Open Thread - Politics Plus

Yes but Bloomberg will be a problem for Clinton too.

I'm pretty sure he'll only enter the race if Sanders gets the nomination. Bloomberg and Clinton are so alike in their views that he would see no point in running against her.

I wonder where coldjoint went?????

His name would logically suggest it was somewhere warm and dry. But as logical isn't really his thing...

Bloomberg has no organization established for a run whereas the others have been building their's up for a year or far longer. So besides from a run against Hillary being the stupidest waste of money, there's no indication he'll run against her. And the notion that Hillary is unelectable is some sort of weird hope not reflected in polling. Sheesh.

The GOP planned a dynastic restoration in 2016. Instead, it triggered an internal class war. Can the party reconcile the demands of its donors with the interests of its rank and file?

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how white male became an accusation rather than a description.

You can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites without a college degree express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.

These populists seek to defend what the French call “acquired rights”—health care, pensions, and other programs that benefit older people—against bankers and technocrats who endlessly demand austerity; against migrants who make new claims and challenge accustomed ways; against a globalized market that depresses wages and benefits.

In the United States, they lean Republican because they fear the Democrats want to take from them and redistribute to Americans who are newer, poorer, and in their view less deserving—to “spread the wealth around,” in candidate Barack Obama’s words to “Joe the Plumber” back in 2008.

Yet they have come to fear more and more strongly that their party does not have their best interests at heart.

Politics was becoming more central to Americans’ identities in the 21st century than it ever was in the 20th.

Would you be upset if your child married a supporter of a different party from your own? In 1960, only 5 percent of Americans said yes. In 2010, a third of Democrats and half of Republicans did.

Political identity has become so central because it has come to overlap with so many other aspects of identity: race, religion, lifestyle.

In 1960, I wouldn’t have learned much about your politics if you told me that you hunted. Today, that hobby strongly suggests Republican loyalty. Unmarried? In 1960, that indicated little. Today, it predicts that you’re a Democrat, especially if you’re also a woman.

The Great Recession ended in the summer of 2009. Since then, the U.S. economy has been growing, but most incomes have not grown comparably. In 2014, real median household income remained almost $4,000 below the pre-recession level, and well below the level in 1999.

The country has recovered from the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. Most of its people have not.

Many Republicans haven’t shared in the recovery and continued upward flight of their more affluent fellow partisans.

It was these pessimistic Republicans who powered the Tea Party movement of 2009 and 2010. They were not, as a rule, libertarians looking for an ultraminimal government. The closest study we have of the beliefs of Tea Party supporters, led by Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist, found that “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.

The distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘people who don’t work’ is fundamental to Tea Party ideology.”

Yet even as the Republican Main Street protested Obamacare, it rejected the hardening ideological orthodoxy of Republican donors and elected officials. A substantial minority of Republicans—almost 30 percent—said they would welcome “heavy” taxes on the wealthy, according to Gallup. Within the party that made Paul Ryan’s entitlement-slashing budget plan a centerpiece of policy, only 21 percent favored cuts in Medicare and only 17 percent wanted to see spending on Social Security reduced, according to Pew. Less than a third of ordinary Republicans supported a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants (again according to Pew); a majority, by contrast, favored stepped-up deportation.

As a class, big Republican donors could not see any of this, or would not. So neither did the politicians who depend upon them. Against all evidence, both groups interpreted the Tea Party as a mass movement in favor of the agenda of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

One of the more dangerous pleasures of great wealth is that you never have to hear anyone tell you that you are completely wrong.

The puzzle for the monied leaders of the Republican Party is: What now? And what next after that? None of the options facing the GOP elite is entirely congenial. But there appear to be four paths the elite could follow, for this campaign season and beyond. They lead the party in very different directions.

Option 1: Double Down

The premise of the past few thousand words is that the Republican donor elite failed to impose its preferred candidate on an unwilling base in 2015 for big and important reasons. But maybe that premise is wrong. Maybe Jeb Bush has just been a bad candidate with a radioactive last name. Maybe the same message and platform would have worked fine if espoused by a fresher and livelier candidate. Such is the theory of Marco Rubio’s campaign. Or—even if the donor message and platform have troubles—maybe $100 million in negative ads can scorch any potential alternative, enabling the donor-backed candidate to win by default.

And if not Rubio, maybe the core donor message could still work if joined to a true outsider candidacy: Ben Carson’s, for example. Carson is often regarded as a protest candidate, but as The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes enthused back in January 2015: “One thing not in doubt is Carson’s conservatism. He’s the real deal, an economic, social, and foreign policy conservative.” Carson may say wacky things, but he does not say heterodox things.

Yet even if the Republican donor elite can keep control of the party while doubling down, it’s doubtful that the tactic can ultimately win presidential elections. The “change nothing but immigration” advice was a self-flattering fantasy from the start. Immigration is not the main reason Republican presidential candidates lose so badly among Latino and Asian American voters, and never was: Latino voters are more likely to list education and health care as issues that are extremely important to them. A majority of Asian Americans are non-Christian and susceptible to exclusion by sectarian religious themes.

So …

Option 2: Tactical Concession

Perhaps some concession to the disgruntled base is needed. That’s the theory of the Cruz campaign and—after a course correction—also of the Christie campaign. Instead of 2013’s “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Liberalization,” Cruz and Christie are urging “Conservatism Classic Plus Immigration Enforcement.” True, Cruz’s carefully selected words on immigration leave open the possibility of guest-worker programs or other pro-employer reforms after a burst of border enforcement. But Cruz and Christie have seen the reaction to Donald Trump’s message, and appear to appreciate the need to at least seem to do something to redress the grievances of the Republican base.

Much of the donor elite could likely be convinced that while Jeb Bush’s idea of immigration reform would be good to have, it isn’t a must-have. Just as the party elite reached a pact on abortion with social conservatives in the 1980s, it could concede the immigration issue to its Main Street base in the 2010s.


Yet a narrow focus on immigration populism alone seems insufficient to raise Republican hopes. Trump shrewdly joins his immigration populism to trade populism. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders’s opposition to open borders is logically connected to his hopes for a Democratic Socialist future: His admired Denmark upholds high labor standards along with some of the world’s toughest immigration rules. Severed from a larger agenda, however—as Mitt Romney tried to sever the issue in 2012—immigration populism looks at best like pandering, and at worst like identity politics for white voters. In a society that is and always has been multiethnic and polyglot, any national party must compete more broadly than that.

Which brings us to …

Option 3: True Reform

Admittedly, this may be the most uncongenial thought of them all, but party elites could try to open more ideological space for the economic interests of the middle class.

Make peace with universal health-insurance coverage: Mend Obamacare rather than end it.

Cut taxes less at the top, and use the money to deliver more benefits to working families in the middle.

Devise immigration policy to support wages, not undercut them.

Worry more about regulations that artificially transfer wealth upward, and less about regulations that constrain financial speculation.

Take seriously issues such as the length of commutes, nursing-home costs, and the anticompetitive practices that inflate college tuition.

Remember that Republican voters care more about aligning government with their values of work and family than they care about cutting the size of government as an end in itself.

Recognize that the gimmick of mobilizing the base with culture-war outrages stopped working at least a decade ago.

Such a party would cut health-care costs by squeezing providers, not young beneficiaries. It would boost productivity by investing in hard infrastructure—bridges, airports, water-treatment plants. It would restore Dwight Eisenhower to the Republican pantheon alongside Ronald Reagan and emphasize the center in center-right.

To imagine the change is to see how convulsive it would be—and how unlikely.

True, center-right conservative parties backed by broad multiethnic coalitions of the middle class have gained and exercised power in other English-speaking countries, even as Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 and 2012.

But the most-influential voices in American conservatism reject the experience of their foreign counterparts as weak, unprincipled, and unnecessary.

In parliamentary democracy, winning or losing is starkly binary: A party either is in power or is the opposition.

In the American system, that binary is much blurrier. Republicans can, of course, exert some control over government as long as they hold any one of the House, Senate, or presidency.

Which brings us finally to …

Option 4: Change the Rules of the Game

“The filibuster used to be bad. Now it’s good.” So Fred Thompson, the late actor and former Republican senator, jokingly told an audience on a National Review cruise shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency for the first time.

How partisans feel about process issues is notoriously related to what process would benefit them at any given moment. Liberals loved the interventionist Supreme Court in the 1960s and ’70s, hated it in the 1990s and 2000s—and may rotate their opinion again if a President Hillary Clinton can tilt a majority of the Supreme Court their way. It’s an old story that may find a new twist if and when Republicans acknowledge that the presidency may be attainable only after they make policy changes that are unacceptable to the party elite.

There are metrics, after all, by which the post-2009 GOP appears to be a supremely successful political party. Recently, Rory Cooper, of the communications firm Purple Strategies, tallied a net gain to the Republicans of 69 seats in the House of Representatives, 13 seats in the Senate, 900-plus seats in state legislatures, and 12 governorships since Obama took office. With that kind of grip on state government, in particular, Republicans are well positioned to write election and voting rules that sustain their hold on the national legislature. The president may be able to grant formerly illegal immigrants the right to work, but he cannot grant them the right to vote. In this light, instead of revising Republican policies to stop future Barack Obamas and Hillary Clintons, maybe it’s necessary to revise only the party rules to stop future Donald Trumps from confronting party elites with their own unpopularity.

What happens to an elite whose followers withdraw their assent?

Does it self-examine? Or does it take refuge in denial? Does it change? Or does it try to prevent change? Does it challenge itself to build a new political majority? Or does it seize the opportunities the American political system offers to compact and purposeful minorities? When its old answers fail, will it think anew? Or will it simply repeat louder the dogmas that enthralled supporters in the past? Americans love the crush of competition, the hard-fought struggle, the long-slogging race. But much more than the pundit’s “Who will win?,” it is these deeper questions from the election of 2016 that will shape the future of American politics.