The GOP Loses if Trump Wins

Buried beneath all the drama and ugliness of this election is a truth I don't think many people have examined: if Trump wins the election on Tuesday, it's going to be very bad for Republicans' prospects as a viable party long term. Whether they win or lose, fundamental realities of their fractured coalition will call that question eventually, but if Trump loses, the Party will hang together as an oppositional force against Hillary Clinton.

The malignancy of the Trump campaign did not seriously fracture Republican support of the candidate, because with Clinton members all had a common enemy. With a President Clinton, the Party can turn again to a common enemy. We'll see skirmishes for power in the House, but the ultimate endgame--gridlock, endless investigations, a potential impeachment--will paper over divisions. Republicans in the Senate will likely be a minority, and they'll turn to procedural rules to impede the body's function. Nothing rallies the base so fast as the prospect of a good impeachment.

During the Obama era, Republicans honed their skill at outrage and obstruction, the key pillars of any effective opposition party. With none of their actual policy goals at stake, it was easy to stay united. But if Trump wins, the GOP can't stay an oppositional Party. It would, in the event of a Trump win, almost certainly, hold all levers of government. Policy accomplishments now become the prize of power, and realizing them will expose the warring factions' differing goals. Once a strong coalition of a corporate donor class, religious conservatives, and neoconservatives, a post-Trump GOP would be guided by Trumpies (fueled by racial grievance, in favor of social welfare programs, and opposed to trade and foreign adventures). The voter base that supports these positions was drawn from the previous coalitions, leaving them all weaker--and in the case of the donor class and neoconservatives, in direct conflict with the base.

Since the Nixon era, the GOP has managed to use white resentment as a way of cementing power among these groups. Trump's campaign made the implicit explicit, and he ran on a platform of white supremacy. That demon, once loosed to the public, can't be quietly ignored while the GOP's usual business--tax cuts, a war on abortion, deregulation and promotion of corporate rights, war--come back to the fore. People want a wall, they want Muslims out of their communities, they want trade deals nullified, they want "illegals" deported. Most of these things are anathema to standard-issue Republicans.

There might be a few issues they could come together on, like guns, abortion, and coal, but these are mostly not the groups' top issues. Worse, issues like nullifying Obamacare are riven with danger, since the GOP's misinformation campaign has obscured all the benefits people have under its provisions. But it's more likely that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell will push the issues they always have--massive tax cuts for the wealthy, new trade deals (it's high on the party platform), re-deregulate Wall Street, cutting future benefits to Social Security and Medicare, and radically slashing social programs. None of these things will be popular with the Trumpie base, and where will all that white resentment go if the GOP don't immediately pander to it?

Then there's the issue of Trump as president. It is frankly inconceivable to think of a non-catastrophic Trump administration. The best-case scenario is a shadow government headed by traditional GOP elites, perhaps lead by Mike Pence. Even in that scenario, it's impossible to imagine President Trump not saying things that embarrass the party and enrage allies. There are many scenarios of disaster--too many to speculate on.

After a year of in-fighting and bad leadership, the midterm elections would force the divisions wide open. Primary challengers will emerge both for and against the Trump loyalists. If Trump loses, the Party can forestall the reckoning. (Maybe.) But if he wins, the reckoning begins in a few weeks' time, as the coalitions gear up to seize power. No one is thinking about this now, but I don't see how any other outcome is possible. The Republican Party might survive a Trump candidacy; surviving a Trump presidency will be much, much harder.

Iran, Immigration, and Other Fake Emergencies

You have perhaps seen the Tancredo ad. It asserts, among other things, that "Islamic terrorists now freely roam US soil." It is a spectacular example of the "fake emergency" technique regularly employed by the Republican Party. You select an issue of great value to a panicked segment of your base, flog it like it's Hitler invading Poland (sometimes you actually compare it to Hitler invading Poland), and demand that something must be done. Tancredo is certifiable, and this is more a testament about the degree of derangement on the GOP right. (Compare, for example, to Kucinich, the regularly-derided "nut" on the Dem left. At least he admits the UFOs he sees are unidentified; the terrorists Tancredo sees are panicked phantoms.) I'll go on, but have a look, first:

Nice, eh? I have some desire to go on a thousand-word rant about this, but I'll constrain myself. The reason this technique succeeds is twofold: 1) the media parrot back the talking point as often as the nuts scream it; 2) Democrats, when quizzed by the media to offer a solution, don't say "that's a fake emergency for which no solution is necessary; if you were even a mediocre journalist, you would have done the research to confirm its mendacity." In the Iraq debate, Dems stood up and solemnly agreed: yes, Iraq is the greatest threat to the US on the planet. On immigration, they stand up and agree: yes, the failure to stop Mexicans from running through the baking desert to come work in our apple orchards represents the greatest threat to American security--a fence is most certainly in order. On Social Security: yes, it is indeed a crisis. (Fortunately they're backing off that sufficiently that even Barack Obama, who doesn't believe it, has apologized for not being clear enough that he doesn't believe it.) On Iran: yes ... well, you get the picture.

The entire Republican Party is comprised of a coalition of hysterics. The conservative movement at this point is a negotiation among the hysterics about which phantom emergency should have primacy in scaring the populace. Why the media and Dems take them at all seriously is one of modern politics' great mysteries.

The Mutable, Theoretical "Center"

Kevin Drum has a post discussing a time-honored tradition: considering ideological purity and where it may be possible to compromise, and where exactly the sweet spot will be to win elections. His formula:

Every two years the losing party has this exact same conversation: (a) move to the center to appeal more to swing voters, or (b) move left (right) in order to stay true to the party's liberal (conservative) heritage? My sense is that (b) is almost always the choice after the first loss or two, after which (a) finally wins out.

This may be plausible in a restricted sense, with a couple of stipulations: 1) that "the center" is only a theoretical place defined by the politics of the day and substantially mutable from election to election; and 2) that "right" and "left" are themselves mutable and theoretical. In a certain sense, parties must fight a battle every two years to characterize their own politics as being within that sweet spot by defining that sweet spot.

Think of the first W campaign. On foreign policy, he argued an aggressively isolationist view--described at the time as "conservative." (Gore's diplomatic, engaged approach was "liberal.") On revenues, he argued that small government was the goal, big spending and debt the enemy, and tax cuts the vehicle. Again, the conservative view. From this evolved a president who aggressively engaged in "nation building," expanded the government like no one since FDR, and plunged the country into debt it will take decades to dig out of. There's no throughline here--yet every election, the Republicans characterize whatever policies they happen to be supporting as "the center."

Something else in Kevin's post bothers me even more. While it's the politicians' role to craft their message to the frame of "centrist," it doesn't mean the actual political spectrum shifts that much election-to-election. (Over generations, some things do change, but that's a different post.) So, when he characterizes the parties' deviation from center like this, I have to call BS:

[D]uring the 90s, moving aggressively to the center after years in the wilderness, and the GOP moved so far to the right under Gingrich and Bush, that Democrats have the luxury of being able to move modestly to the left and yet still be moving relatively closer to the center than the Republican Party. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's like the GOP is moving right from 8 to 9 while the Democratic party is moving left from 4 to 3.5. The lunacy of the conservative base is providing a huge amount of cover for liberals to make some modest progress this year.

If five is the perfect center, what do 1 and 10 look like? By historical standards, a one has the economic aspects of socialism that flourished in reaction to the Gilded age through the depression--of course, far to the left of the Democratic Party. It carries with it all the hallmarks consistent with socialism--state control of many industries, pervasive workers unions, and so on. If you compare Western democracies, with their labor protections, large social networks, strong regulation of industry, you see something along the lines of a 2.5 on that scale. The current Democratic Party, which is so pro-business that it supports NAFTA et. al., resists market regulations, offers limited support for workers, has abandoned progressive taxation, and has let the social safety net fray and tear, looks like the GOP of 1960.

What's a ten look like? The farthest extremes of market freedom have occured twice in America--during the Gilded Age and now, when government has almost been removed from its role as regulator. Our foreign policy is dictated by market economics and the imperative to open new markets. I can imagine a futher step right, but in terms of historical measures, we're about as far right as we've ever been.

So if the "center" is a five, then neither party represents it. Democrats range from probably 5-8, and Republicans from 8-10. The center of that spread is about a seven, not the historic center. What we regard as the political sweet spot for getting elected now would, by historical standards, look moderately-to-extremely conservative. If a true historic liberal ran now--one who pushed for a high tax bracket of 75%, universal healthcare, vast government investment in education, a department of peace, total nuclear disarmament, labor protections equal to France's--s/he would be mocked as a fanatic. But once, those positions would have been the mainstream.

More Charged Language

It is possible, in the midst of a three-hour, 39-minute baseball game, for the attention to wander. Anyway, while the Red Sox were clubbing Seattle yesterday afternoon, mine did. (Not enough for me to tune out; a win at Safeco is rare enough that I watch to the final out.) It wandered right over to the White House's webpage, where I continued looking at the frequency with which Bush used heated languages in speeches. See if you can spot the pattern*:

"Terror" and "Danger"



The pattern was thrown off slightly by 9/11, but sure enough, when it came time to scare soccer moms before an election, Bush was ready with the fear-mongering. Of course, he's not above emotional manipulation, either. Have a look at the next chart.

"Troops"



For a guy who has ridden the backs of the military harder than any president in American history, this is pretty cynical, don't you think? But cynicism isn't just for the troops. Bush also played the God card to the hilt.

"God"


Based on this pattern, it looks like we can expect to hear a lot more of "God," "the troops," "danger" and "terror" in a few months.

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*As with the earlier graph, these use six-month averages, which is why the height of use doesn't necessarily correspond with the election. If an enterprising blogger wanted to break it down by month, it might be even more illustrative. Maybe I'll get to it during the next televised Red Sox game. (Might be awhile--I don't have cable.)

Stones, Political PTSD

Weird. Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan were both thinking along the lines I was this morning. How does that happen?

Kevin:

In the 90s, Democrats were still fighting the countercultural backlash of the 70s and needed ways to demonstrate their willingness to abandon old orthodoxies. Hanging with the DLC was a terrific way of signalling to both the press and the public that the party had reinvented itself....

But it's not because the average Kossack is to the left of the average DLCer. The real difference is that the average Kossack is obsessed with Democrats having the stones to stand up to the modern Republican machine.

No one's talking about rolling back welfare reform. No one's proposed a healthcare initiative even half as comprehensive as the 1994 Clinton plan. All three candidates continue to claim they're personally opposed to gay marriage. Their rhetoric on guns and abortion is much more muted than in the past. They mostly agree that some of the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, but not much more. They want to get out of Iraq, but that's a thoroughly mainstream position, and none of them are willing to commit to a complete withdrawal in any case.

And Andrew:

Clinton is from the traumatized generation; Obama isn't. Clinton has internalized to her bones the 1990s sense that conservatism is ascendant, that what she really believes is unpopular, that the Republicans have structural, latent power of having a majority of Americans on their side. Hence the fact that she reeks of fear, of calculation, of focus groups, of triangulation. She might once have had ideals keenly felt; she might once have actually relished fighting for them and arguing in thier defense. But she has not been like that for a very long time. She has political post-traumatic stress disorder. She saw her view of feminism gutted in the 1992 campaign; she saw her healthcare plan destroyed by what she saw as a VRWC; she remains among the most risk-averse of Democrats on foreign policy and in the culture wars.

I wonder if this is more than just a coincidence. Maybe last week's Obama-Clinton scuffle will get the ball rolling on Democratic courage.

Finding Their Morality

We are living through one of the most corrupt times in American politics. Corruption in turn breeds incompetence, and the two breed, among voters, cynicism. In response, the Democrats, to everyone's astonishment, don't seem to be able to find their voice. They waffle, equivocate, and fall back on politicalese. Last week's spat between Obama and Hillary about foreign diplomacy was the most recent case in point. Why this has happened seems clear, but first, it's relevant to deconstruct recent Republican rule to see how we got here.

The process by which the GOP managed to consolidate power included a strong moral argument: government as an institution is corrupt and malign--witness the travesties of Roe and welfare. Morality is a potent weapon; it allows you to distinguish your position from the mire of politics as usual while simultaneously identifying your opponents as that mire. The Democrats did the same thing in the 30s and carried it through the civil rights movement. With social issues and "small government" on their side, Republicans turned the tables in the 80s.

The power of this identification (GOP=morality) becomes the standard position. In any debate, voters and--to a far larger degree (quite bizarrely)--the media assume the GOP are right. So even though Bush lied his way through a war, bogus tax cuts, a phony social security debate, ad infinitum, the assumption has been that this is still the moral position. Even over the weekend, as I listened to the debate about Alberto Gonzales play out on the talk shows, there was an instinctive mistrust of the Democratic position despite overwhelming evidence that Gonzales is a toady, a liar, and a bum. (Media position: "yes, Gonzales appears to have lied, but aren't the Democrats still only interested because it gives them partisan advantage?")

Corruption, of course, resulted from the connections to K Street, the motivation of most of the GOP to rule, not govern, and a sense that reality didn't matter--there was no catastrophe that couldn't be spun to implicate the Democrats. Voters, who by nature have only a dim understanding of politics, don't know how to sort all of it out. The party of morality seems to be corrupt, and the other party--the chumps--don't know their asses from a hole in the ground. So cynicism prevails.

So why are Democrats so lame? I think they have a kind of Stockholm syndrome. It's not only the media and voters who genuflect to the moral authority of the GOP; in a certain sense, the Dems to it reflexively, too. (Unlike Republicans, who turned "liberal" into a profane description, Democrats regularly refer to "solid conservatives" as those with principles, as distinct from the cancerous Abramoff/Bush wing.) They naturally mistrust the politics of spin, and being the wonkier party, default to policy discussions rather than emotional appeals. What results is a timid, equivocating party that almost never speaks about policy in the language of morality. And, even when they do, they take a very mildly heterodox position that seems to undermine the very moral point they're making.

The "third way" politics of the DLC contain a deeply structural fault. While it may have been a successful wedge politics for the middle of the GOP era, it is by design without morality: it splits the difference. To a certain extent, all Democrats currently labor in Clinton's shadow, and his damnable DLC politics.

At some point, an overarching politics of morality is going to have to emerge that buoys and animates all their arguments--and which abandons the third way. Liberals actually believe government is good: it regulates to keep markets healthy and competitive, it redistributes to give all Americans a chance, it offers justice so that no citizen is greater or lesser before the law, and it offers security through competent foreign policy. The GOP has so profoundly dominated the politics of morality, that even to suggest that government is an agent for change seems not only unutterable, but wrong. But in fact, in every liberal democracy besides the United States, that is the default view and the unquestioned morality of politics.

If the Democrats find the courage to express this morality, 2025 might feel a lot like 1945, when those values went unquestioned. If they don't, we may be in for years more of political gridlock, polarization, and cynicism.

Rural Voters Stray the GOP

I just posted this at BlueOregon, and at the same time, we had another guest post on the same topic. So I deleted it. An item for the Zombie Blog, I imagined ...

For those of us who read polls like tea leaves, hoping to discern a pattern that will give us insight into what Americans will do in the next election, the recent Rural America poll sponsored by NPR was a shocker. Generally, reading polls is like reading tea leaves--and about as accurate. You may be able to perceive opinion trends, but how these correlate to what people do in the election booth, that's an iffier prospect. But this latest poll is dramatically at odds with conventional wisdom that it looks like it may actually mean something.

Forty-six percent of the survey respondents indicated they'd vote for an un-named Democratic candidate for president if the election were held today; 43 percent favored a Republican.... The numbers reflect a plunge in Republican support among rural voters. Exit polls from the 2000 presidential election had Republican George Bush beating Democrat Al Gore by 22 per cent in rural areas. In 2004, the actual vote tally showed President Bush outpolling his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by 19 percent among rural voters.

NPR credits the war in Iraq as the main cause for the shift, and it's clearly a factor; they note that "three-fourths of those surveyed know someone who is serving or has served in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan." But digging a little deeper, I notice a trend that should be a lot more alarming for Republicans. When compared with average Americans, rural voters feel far less prosperous and see themselves as having far worse prospects in the future.

Pollsters asked respondents to describe whether certain words applied to rural America and then whether it applied to the country as a whole. Seventy percent believed "prosperous" applied to the country, but only 42% thought it applied to rural America. Similarly, 64% thought "increasing opportunity" applied to the country, but only 39% to rural America.

More predictably, they believed rural America was more strongly oriented toward "traditional values" (80%-56%) and "strong family values" (85%-62%) than the country as a whole. These are the elements the GOP has highlighted for decades, but it apparently they are no longer enough to keep rural voters reliably loyal.

There are three statewide races in '08 (attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer), in addition to Gordon Smith's Senate seat. Conventional wisdom holds that it's the swing districts in Clackamas and Washington County where the real race is. But this assumes that Republicans have the rural districts sewn up. Perhaps that assumption isn't accurate.

Historically, Democrats did a lot better in rural America exactly because they focused on economic fairness issues. We don't know whether these results would be mirrored in Oregon. (Western politics tend not to line up like rural/urban politics of the South and NE.) And yet, the economic concerns are surely as dire in rural Oregon. So, could we be at one of those historic moments when traditional political coalitions collapse and regroup? Maybe the polls are telling us something. It's definitely worth keeping an eye on in 2008.

Why You're Liberal

Cool article in Psychology Today that explains why people choose their political affiliations. Actually, it's way more than cool. Some very revealing findings demonstrate why you're liberal (in a nutshell, because you're well-balanced and mentally healthy):

As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.

The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.

The study's authors also concluded that conservatives have less tolerance for ambiguity, a trait they say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, "Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think," and "I'm the decider." Those who think the world is highly dangerous and those with the greatest fear of death are the most likely to be conservative.

I could excerpt more, but it's probably better for you to just go read the whole thing.