“America Is A Democracy, Not A Plutocracy”: It’s Time To Show The Rich And Powerful Who’s Boss
Who is in charge here, anyway? That, more than sequestered spending or how much we raise in new taxes, will be the most important question resolved by this “fiscal cliff” stand-off between President Obama and the GOP.
More than Republicans and Democrats forging an elusive consensus on shrinking the nation’s deficit, the real question before the country in these debates over debt is whether the American Republic has within it the will and the means to make its most powerful elites pay “just a little bit more,” as the President likes to say, at a time when those elites are determined to resist. And as we sit here today, the jury on that question is still out.
The power to tax may be the power to destroy, as the old saying goes. But as historian Francis Fukuyama reminds us, the reverse is also true: “Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics,” he says, “one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites.”
Those who have ever been to places like Jamaica and seen ramshackle shacks side-by-side with mansions behind their high, stone walls and iron-barred windows know Fukuyama is right when he says the most dysfunctional societies are those in which elites are able to either legally exempt themselves from taxation or evade it and thus shift the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society.
There is another old saying among students of American politics: “The President proposes and Congress disposes.” Well, the new rule, as Bill Maher might say, seems to be that in America today the Plutocracy proposes and Congress – or at least that part of Congress that is Republican – does as it is told.
Listening to the supposedly sensible Republican Senator Tom Coburn on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program earlier today dodge and weave every time the show’s hosts tried to pin him down on whether Republicans could agree to increasing income tax rates on the rich, it quickly became apparent that when Republicans say we shouldn’t raise taxes on the rich what they really mean is that Republicans can’t.
When Republicans say taxes on the rich cannot go up, that is not a bargaining position. It’s an admission of weakness that Republicans literally can’t make it happen — either because their rigid ideology won’t let them or because Republicans have lost control of their own party. Maybe both.
Republican heretic David Frum helps shine a light on why Republicans are so boxed in on tax rates and why they are reduced to vague talk about closing loopholes and deductions with no specifics or numbers attached.
According to Frum, it’s okay for Republican lawmakers to advocate raising “revenues” by closing unspecified loopholes because upper-income Republicans in red states, like Texas, don’t really have that many deductions to begin with.
Deductions for state and local taxes don’t interest wealthy Texans because Texas doesn’t have a state income tax at all, he says.
“Nor is the mortgage interest deduction a matter of life or death,” says Frum, since housing prices are comparatively cheap in the Lone Star State, unlike blue states like New York or California where housing is more expensive, as are taxes.
“What Texas does have, however, is a lot of very high incomes who care a great deal about tax rates,” says Frum. And so the GOP’s big donors are willing to throw loopholes over the side, says Frum, since in the battle between the “ordinary rich” and super-rich, deductions matter a lot more to people earning $400,000 than to people earning $4 million or $40 million.”
That is why the Republican Party’s billionaire backers have sent the word out that there will be hell to pay if Republicans let tax rates go up even a fraction of a point on those making more than $250,000.
Republicans do their best to disguise their emasculated feebleness by whining that raising tax rates 4% would only bring in about $50 billion a year – chump change, a drop in the bucket, they say – while promising to bring in lots more dough by closing unnamed loopholes or through that fog bank of imprecision known as “tax reform.”
But rates going up on the richest Americans is off the table as far as Republicans are concerned. It is a non-starter, with violators punished by no-nonsense warnings of a leadership coup or, even worse, an intra-party civil war as conservative secessionists carry out their threats to abandon the GOP, en masse, and form their own ultra-right party.
One manifestation of the dysfunction affecting American politics is that once the Republican Party has dug in its heels and decided not to do something, their obstruction sets the terms of debate and the starting assumptions for the rest of the Washington Establishment.
When Republican’s wealthy benefactors decide they will tolerate no compromise on rates – none – the rest of us are expected to accept that recalcitrance as a “given” and work around it.
To confront that presumption head-on and challenge it directly, as President Obama has done – to declare that America is a democracy not a plutocracy by insisting that no deficit-reduction package will be signed by him unless Republicans agree to increase tax rates on top income earners – that is what Republicans mean when they say the President is “politicizing” an issue or “failing to show leadership” by either capitulating to Republican demands or neutralizing the negative consequences of the Republican Party’s own intransigence.
“President Obama has an unbelievable opportunity to be a transformational president – that is, to bring the country together,” said Speaker Boehner lieutenant Pete Roskam of Illinois. “Or he can devolve into zero-sum-game politics, where he wins and other people lose.”
You can tell Charles Krauthammer understands the Republican’s inside game here because the master propagandist accuses President Obama of playing it.
The President’s insistence Republicans put their big donor’s money where their mouths and show they are serious about deficit reduction “has nothing to do with economics or real fiscal reform,” says Krauthammer. “It is entirely about politics.”
How true, about Republicans I mean. Likewise, in response to news the irreconcilable right intends to launch a leadership coup or third party challenge should Republican leaders go along with the 70% of Americans who say they want taxes raised on the top 2%, Krauthammer accuses the President of bargaining in bad faith by making offers “designed to break the Republican opposition and grant him political supremacy.”
This is why, for example, Krauthammer says Obama sent Treasury Secretary Geithner to Republicans “to convey not a negotiating offer but a demand for unconditional surrender.”
Accusing ones opponents of that which you are most guilty of yourself is a well-traveled tactic on the right. And what’s obviously got Krauthammer most incensed is the dawning realization from the President’s less conciliatory posture since election day that two can play at the Republican’s give-no-quarter game.
The seeds for America’s political dysfunction were sown 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party made the fateful decision to favor Wall Street over Main Street, finance over manufacturing, as America’s signature industry.
The inevitable concentration of wealth this favoritism produced empowered a narrow economic elite with the financial resources to capture a political party and then use that party to capture the nation’s government.
It was just as those early Jeffersonians foretold more than 200 years ago when they worried about those “Anglomen” who stood to profit from Alexander Hamilton’s scheming over the National Bank and a Commercial Republic far more entranced by pecuniary promises of profit than the public-spirited virtues of civic republicanism.
And since 1980 all of these ancient fears have come to pass as a greater share of the nation’s wealth has fallen into fewer and fewer hands – 25% of income and 40% of assets controlled by 1% of the population – with the predicable distortions this concentration of economic power has had on the American political system.
A GOP that is the wholly-owned subsidiary of that super elite “may no longer be a normal party,” wrote David Brooks at the height of the debt ceiling crisis 18 months ago.
Brooks was outraged when Republicans passed on what he called the “mother of no brainers” by turning down a perfectly good deal with Democrats to resolve the impasse because, in Brooks’ view, Republicans a.) have been “infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative;” b.) do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms; c.) do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities; d.) have no sense of moral decency if they can talk so “blandly of default” and their willingness to “stain their nation’s honor”; and finally e.) have no economic theory worthy of the name since tax levels are all that matter to them.
There are sound economic arguments for reducing debts and deficits – maybe not now while unemployment is still high and interests rates low, but over the long term. But there is none – none – for taking upper income tax rates off the table as part of the final deficit-reduction agreement. And the only reason we are hung up on taxes for the top 2% is that this powerful special interest thinks it can flex its muscles and vacate the verdict of a national election by getting its demands met regardless of majority public opinion.
“The conservative insurgents of today argue that their anti-tax cost cutting agenda is designed to revive the economy, boost the job market and get America on the move again,” writes Thomas Edsall in The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.
“There is, however, another equally probable motivation,” he says, “that this cashiering of moral restraint on the Right reflects its belief, conscious or unconscious, that we have reached the end of the American Century.”
In that event, says Edsell, the “adamant anti-tax posture of the Right” can be seen as “an implicit abandonment of the state and of the larger American experiment — a decision that the enterprise is failing and that it is time to jump ship.”
The real news on the American right, agrees professor Mark Lilla “is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism” led by people he calls “redemptive reactionaries” who think the only way forward “is to destroy what history has given us and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos.”
Once there was a conservative Golden Age, these reactionaries believe, where the world was ruled by the “Best and Brightest,” the “job creators,” Ayn Rand’s “makers,” and the top 2% who now threaten punitive action against Republican leaders or civil war within the party if their non-negotiable demands against tax hikes are not met.
But then came the New Deal, the Great Society and the civil rights movements of the 1960s that emancipated heretofore marginalized minorities of all kinds – in other words “an apocalypse” so horrible in its consequences that the only sane response was “to provoke another in hopes of starting over,” says Lizza.
And ever since, these reactionaries have been working toward a counterrevolution “that would destroy the present state of affairs and transport the nation, or the faith, or the entire human race to some new Golden Age that would redeem aspects of the past without returning there.”
Grover Norquist’s “no tax pledge” perfectly captures the Judgment Day spirit of this reactionary mentality. So does the Senate filibuster. So does the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which itself is the apocalyptic can Democrats were forced to kick down the road to escape the calamitous consequences of the first Doomsday can Republicans constructed 18 months ago by refusing to raise the debt ceiling and allow the government to pay its overdue bills, thus pushing the nation to the brink of insolvency for the first time in US history.
And so, when Republicans assail President Obama for trying to make a political “statement” when he insists that taxes on the wealthy must go up as part of this deficit-cutting deal that Republicans demanded in the first place, it’s good to remember that this is a valuable statement to make, since every once in a while it’s important to remind these rich and powerful “redemptive reactionaries” just who’s boss.
By: Ted Frier, Open Salon Blog, December 7, 2012
“A Good Time To Take Stock”: Don’t Count Out Angry White Guys Quite Yet
Earlier this week, John Boehner opened his fiscal cliff counteroffer to President Obama by claiming that it had been a “status quo election in which both you and the Republican majority in the House were re-elected.” Democrats and progressives, who have spent the last month crowing about Republican’s self-marginalization as the party of aging white men, obviously beg to differ — both about who holds the leverage in the ongoing tax rate and debt ceiling standoffs and how the election plays into it. Are they being overconfident, or will the Obama coalition we saw turn out a month ago hold?
As the last of the post-election data sifts and behind-the-scenes campaign reveals trickle out and the political class tries to figure out the new normal, it’s a good time to take stock.
Liberals are thrilled to see a toughened Obama use his strengthened hand against Republican intransigence, which they see as bolstered by an election day mandate. Greg Sargent at the Washington Post put it this way: “The argument is straightforward: This isn’t 2011 anymore. Last time, Republicans had won an election; this time, Obama and Democrats won. Polls show the public increasingly sees Republicans as the intransigent party and the primary obstacle to compromise in Washington.” And Frank Rich was equally dismissive of the Republicans’ bargaining power: “Everyone knows the Republicans are going to fold — the Republicans know they are going to fold — and the only question to be resolved is when and on what terms. They have zero leverage. It’s not only that they lost the election; they continue to decline in national polls, with the latest Pew survey showing that 53 percent of Americans will blame the GOP (and only 27 percent will blame President Obama) if there’s no deal by January.” Even plenty of Republicans are pessimistic: “Now more than ever, Republicans should know better than to pretend polls aren’t telling them something,” wrote John Podhoretz glumly.
But House members aren’t elected by national polls, and thanks to gerrymandering into safe districts that helped Republicans hold the House last month, they still may have more to fear from their right flank in the event of a compromise. And the prior particulars of this current skirmish favor the Democrats: Taxes going up on everyone on January 1 over their desire to keep tax cuts for the rich looks bad just after you lost by running an out-of-touch rich guy for president. As Republican Rep. James Lankford admitted to the Times, “It’s a terrible position because by default, Democrats get what they want.” This is a crisis of Republicans’ making that they’ve boxed themselves into; future battles might not be so deliciously karmic.
Of course, the long-term demographic trends that, combined with a killer turnout game helped re-elect the president — despite Republicans’ innumerate overconfidence — still exist. Just how that created (or confirmed) an “Obama coalition” is elucidated in a just-released report by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, who can justly claim to have called those trends long before Republicans had to remember that Latino voters exist.
While many pollsters erroneously believed that the share of the white vote, for example, would remain stable, their 2011 report, “The Path to 270” projected that in 2012, the following math would favor Obama: an increase of 2 percent in the share of voters of color, fewer white working-class voters, and a small uptick in white college graduate voters. “According to the 2012 exit polls, that is exactly what happened,” they write in the new report. “With the re-election of President Barack Obama in 2012, this progressive coalition has clearly emerged, albeit in an early and tenuous stage.”
That last qualifier also matters in figuring out just what that progressive coalition can do and how it can be harnessed, especially with coming state-level and local races and in future legislative battles that may divide those disparate constituencies — or leave them disengaged. For example, much was rightly made of the gender gap, but specificity matters: As Teixeira and Halpin note, President Obama actually lost white college-graduate women after winning them in 2008: “Among women in this demographic, his margin declined from 52 percent to 47 percent in 2008, to 46 percent to 52 percent in 2012.” (Romney also won the white working class, where he gained men compared to McCain, but not enough working class white women were in his ranks to make a difference from 2008.) As John Cassidy pointed out just after the election, white women overall have broken with the overall “gender gap” dynamic: Bush won 55 percent of white women in 2004.
The most reliable Obama voters turned not to be all women, but young women and women of color, in part because young people and people of color in general turned out and voted for the president. (Younger people and people of color are also generally less likely to be married, which partly explains how Obama won single women by 36 points; unmarried women also made up a larger share of voters in the election, 23 percent versus 21 percent in 2008.)
Unfortunately, those are the same demographics who largely stayed home in 2010, when we got many of the looniest members of the Republican caucus. They’re the same ones that brought the debt ceiling debate to the brink, after they held the government hostage over defunding Planned Parenthood. By the way, those positions on women’s health also proved politically toxic last month, at least according to the organization’s own action fund, which just released polling showing that it had managed to make 64 percent of all voters aware that Romney planned to defund it, which 62 percent of them disagreed with. Their research also found that Latinos and African Americans were more likely to side with Obama after hearing his views on “affordable birth control,” abortion, and Planned Parenthood funding. Republicans may have lost their appetites on that kind of fight, except that they still have right-to-life absolutists to appease in their coalition and in their districts.
Soon after the election, Michael Tomasky proposed that some rich liberal donor throw cash at this perennial problem: In off-year elections, “The 20 percent who leave the system are almost entirely Democrats. This has been true all my life. It’s basically because old people always vote, and I guess old white people vote more than other old people, and old white people tend to be Republican. So even when white America isn’t enraged as it was in 2010, midterms often benefit Republicans.” Meanwhile, according to Politico, it’s looking like the vaunted Obama database is going to be kept in the president’s hands mainly to channel support for legislation, despite the desperate entreaties of Democratic candidates up for election in 2013 and 2014, though it might also be used for an entirely new organization that could support candidates. (It’s also up for debate whether that database is already obsolete, anyway.)
None of this means that Democrats should be folding to a compromise which well could include draconian cuts to programs like Medicaid and Social Security that are crucial to that coalition. In fact, it probably means the opposite: Those voters need to be reminded why it matters for them to come back to the polls and to stand up for the policies that motivated them on November 6, from social insurance to ensuring access to reproductive health to comprehensive immigration reform, even without Obama’s name on the ballot.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, December 6, 2012
“The Conservative Learning Curve”: Thinking Mildly Heretical Thoughts Is One Thing, Actions On The Other Hand…
Over the long run, the most important impact of an election is not on the winning party but on the loser. Winners feel confirmed in staying the course they’re on. Losing parties — or, at least, the ones intent on winning again someday — are moved to figure out what they did wrong and how they must change.
After losing throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Republicans finally came to terms with the New Deal and elected Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Democrats lost three elections in the 1980s and did a lot of rethinking inspired by Bill Clinton, who won the White House in 1992. In Britain, the Labor Party learned a great deal during its exile from power in the Margaret Thatcher years. The same thing happened to the Conservatives during Tony Blair’s long run.
The American conservative movement and the Republican Party it controls were stunned by President Obama’s victory last month. The depth of their astonishment was itself a sign of how much they misunderstood the country they proposed to lead. Yet the shock has pushed many conservatives to think at least mildly heretical thoughts.
In particular, some are realizing that the tea party surge of 2010 was akin to an amphetamine rush — it produced instant gratification but left the conservative brand tarnished by extremism on both social and economic issues. Within two years, the tea party high gave way to a crash.
It’s true that the early signs of conservative evolution are superficial and largely rhetorical. The right wing’s supporters are already threatening primaries against House and Senate Republicans who offer even a hint of apostasy when it comes to raising taxes in any budget deal. Many Republicans still fear challenges from their right far more than defeat in an election by a Democrat.
Nonetheless, rhetorical shifts often presage substantive changes because they are the first and easiest steps along the revisionist path. And on Tuesday, three prominent Republicans took the plunge.
At a dinner in honor of the late Jack Kemp — a big tax-cutter who also had a big heart — Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Marco Rubio both worked hard to back the party away from the damage done by Mitt Romney’s comments on the supposedly dependent 47 percent and the broader hostility shown toward government by a conservatism transfigured by tea-party thinking.
Ryan spoke gracious words about Romney, the man who made him his running mate on the GOP ticket. But the implicit criticism of Romney’s theory was unmistakable. Kemp, Ryan said, “hated the idea that any part of America could be written off.” Republicans, Ryan said, must “carry on and keep fighting for the American Idea — the belief that everyone should have the opportunity to rise, to escape from poverty.” He also said: “Government must act for the common good, while leaving private groups free to do the work that only they can do.”
Rubio dubbed his speech a discourse on “middle-class opportunity” and distanced himself from the GOP’s obsession with giving succor to the very wealthy.
“Every country in the world has rich people,” Rubio said. “But only a few places have achieved a vibrant and stable middle class. And in the history of the world, none has been more vibrant and more stable than the great American middle class.”
Rubio also walked a new and more careful line on government. “Government has a role to play,” he said, “and we must make sure that it does its part.” Then, making sure he stayed inside the conservative tent, Rubio added: “But it’s a supporting role, to help create the conditions that enable prosperity in our private economy.”
For good measure, former president George W. Bush tried to push his party back toward moderation on immigration, using a speech in Texas to urge that the issue be approached with “a benevolent spirit” mindful of “the contribution of immigrants.”
There’s ample reason to remain skeptical about how far conservatives will go in challenging themselves. Substantively, neither Ryan nor Rubio threw much conservative orthodoxy overboard.
And actions matter more than words. It’s not encouraging that a large group of Republican senators blocked ratification of the international treaty on the rights of the disabled. Then there’s the budget. If Republicans can’t accept even a modest increase in tax rates on the best-off Americans, it’s hard to take their proclamations of a new day seriously.
Still, elections are 2-by-4s, and many conservatives seem to realize the need to understand what just hit them.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 5, 2012
“Comedy Central”: Grover Norquist Is Wrong About The Tea Party’s Second Coming
This past Sunday, on NBC’s Meet The Press, Grover Norquist had a warning for the president, Democrats, the nation, and perhaps the world: If America ends up going over the “fiscal cliff” there will be a Tea Party revival that will outweigh that of the 2010 midterm elections. “Tea Party two is going to dwarf Tea Party one if Obama pushes us off the cliff.”
I have a question. Has Mr. Norquist resigned as president of Americans for Tax Reform and turned to comedy? If not, maybe he should quit his day job because I laughed so hard at the idea of “Tea Party two” as a warning to our president, my political party, and our nation. Oooh…”Tea Party two.” Scared President Obama? Democrats? You should be, or so Mr. Norquist thinks. Is the “Tea Party two” like Jaws II, or worse yet, Godfather III?
Look, all joking aside, the Tea Party, which isn’t a party at all, had a handful of political victories in 2010. But as I predicted, those “Tea Party candidates,” who are technically Republicans, acted like the red R on their cape dictated when it came time to voting. There was no “T” next to their name when they ran or were elected and when they got to Washington. The GOP schooled them not only on how to behave, but on how to vote. So the faithful lost their religion so to speak. And America wasn’t fooled by a party which was a movement. America also wasn’t fooled by a group that claimed to be nonpartisan, not conservatives, not angry, or not anti-Obama when it turned out to be just that: extremely partisan, very conservative, angry and definitely against the president. In other words, the original plan for the Tea Party either got off track or they lied. Oh, excuse me, let me use political terms: They misspoke.
Another reason I had to laugh at Mr. Norquists’s warning of the second coming of the Tea Party? Polls show since last spring a continuing decline in support for the Tea Party. And there was an analysis done by the Pew Research Center showing that support for the Republican Party has fallen even further in those places that once supported Tea Party candidates than it has in the country as a whole. In the 60 districts represented in Congress by a member of the House Tea Party Caucus, Republicans were viewed about as negatively as Democrats. And the analysis suggests that the Tea Party may be dragging down the Republican Party. That analysis was proven true by the results of the last election. Other polls have shown a decline in support for the Tea Party and its positions, particularly because of its hard line during the debate over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction.
So when Mr. Norquist warns the president about pushing the country over the fiscal cliff, I think he is really speaking to Republicans who are lining up now to walk away from their original pledge to him and his organization not to increase taxes. I think Mr. Norquist is saying, work with the Democrats and we’ll put so much power and money behind a Tea Party candidate to challenge your seat in Congress that you’ll lose your job. So a warning to the president? Or a threat, an unspoken form of bullying to any of the 95 percent of Republicans who signed his pledge?
Some say Democrats should heed Mr. Norquist’s warning. Some say the Tea Party is no longer relevant, they had their 15 minutes of fame and they were a one hit wonder. (This blogger among those of that opinion).
So when Mr Norquist took center stage on NBC’s Meet The Press and David Gregory asked the question “Are you over?” I think it was Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat of Missouri who was in the same segment on Sunday, who said it best: “I just met him for the first time this morning,” McCaskill said. “Nice to meet him. But, you know, who is he?” Or perhaps my two toddlers, who when they hear me mentioning “Grover,” think I’m talking about a furry guy on Sesame Street.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, December 5, 2012
“His Centrisim Is Style And Tone”: There’s Absolutely No Reason For The GOP (Or Anyone) To Listen To Jon Huntsman
Former Utah governor, U.S. ambassador to China and failed presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has been making the media rounds recently, sitting down with the Huffington Post and CNN, sharing his big ideas about How to Save the Republican Party From Itself.*
Before we get into those ideas, and their merit, something should be made very clear: It doesn’t matter what Jon Huntsman thinks, at all. Conservatives should feel no obligation to listen to him, because he has no constituency in the Republican Party — no allies, supporters or acolytes. Liberals shouldn’t listen to him because for all his “the GOP must remake itself in my image” talk, he always conveniently forgets to mention that he’s precisely as conservative — on all the same issues — as Mitt Romney is. (Or as Mitt Romney became, as the case may be.) His “centrism” is entirely a matter of style and tone.
For the current budget showdown, he proposes … “entitlement reform,” along with a rhetorical openness to the possibility of maybe allowing the top marginal tax rate to rise, which is what makes him a big pinko now, apparently:
“You will have to have some compromise built in, and perhaps even on the marginal rates going up for a certain income category. My going-in position would be: Let’s work on phasing out all the deductions and loopholes. There is a trillion dollars there. Let’s see where that leaves us and move forward before you start willy-nilly raising taxes.”
Is this appreciably to the left of Mitt Romney’s position?
Jon Huntsman supported the Ryan Plan. During the campaign, Huntsman proposed what was probably the single most regressive, pro-rich tax plan of any Republican candidate. He called for the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit — which benefits poor people — along with the abolition of all taxes on capital gains and dividends, which would amount to a massive redistribution of wealth from poor and working people to rich people. This is the guy we’re looking to for serious soul-searching about how the Republicans can make themselves appeal to Americans outside the conservative bubble?
Huntsman’s actual prescription for the party is to make it more palatable to … Northeastern Elites. He wants to drop the “crazy talk” in order to focus more on the hardcore economic conservatism. Sure, he’s not going to be a Norquistian fanatic on the top marginal tax rate, but his plan is still austerity for most. The thing is, that sort of conservatism doesn’t appeal to anyone without money. Race-baiting, immigrant-hating, and war-mongering nationalism are what make the GOP’s economic agenda marketable to the masses. The best-case scenario for a Huntsman-led Republican Party is that they pick off some Dem-supporting “socially liberal” rich people in Maryland and Manhattan and maybe Silicon Valley. Enough to harm Democratic fundraising, but not to win national elections.
Since the end of the Reagan era we’ve essentially had two parties that pursue an economic agenda designed to benefit the rich people, as the poor survive on subsistence benefits and the middle class find themselves joining the poor. The rich people each party represents are generally in different (though often overlapping) industries and sectors — entertainment and finance for Democrats, energy and finance for Republicans — but they are the wealthiest all the same. The differentiating factor was that one party also supported welfare state policies that benefited the very poor and the other party also supported “social issues” that appealed to the religious white middle class. A party that did the opposite of Huntsman’s prescription — one that combined real economic populism with conservative religious appeals, as many pre-civil rights Democrats and populists once did — would almost certainly be much more popular than the current Republican Party. (The enduring popularity of Mike Huckabee, who used to frequently adopt the rhetoric of an economic populist, is evidence enough.) There’s a huge “soak the rich and burn the banks down” constituency out there, and the Democrats — who are terrified of soaking the rich — currently win it largely by default.
Unfortunately for the GOP (but probably fortunately for us secular social liberals), as Josh Barro pointed out last week, the money guys are going to push the “more secular but still pro-rich” brand makeover. And the money people have been in charge for so long that they’ve remade most of the Moral Majority people in their image.
Jon Huntsman, though, is not the man to save the party. Nor is his brother in rebranding hucksterism Bobby Jindal, unless he stops talking like a Rhodes scholar and starts acting more like the Kingfish.
*It bears mentioning that at no point does the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein disclose that his interviewee is the father of a fairly prominent Huffington Post employee.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, December 3, 2012
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