“Behold, The Arsonist Is Here”: How Donald Trump Turned Republicans’ Smoldering Resentments Into A Dumpster Fire
The Republican Party has long faced a simple yet vexing mathematical problem. While there are benefits that come with being the party that represents the interests of large corporations and the wealthy, executives and rich people won’t give you enough votes to win a majority come election day. So one of the ways the GOP has handled the problem is with a deflection of discontentment: There’s an elite you should resent, they tell ordinary people, but it isn’t the people who control the country’s economic life. Instead, it’s the cultural elite, those wine-sipping, brie-nibbling college professors, Hollywood liberals, and cosmopolitan multiculturalists who look down their noses at you and tell you your values are wrong. The best way to stand up for yourself and stick it to those elitists is to vote Republican.
It’s an argument that dates back to the 1960s, but for the first time since then the GOP has a presidential nominee who doesn’t quite get it. Not steeped in the subtleties of Republican rhetoric and the goals it’s meant to serve, Donald Trump is blasting in all different directions, even hitting some Republican sacred cows.
There’s nothing coherent about Trump’s arguments — he’ll say how terrible it is that wages haven’t grown, then say that we need to get rid of the federal minimum wage. But he has taken the core of the GOP’s trickle-down agenda — tax cuts for the wealthy and a drastic reduction in taxes and regulation on businesses — and tossed on top of it a garnish of protectionism, promising to impose tariffs on foreign competitors and initiate trade wars until other countries march right over here and give us back our jobs. He’s even feuding with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Trump’s offensive against international trade is apparently based on the theory that it will help win working-class white voters to his cause, particularly in Rust Belt states where manufacturing jobs have declined in recent decades. And this has his party very nervous.
“Mr. Trump wants to make Republicans into the Tariff Party,” laments The Wall Street Journal editorial page, house organ of America’s economic masters. “He’ll have a better chance of winning the economic debate if he focuses on the taxes, regulations, and monetary policy that are the real cause of our economic malaise.” In other words, stick to the stuff the people in the board rooms care about.
That’s not to say that Trump’s infantile ideas about trade would actually produce any benefit to working people — on that basic point, the Journal has it right. And there have been Republicans who advocated protectionism before; some of them even ran for president. But they lost. The party’s nominee always understood which side its economic bread was buttered on.
All the while, though, the audience for an explicitly economic anti-elitism remained in the party, a product of their success at bringing in whites of modest means with appeals to cultural and racial solidarity. Those downscale voters may have been told that upper-income tax cuts were the best path to prosperity for all, but they never quite bought it. One recent poll showed 54 percent of Republican voters supporting increasing taxes on those making over $250,000 a year, a result that’s enough to make Paul Ryan spit up his Gatorade.
There’s a way to handle that, which is to turn up the dial on cultural resentments. But it has to be done carefully in order to minimize the collateral damage. Republicans always knew that nativism and racial appeals had to be fed to these voters carefully, couched in dog-whistles and euphemisms. But Trump just hands them an overflowing glass of hate and tells them to tilt their heads back and chug. A secure border? Hell, we need to build a 20-foot high wall because Mexicans are rapists. Strong measures to stop terrorism? Just keep out all the Muslims.
Part of what has Republicans upset is that Trump’s nativism narrows the cultural argument down to ethnic and racial identity. They may have condemned “political correctness” to get people upset at liberal elitists telling you what to think, but in Trump’s version, rejecting it means indulging your ugliest impulses, taking every rancid thought about foreigners or minorities that pops into your head and vomiting it right out of your mouth in triumph.
Once you unleash that stuff, it’s hard to pretend that it’s anything other than what it is. So the Republican elites — who, let’s be honest, usually bear more of a cultural resemblance to the liberals against whom they whip up all those resentments than to the working-class whites whose votes they want — look on in horror as Trump ruins everything. He lays the GOP’s racial appeals bare so they can’t be denied, and he can’t even be trusted to keep faithful to all of the party’s economic agenda. If you can’t rely on an (alleged) billionaire to keep all that straight, what hope does your party have?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, July 2, 2016
“Because They’re Actually Not”: Why Republicans Struggle To Convince Ordinary Americans The GOP Is On Their Side
Attention, Republicans: if you want to know why Americans never seem to believe you when you say you have ordinary people’s interests at heart, look no further than the new regulation governing investment advisers the Obama administration has now released.
I realize that few readers will lean forward with excitement upon reading the words “fiduciary standard,” but this is actually an important topic, both substantively and politically, so stay with me. The new regulation, which had been in the works for some time, says that investment advisers are required to follow a fiduciary standard, which means nothing more than that they have to be guided by what’s in their client’s best interests, just like a doctor or lawyer must.
You might ask, who on earth could possibly object to that? Other than the investment advising industry, of course. The answer is…the Republican Party.
Not the whole party, actually. Most Republicans would rather not discuss this issue at all, because doing so puts them in an uncomfortable place. But I have yet to find a single elected Republican who comes down on the side of the fiduciary standard.
To explain briefly: As things exist today, when you hire a financial adviser, they’re under no obligation to actually give you advice that’s in your best interests. What they often do instead is sell you products from which they’ll obtain bigger commissions, pushing you into investments that make them more money but won’t necessarily be good for you. The new regulation changes that, imposing the fiduciary standard on those advisers. This is a very big deal, because we’re talking about an industry that manages trillions of dollars in Americans’ money.
This morning I spoke to University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack, co-author (with Helaine Olen) of The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be Complicated and a longtime advocate of the fiduciary standard. He was, unsurprisingly, enormously pleased by the administration’s move.
“People are unaware of the many conflicts of interest that exist in the financial advice industry and how much money it costs them over the course of their lives,” Pollack said, noting that selling clients products they don’t need is a core part of the industry’s business model.
But Pollack is quick to note that financial advisers provide an essential service, since most of us don’t have the expertise to make good investments and save properly for retirement or our children’s education. It’s also an extremely intimate relationship — Americans are notoriously secretive about their finances, which means you’ll share details of your life with your financial advisor that you wouldn’t tell friends or even some family members. That’s why it’s essential that the relationship is based on a core of trust.
“When people are dealing with financial advisers,” Pollack says, “they need to know that what they are getting is actual advice and not a sales pitch.” He also pointed out: “The research that has come out about the poor performance of actively managed investments has had a huge impact.” More and more people are becoming aware that the best investment strategy is often to simply park most of your money in a low-fee index fund; no matter how smart your adviser is, you aren’t going to beat the market.
So what are the political implications of this new rule? On the surface, you’d think that a position in opposition to the administration’s move would be almost impossible to defend. Who’s going to argue that your financial adviser ought to be able to push you into buying something you don’t need? That’s just a couple of steps away from outright fraud.
But if you listen to Republicans, it becomes clear they don’t like the rule, but not for any specific reason relating to the rule itself. They’ll talk about Washington bureaucrats and Obama overreach, but the tell is in their repeated use of the phrase “Obamacare for financial planning!” (here’s an example from Paul Ryan). Whenever Republicans say something is “Obamacare for X,” it’s a way of saying, “We don’t like this thing, but we don’t want to say exactly why, so we’ll just say it’s like that other thing we don’t like.”
This gets to the heart of the different perspective the two parties bring to questions of the economy and government’s role in regulating it. The conservative perspective is essentially laissez-faire: if financial advisers take advantage of their clients, well, that may be regrettable, but we don’t want the government to actually do anything to prevent it, because we have to let the market do what it will. And when it comes to the affirmative policy changes they want to make, for ordinary people most of it involves waiting for things to trickle down. Let us cut taxes on the wealthy and reduce regulations on corporations, they say, and that will create the conditions that will foster economic growth, so that at some time in the future it will be easier for you to find a good-paying job (those getting the tax cuts and regulatory breaks, on the other hand, get their benefits right away).
Liberals, in contrast, are comfortable with making policies like the fiduciary rule — or increases in the minimum wage, or paid family leave, or more inclusive overtime rules — that are designed to deliver immediate benefit to ordinary people. And as complicated as economic policy can sometimes get, most voters can understand this fundamental difference. That’s why Republicans constantly have to struggle to explain why they actually have ordinary people’s interests at heart, and why Democrats can just say, “Yep, there go the Republicans again, just trying to help the rich and screw the little guy,” and voters nod their heads in recognition. Republicans may think it’s unfair, but when they oppose things like the fiduciary rule or try to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (protecting consumers, egad!), what do they expect voters to conclude?
Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders came out in favor of the fiduciary rule last fall; it remains to be seen whether they’ll bring it up again on the campaign trail. But as Pollack notes, the change might not have been possible without the attention it has already gotten. Though people in positions of power often say, “good policy is good politics” as a way of claiming that they have only the purest of (non-political) intentions for their decisions, sometimes exactly the opposite is true.
“This is an example where good politics is actually critical to good policy,” Pollack says, “because if this had been decided quietly in Congress, there’s a good possibility it would have been weakened.” The more attention it got, the more room the administration had to do the right thing. And now that they have, Democrats should keep talking about it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, April 7, 2016
“Republican Elite’s Reign Of Disdain”: The White Working Class Failed Itself
“Sire, the peasants are revolting!”
“Yes, they are, aren’t they?”
It’s an old joke, but it seems highly relevant to the current situation within the Republican Party. As an angry base rejects establishment candidates in favor of you-know-who, a significant part of the party’s elite blames not itself, but the moral and character failings of the voters.
There has been a lot of buzz over the past few days about an article by Kevin Williamson in National Review, vigorously defended by other members of the magazine’s staff, denying that the white working class — “the heart of Trump’s support” — is in any sense a victim of external forces. A lot has gone wrong in these Americans’ lives — “the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy” — but “nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.”
O.K., we’re just talking about a couple of writers at a conservative magazine. But it’s obvious, if you look around, that this attitude is widely shared on the right. When Mitt Romney spoke about the 47 percent of voters who would never support him because they “believe that the government has a responsibility to take care of them,” he was channeling an influential strain of conservative thought. So was Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, when he warned of a social safety net that becomes “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”
Or consider the attitude toward American workers inadvertently displayed by Eric Cantor, then the House majority leader, when he chose to mark Labor Day with a Twitter post celebrating … business owners.
So what’s going on here?
To be sure, social collapse in the white working class is a deadly serious issue. Literally. Last fall, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton attracted widespread attention with a paper showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans, which had been declining for generations, started rising again circa 2000. This rising death rate mainly reflected suicide, alcohol and overdoses of drugs, notably prescription opioids. (Marx declared that religion was the opium of the people. But in 21st-century America, it appears that opioids are the opium of the people.)
And other signs of social unraveling, from deteriorating health to growing isolation, are also on the rise among American whites. Something is going seriously wrong in the heartland.
Furthermore, the writers at National Review are right to link these social ills to the Trump phenomenon. Call it death and The Donald: Analysis of primary election results so far shows that counties with high white mortality rates are also likely to vote Trump.
The question, however, is why this is happening. And the diagnosis preferred by the Republican elite is just wrong — wrong in a way that helps us understand how that elite lost control of the nominating process.
Stripped down to its essence, the G.O.P. elite view is that working-class America faces a crisis, not of opportunity, but of values. That is, for some mysterious reason many of our citizens have, as Mr. Ryan puts it, lost “their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” And this crisis of values, they suggest, has been aided and abetted by social programs that make life too easy on slackers.
The problems with this diagnosis should be obvious. Tens of millions of people don’t suffer a collapse in values for no reason. Remember, several decades ago the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that the social ills of America’s black community didn’t come out of thin air, but were the result of disappearing economic opportunity. If he was right, you would have expected declining opportunity to have the same effect on whites, and sure enough, that’s exactly what we’re seeing.
Meanwhile, the argument that the social safety net causes social decay by coddling slackers runs up against the hard truth that every other advanced country has a more generous social safety net than we do, yet the rise in mortality among middle-aged whites in America is unique: Everywhere else, it is continuing its historic decline.
But the Republican elite can’t handle the truth. It’s too committed to an Ayn Rand story line about heroic job creators versus moochers to admit either that trickle-down economics can fail to deliver good jobs, or that sometimes government aid is a crucial lifeline. So it ends up lashing out at its own voters when they refuse to buy into that story line.
Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Donald Trump has any better idea about what the country needs; he’s just peddling another fantasy, this one involving the supposed power of belligerence. But at least he’s acknowledging the real problems ordinary Americans face, not lecturing them on their moral failings. And that’s an important reason he’s winning.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, March 18, 2016
“John Kasich – Only Moderately Extreme”: Remember The Last Time We Had A “Compassionately Conservative” President?
If you’ve watched John Kasich at any of the Republican presidential debates so far, two things stand out about him: (1) he wants to be the “Republican with a heart,” and (2) he completely embraces trickle-down economics. That’s pretty much the kind of thing we heard from George W. Bush in the 2000 election when he called himself a “compassionate conservative.” Compared to the rest of the field this time around, that has a lot of pundits calling Kasich the moderate of the group.
The problem is that we all got a pretty good lesson on the failure of trickle-down economics during the Bush/Cheney years. And right now, Kasich is demonstrating just how un-moderate he is on some important issues. For example, here’s what happened at a town hall event in Virginia today.
Notice that even one of his supporters called him out for saying that “women came out of their kitchens” to work on his campaign. That little gem comes the day after Kasich did this:
Gov. John Kasich has signed legislation to strip government money from Planned Parenthood in Ohio…
The bill targets roughly $1.3 million in funding that Planned Parenthood receives through Ohio’s health department. The money, which is mostly federal, supports initiatives for HIV testing, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and prevention of violence against women.
All of that reminded me of something that happened just after Kasich was elected Governor of Ohio. He came under heavy fire in his home state for the fact that all of the appointments in his administration went to white people. For a Republican, that isn’t terribly surprising. But it was his response that was jarring. Instead of working with communities of color to improve, he got defensive.
“We pick people on the basis of who’s qualified. We don’t pick them on the basis of quotas. I mean I think quotas are yesterday,” Kasich said on Jan. 2.
Kasich said he’s color blind when it comes to hiring.
“I mean let’s get the best people for the job,” said Kasich.
In other words, “the best people for the job” just happened to all be white. People of color need not apply. When Ohio’s Legislative Black Caucus offered to help him out with that, Kasich said, “I don’t need your people.”
So the moderate in the Republican presidential race is the guy who believes that:
1. if we just give rich people more tax cuts our economy will boom for everyone,
2. women are still in the kitchen and don’t deserve access to reproductive health care, and
3. the best person for any job in his administration just so happens to be white.
I’ll grant you that compared to the other 4 candidates still in this race, Kasich is slightly less extreme. But then, I’m old enough to remember what happened the last time the country had a “compassionately conservative” president.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 22, 2016
“Loose Money”: Paul Ryan Just Twisted Himself Into A Knot Trying To Undermine Obama’s Economic Record
It is not surprising that House Speaker Paul Ryan is unimpressed with President Obama’s economic record. What is surprising is who Ryan thinks does deserve credit for helping the recovery: the Federal Reserve.
“I think the Federal Reserve has done more,” the speaker told reporters on Tuesday, after being asked if Obama “deserves any credit at all” for the recovery. “What’s happening is people at the high end are doing pretty darn well because of loose money from the Fed,” he said. This will be news to followers of Ryan’s career. He’s long railed against loose money from the Fed, claiming it will debase the dollar and lead to inflation. (It hasn’t.)
It’s not crazy to claim, as Ryan did, that the Fed’s policies amounts to “trickle down economics.” But there is nothing in Paul Ryan’s history to suggest he thinks monetary policy can help the economy at all, even if it’s just at the top. Plus, if that’s his critique, there are some progressive money-printing enthusiasts — and even some conservative ones — who would probably like to schedule a chat with the speaker.
To recap: Paul Ryan thinks loose money helped the economy. But Paul Ryan opposes loose money. He also thinks loose money favors the rich too much. But shows no indication of wanting to make loose money favor the poor.
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, January 13, 2016
Share This Blog
mykeystrokes.com- “The Unrelenting Hostility Of Washington’s Courtier Press”: The Media’s Crusade Of Scandals Against Hillary Clinton July 28, 2016
- “Endorsing This Philistine”: The Christian Right Has Surrendered To Trump July 24, 2016
- “Cop Killers Serve No Cause”: It’s Getting To The Point Where No Lives Matter July 24, 2016
mykeystrokes.com 