While mulling some recent material from The Bulwark, I thought I’d explain something to the converted “Never Trumpers” the outlet represents, and did so at New York:
For a while now I’ve had a guilty-pleasure reading habit: The Bulwark, that semi-official outlet of Never Trumpers who view themselves as having definitively broken with the GOP thanks to their former party’s thralldom to Donald J. Trump. I share its contributors’ belief that they (the tribe usefully described by Miller as Red Dog Democrats) represent not just a self-promoting claque of elite scribblers but a real if marginal faction of the Democratic Party, having burned a lot of bridges on their way out of the GOP. Their views appear to parallel those of a significant number of suburban Republicans and independents who voted Democratic in 2018 and 2020. And given the very close balance between voters of the two parties, as reflected most recently in 2020, Democrats really can’t afford to contemptuously reject any potential adherents, however alien or even repugnant they might find their backgrounds.
So it’s understandable when Bulwark co-founder Charlie Sykes expresses frustration that Democrats refuse to consider their pleas for policy concessions on grounds of holding old grudges:
“The spending. The wokeness. The repeal of the Hyde Amendment. I could go on …
“These are difficult times for folks on the center-right, who’ve tried to join Democrats in a loose alliance to protect the Republic from Trumpism …
“Litmus tests are applied: it’s not enough to be pro-democracy, NTers are also expected to embrace the elements of the progressive agenda — from free community college, to abortion, rent moratoriums, police funding, transgenderism, CRT, social spending, and the candidacy of Greta Thunberg for sainthood.”
Sykes fears it’s all very personal, and warns, “If you cancel moderates/conservatives for their past sins, you don’t have a coalition.”
Here’s the thing, though: It’s not really about the Red Dogs. Yes, I’m sure it’s been tough for them to watch Democrats largely come together around a legislative program that’s significantly more progressive than the one advanced by the Obama administration. But Democrats have been coalescing around the basics of the Build Back Better agenda for some time now. That the famously moderate Joe Biden now embraces it is a sign of how the party has slowly evolved, not some sort of betrayal or surrender to the left. And anyone who paid close attention to the 2020 presidential primaries should have understood that there is less distance between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders than between Joe Biden and the Joe Biden of the 1990s.
Part of what has happened is simply a resolution of internal conflicts among Democrats that left them defensive and at times incoherent. A classic example is one that Sykes mentioned: abortion policy. For years, Democrats claimed to value reproductive rights even as they accepted significant limitations on them: e.g., the Hyde Amendment, which made abortion services, unlike any other medical services, ineligible for any sort of federal support. That amendment, along with acceptance of some largely symbolic restrictions on rare late-term abortions, and the whole “safe, legal, and rare” messaging introduced by Bill Clinton, represented concessions to a significant bloc of Democratic voters and Democratic pols who did not recognize reproductive rights at all.
That has changed over time. Anti-abortion Democratic politicians are a rare and shrinking breed, and there are now significantly fewer anti-abortion Democratic voters than there are pro-choice Republicans. Most Democrats, including Joe Biden, have made the leap into a more coherent and unified position. They aren’t going to turn back the clock to satisfy ex-Republicans, but they aren’t insisting on a “litmus test” just to annoy or exclude them, either. The same could be said for other policy tenets once beloved by a significant number of Democrats — from fiscal hawkishness to armed interventionism to an openness to “entitlement reform” — that remain attractive to the newest proto-Democrats. As for the idea that Democrats are some sort of rigid ideological cult: Come on, seriously? Look at what’s going on with the attempted enactment of the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. If this is an intolerant and exclusive political party, I’d hate to see a loosey-goosey one try to function. It may just be that the issues Red Dogs fret about may lie outside the still relatively loose bounds of party unity.
This doesn’t mean Red Dogs should despair, but it may mean another painful reevaluation of priorities, recognizing that most have already had to sacrifice a lot of old allegiances and even the habitual language used to make sense of the political world. In many respects, the Never Trumpers resemble their spiritual (and in some cases biological) predecessors, the neo-conservatives. These were people who broke with the Democratic Party out of a conviction that Democratic views on national security made continued party loyalty impossible. But most of them retained many views that horrified their new Republican allies until they accepted the inevitable role of a factional minority and grew to accommodate or even share the policy positions and ideological language of the GOP, which was increasingly dominated by conservatives with their own ideological-consistency demands.
Most Red Dogs have no illusions about the party they’ve left and understand their constituencies are too small to form a third force or demand concessions from a position of strength. Most, I suppose, will get used to the strange and sometimes lurid landscape of the Donkey Party. Others will embrace the posture of the gadfly, the people of no party or coalition. But it’s really not personal. It’s just politics.
My memory of Rubinomics associates it with bringing down the interest rate and reducing the deficit, rather than free trade. This apparently has changed in the post-election discussion.
The benefits of free trade have not been shared, no doubt. The “free” part has been taken by opportunists to mean free from the need to share gains or mitigate pains. Populists are right to shut down the store until accounts are set up correctly.
But the other side of Rubinomics is no less difficult. Getting the budget under control. Debt service and the retiring baby boomers are going to set up an impossible situation. Remember, off-the-books borrowing from Social Security and Medicare funds is not only going to stop, but will need to be reversed simultaneous with the ballooning debt service.
Clearly fiscal responsibility means revenue increases. Tax increases? Not on the middle class. That is the Democrats bargain with the voter in the past election. And we’d better not renege on that. The 1994 election, if you’ll recall, was demagogued by the Gingrich and the Republicans using very meagre tax increases.
Where then? I’d like to see somebody else’s ideas. I would first end the cap on payroll taxes. This would have the effect of increasing the top marginal rate by 16% or so for earned income, earmarked for the entitlements that will be needing it.
Symbolically, it might be neat to institute a new top marginal rate of 80 or 90 percent on income over $3 million.
An idea that is not mine, but I forget where I saw it, was to get rid of all the income tax deductions and credits and bells and whistles in favor of five: children, pensions, health care, education, mortgages. This might net the most, while holding the middle class harmless.
“Taxes” won’t be such a dirty word if it is applied to the other guy.
“Free” vs. “Fair” Trade
As the Rubinites and the economic populists square off on a number of issues which includes the free versus fair trade debate, the narrow use of the term “fair” trade by some Democrats borders on a disguised and thus disquieting form of rank economic nationalism.
Free trade is not fair trade when our government, thanks to powerful and well-heeled lobbies, refuses to couple “free” trade with the abolition of the patently inefficient subsidization of cotton, wheat, and sugar production in this country, among other such supports. These subsidies underwrite a monied elite while increasing the price of these products for consumers, not to mention the denial of economic opportunities for foreign workers. (Here in Florida, for example, we not only subsidize “big sugar” and thus pay more for our sugar, but we also subsidize their cost of doing business by using tax dollars to clean up their despoilment of the Everglades.)
An example of this “fairness” is reflected in the draft free trade agreement with Peru. As drafted, its implementation would demolish the Peruvian wheat, cotton, and sugar industries, for even with their lower wage rates, they cannot compete with the artificially supported low prices for these products.
Some Democrats are calling for better labor and environmental laws and their enforcement, which in Peru’s case could be strengthened, but this call is being made without any discussion whatsoever of the “unfair” destruction of three Peruvian industries.
The money we waste on welfare for industries that don’t need protection could be better spent on the social nets necessary for a fair trade driven economy.
In short, if the economic populists are going to argue for fair trade then they should use that term consistently to apply not only to our trading partners but to ourselves as well.