election year began with the avowed segregationist Strom Thurmond, who opposed LBJ’s appointment of Abe Fortas as Chief Justice back in 1968. (Notice, by the way, the “Thurmond Rule” wasn’t even about filling a vacancy – it was about moving Fortas from Associate to Chief Justice.)
Prior to that time, Supreme Court nominations in election years were par for the course. Justice Frank Murphy was nominated in 1940, Cardozo in 1932, Clarke and Brandeis in 1916, and Pitney in 1912.
But there were many reasons for conservatives to oppose Fortas. As an associate justice, he had maintained an unusually close relationship with LBJ (allegedly, Fortas helped write one of LBJ’s State of the Union speeches). There was a minor scandal involving speaking fees. There was Fortas’s religion – it was one thing to have a “Jewish seat” on the Supreme Court, but quite another to have a Jew as Chief.
But mostly, it was ideology. Fortas was a full-fledged member of the Warren Court, extending due process rights to minors, and writing the opinion that effectively banned creationism from public schools.
The tactic worked. The Fortas appointment was withdrawn, and the position of chief justice has been held by a conservative for the last 46 years (Burger, Rehnquist, Roberts).
Since then, the “Thurmond Rule” has been understood as holding that lifetime appointments of all types should not be made in the final six months of a president’s term in office.
In practice, however, the “Thurmond Rule” could best be described as the “Sore Loser’s Rule,” since it is wielded by whichever party doesn’t hold the White House at the moment. In July, 2004, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said there was no such thing. And Republican Senator John Cornyn threatened in 2008 that if Democrats invoked the Thurmond Rule, Republicans would go nuclear: “We could require 60 votes on every single motion, bill and procedural move before the Senate,” he said at the time.
Now, it’s the Republicans’ turn to invoke the rule, and Democrats’ turn to be outraged.
But some hypocrisy is more equal than others.
First, the Thurmond Rule has never been extended back this far. In 2008, Democrats didn’t invoke it until the late summer; Senator Dianne Feinstein said it kicks in after the first party convention. It’s February now, and even the longest Supreme Court confirmation in history – that of Justice Brandeis, in 1916 – took 125 days. (Brandeis was called a “radical” and bitterly opposed by conservatives, with antisemitism even more overt than Fortas later faced.) So this would be an unprecedented expansion of the “Rule.”
Second, the ‘Rule’ has never been applied to Supreme Court vacancies. On the contrary, when President Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy to the court, he was confirmed 97-0 on February 3, 1988, with Senator McConnell voting in favor.
Now, in fairness, Kennedy was nominated in November, 1987, after the Bork-Ginsburg controversies had left the court with eight justices for five months – seven months counting Kennedy’s confirmation. It was arguably a special case. Moreover, Kennedy was a consensus nominee who has emerged as the swing vote over the last decade precisely because he votes equally with conservatives (as in Citizens United) and liberals (as in the same-sex marriage cases).
But if no justice were confirmed now, the vacancy would be even longer: twelve months at least.
Third, the statistics cut sharply against Republicans.
According to a detailed study by the Brookings Institute, the Senate has already slowed down the pace of judicial confirmations to record levels. In the case of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, confirmations didn’t slow down until the second half of the presidents’ eighth year in office. In their seventh years, the Senate confirmed 23, 17, and 29 judges, respectively. In Obama’s seventh year? 10.
In other words, the two-term Republican presidents fared almost twice as well as the two-term Democrat presidents, with Obama faring the worst by far.
Moreover, the “Thurmond Rule” has rarely been applied with the orthodoxy Republicans now are claiming. An exhaustive 2008 report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service unearthed a goldmine of historical information that belies the current majority’s claims:
In 1980, the Republican-led Senate confirmed 10 out of 13 judges nominated by President Carter in September, with Senator Thurmond himself coming under fire for trying to block some of them.
In October, 1988, the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary committee led by Joe Biden confirmed 11 out of 22 of Ronald Reagan’s judicial appointees. In October, 1992, the same committee confirmed 11 of George H.W. Bush’s.
In 2000, the Republican-led Senate confirmed 31 of President Clinton’s 56 nominations. And the 2004 Senate (narrow Republican majority, Republican president) confirmed a whopping 80% of nominees—despite claims that the Democrat minority was obstructing them.
In 2008, a Brookings Institute review found that George W. Bush’s confirmation rate was 58% for circuit court nominations, 43% for district courts—in other words, roughly the same.
In short, until this one, an opposing-party Senate has never observed the Thurmond Rule. Not in 1980, not in 1988, not in 1992, not in 2000. There are typically slowdowns in confirmations, but never a standstill. And the rule has never been invoked before the summer, let alone before the cherry blossoms bloom. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we’re in new territory this year, and at new heights of hypocrisy.
By: Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast, February 16, 2016
“Let’s Not Ever Do That Again”: SC Gov. Nikki Haley; The U.S. Has ‘Never’ Passed Laws Based On Race And Religion — Um…
Gov. Nikki Haley’s (R-SC) decision to speak out against Donald Trump and other anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim forces in the Republican Party is certainly laudable — but her awareness of American history needs a little work.
The Hill reports:
She said Wednesday that Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to the country is what compelled her to speak out.
“You know, the one thing that got me I think was when he started saying ban all Muslims,” she said.
“We’ve never in the history of this country passed any laws or done anything based on race or religion,” she added. “Let’s not start that now.”
Of course, the state of South Carolina is itself a grand exhibit of America’s history of racially-based laws. It was the state where the Civil War began, as the first state to secede in the South’s effort to preserve and expand the institution of slavery, and it was where the first shots of the war were fired at Fort Sumter.
During the Jim Crow era, the state was also home to Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948, a political mobilization for segregation that rallied against the emerging post-World War II civil rights movement.
To be sure, both South Carolina and the United States as a whole have made progress, climbing upward from these tainted beginnings to build a great country. But it sure does sound odd to hear a political leader say that we’ve “never in the history of this country” passed such odious laws — and, “Let’s not start that now.”
A better thing to say would’ve been: “Let’s not ever do that again.” That sort of myth-busting — against the idea of America as not just a great country, but a perfect one — would, in fact, be the right way to avoid doing it again.
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“Openly Expressing Prejudice”: Carson’s Bias Against Muslims Breaks Unwritten Rule Of Using Veiled Language
When Republican Ben Carson declared Muslims unfit to be president, he crossed a line that historians say no major White House hopeful has breached since the 1940s — openly expressing prejudice.
Carson is not the first to appeal to voter bias, but he broke with a timeworn tradition of using coded language to avert political backlash.
“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” Carson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sept. 20. “I absolutely would not agree with that.”
Carson’s disparagement of Muslims came after months of derogatory remarks about women and Mexicans by rival Donald Trump, who nonetheless has remained the front-runner for the party nomination. Carson is in second place, some polls show.
Some Republican leaders, already worried about Trump’s insults, fear that Carson’s denigration of Muslims will further damage the party’s efforts to expand its base beyond older, conservative white voters.
Civil rights groups and some of Carson’s Republican rivals denounced the retired neurosurgeon, but he stands little risk of harm in the primaries. A 2013 survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants — a key group for Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist — believe Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence.
Historian Thomas S. Kidd, author of “American Christians and Islam,” said Carson was capitalizing on fear of Muslim terrorists. “But then to turn it into a blanket statement that Muslims in general can’t be full participants in the life of the republic — I do think that’s significant, and it’s alarming,” Kidd said.
Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett said the comments were justified because Islam calls for killing gay people (Muslim clerics say that’s untrue), and that’s incompatible with the Constitution (the Constitution says “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”).
Bennett also said that Carson, as an African-American, “dramatically expands the appeal of the Republican Party.”
Carson later said on CNN that a Muslim would “have to reject the tenets of Islam” to be president.
Presidential candidates typically take pains to avoid showing religious bias. When Republican Mitt Romney, a Mormon, ran in 2008 and 2012, some evangelical Christians were hostile toward his faith. One of his 2008 opponents, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, apologized to Romney for asking a reporter, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”
In 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, had to reassure Protestants that he would not take orders from the pope. But his main opponents, Hubert Humphrey in the primaries and Republican Richard Nixon in the general election, avoided the topic.
“Humphrey certainly didn’t say anything like what Carson said,” Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek recalled. Nixon didn’t need to stoke doubts about Kennedy’s faith because “there were plenty of people who were doing it for him,” he said.
Since World War II, historians say, the most openly prejudiced presidential candidate was Strom Thurmond, whose racism was unvarnished when he ran in 1948 as an independent.
“There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” the South Carolinian said.
Alabama Gov. George Wallace, then a Democrat, was nearly as direct in his 1963 inaugural speech, pledging “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.” But in his 1964 campaign for president, he was more guarded in appealing to whites outside the South at a time when many were uneasy about a new housing discrimination ban that would enable blacks to move into their neighborhoods.
“You may want to sell your house to someone with blue eyes and green teeth, and that’s all right,” he told a Maryland audience. “I don’t object. But you should not be forced to do it.”
After Romney’s loss in 2012, Republicans vowed to work harder to attract minority voters. The Republican National Committee released a scathing postmortem saying that “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”
But Trump and Carson are benefiting from the uneasiness of many working-class whites as the nation becomes more diverse.
Their statements alarm strategist Henry Barbour, a co-author of the RNC report.
“When you say a Muslim’s not fit to be president of the United States, you’re a whole lot more than off message,” he said. “We need to stand on principle, but we don’t need to try to run folks off because they have different backgrounds than some traditional Republicans.”
By: Michael Finnegan, Tribune News Service; The National Memo, October 5, 2015
“Why The GOP Is The True Party Of ‘Free Stuff'”: Bush’s Logrolling Directs Almost All The Benefits To People Who Don’t Need It
While other candidates are a lot crazier, Jeb Bush is clearly the most fumble-brained option in the presidential race. He can’t seem to string two words together without committing a grievous political faux pas. Whether it was his call for “phasing out” Medicare, or his scorn for women’s health issues, or his claim that Asians are the real anchor babies, he’s got a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease.
Now he’s out with a fresh clunker, this time about how Republicans, unlike Democrats, won’t try to lure black voters with “free stuff.” Primary voting is months away, and already Bush is flirting with language that may have lost Mitt Romney the election.
Bush’s argument — that Democrats cynically use welfare to buy black votes and thereby trap them in a cycle of dependency — is seriously mistaken, as well as deeply hypocritical. But a more fundamental mistake is the picture of government Bush envisions. Put simply, handing out “free stuff” of one sort or another is perhaps the most important job governments can do.
First, let’s tackle why black people vote Democratic. I think the answer can be illustrated best in two words: Strom Thurmond. He was a South Carolina Democrat when he broke the record for the longest Senate filibuster ever trying to stop the 1957 Civil Rights Act. But after a much more aggressive civil rights bill passed in 1964, he switched parties, eventually followed by most of the other Dixiecrats. As Philip Bump demonstrates, blacks unsurprisingly did the opposite at the same time, shifting very heavily towards the Democratic Party.
In other words, government benefits play, at best, an incidental role in black support for the Democrats. Republicans today are not segregationists, but they are the inheritors of a legacy of outright white supremacy. Thurmond was in the Senate until 2003. At his 100th birthday party in 2002, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) praised Thurmond’s 1948 run for president under a third party apartheid ticket. (Lott later resigned as leader after his comments were made public.) Democrats have not been the finest stewards of black fortunes, but it’s pretty obvious that they’re better than the alternative.
That brings me to the hypocrisy. While Democrats support social benefits in a wishy-washy way, conservatives are absolutely obsessed with directing huge monetary benefits to their favored constituencies — namely, the rich.
George W. Bush’s tax cuts were violently skewed towards the wealthy — over 73 percent of the benefits went to the top income quintile, and fully 30 percent to 1 percenters alone. Jeb Bush aims to pull the same trick, proposing another corpulent set of tax breaks — only this time, over half of the benefits would accrue to the top 1 percent alone. You can’t win an election solely with the support of billionaires, of course, but Bush and his allies have also already raised over $120 million. Not, one suspects, a coincidence.
Overall, welfare benefits for the top income quintile — largely a result of conservative policymaking — cost roughly $355 billion yearly. Meanwhile, what passes for new policy in Republican circles — a child tax credit — is a government benefit for middle- and upper-class parents that carefully and deliberately excludes the poor.
But it would be a mistake to stop here. Good government types often rail against the blatant cronyism of Bush family politics — i.e., you give me hundreds of millions of dollars for my presidential campaign, and I’ll cut the capital gains tax so you can better loot your company — but making good policy isn’t as simple as being against patronage in general. As Francis Fukuyama points out in Political Order and Political Decay, Boss Tweed-style patronage politics can also be a first step towards an efficient, decent modern state. There is no bright line between handing out jobs to one’s ethnic community in return for votes, and constructing a modern bureaucracy that provides universal social benefits like clean air and water, low crime, a safety net, and so forth.
For what are governments good for, if not providing universal security and prosperity for as many citizens as possible? Even in a jalopy country like the U.S., the vast majority of state activity is dedicated towards this end, at least ostensibly. The military, to defend the nation; Social Security, to provide for the retired and disabled; Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare, to provide universal access to health care; various safety net programs like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit, to keep people from destitution — these together, plus interest on the national debt, account for 84 percent of direct federal spending. Many of these could be improved, or are badly misused, but that’s their bedrock ideological justification. Other nations with better versions of similar policies show that universal high-quality health care and an end to poverty are easily within our grasp.
So the problem with Bush’s logrolling — and Republican policy in general — is mainly that it directs almost all the benefits to people who don’t need it.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, September 28, 2015
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