During a recent solitary drive, I did something I hadn’t done in a long, long time: listened to Rush Limbaugh for thirty minutes or so. I was curious to learn if Rush’s recent extracurricular problems, and/or the November election results, had made him a tad humbler.Of course not. The first few minutes of Rush were devoted to redundant and completely idiotic assertions (on the authority of some British journalist, no less) that “liberals” were demanding the presidency for Hillary Clinton as compensation for her endurance of a troubled marriage. (Guess Rush doesn’t read many “liberal” blogs, eh?). But it got a lot worse: Limbaugh then started reading, verbatim, a long blog post by a Selwyn Duke entitled “Soft People, Hard People.” Aside from making Sigmund Freud stir in his grave, Duke basically argues that the “feminization” of American society, and our “weak” and sentimental attachment to things like civil liberties, sexual equality and independent media, doom us to extinction by the “hard people” of the Third World, especially Islamists, who laugh, laugh, laugh at our “soft” refusal to fight fire with fire.This is, of course, an argument about the indefensibility of “civilized” impulses that goes all the way back to Gibbons’ suggestion that Christianity fatally undermined the martial spirit of Rome. More recently, it was an essential element of the fascist contention that bourgeois liberal parliamentary democracy was too weak and “soft” to prevail against Bolshevism.Since Duke, and his publicist Limbaugh, don’t explicitly call for imprisonment of what Duke calls the “enemy inside the gates,” (though he does indulge in the “disease” metaphor for domestic enemies that the Nazis were so fond of, implying as it did a license to exterminate them as an act of biological self-defense), maybe a fairer analogy would be the Cold War argument that civil liberties should not be extended to communists, and that “hard” anti-communist authoritarian regimes beyond our borders deserved our maximum support. Indeed, Dinesh D’Souza recently extended that argument into the post-Cold War era by claiming that Jimmy Carter’s human rights fetish destabilized Reza Pahlavi and led to the Islamic Revolution in Iran and every Middle East calamity since then.Aside from confirming that Rush Limbaugh is as nutty and dangerous as ever, his reading of Duke’s jeremiad provided a timely reminder that there is and always has been a vast and momentous difference in world-view between Left-Center and Right, even among those who thought the Cold War was worth fighting, and among those who now think we are in a war with Jihadism. Some folks on the Left appear to believe there’s really no fundamental difference between Dick Cheney (who clearly thinks only “soft people” care about Abu Ghraib or Gitmo) and, say, Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton, or Peter Beinart or Thomas Friedman (who clearly think the universal values of liberalism are America’s best weapons in any war).If the only thing that matters to you is being right or wrong on the original decision to go into Iraq, or if your litmus test is whether this or that person favors immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, maybe such subtle distinctions as this or that person’s basic orientation on civil liberties, sexual equality, human rights, independent media, or the ultimate meaning of Western Civilization, represent nothing more than a lot of elitist talk. But in the long run, when it comes to electoral choices between the Hard Boys of the Right who think liberal values should be discarded as self-destructive baggage, and the Soft Men and Women of the Center-Left who think they are the essence of any civilization worth fighting for–maybe it will matter a whole lot.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 25: Democrats Dodge Bullet As Trump Kills Higher Income Tax on the Wealthy
Sometimes dogs that don’t bark are very significant, and I noted one at New York:
Republicans have both an arithmetic and a messaging problem as they try to enact Donald Trump’s second-term agenda via a giant budget-reconciliation bill. The former involves finding a way to pay for the $4 trillion-plus tax cuts Trump has demanded, along with a half-trillion or so in border security and defense spending increases. And the latter flows from the necessity of hammering popular federal programs (especially Medicaid) to avoid boosting budget deficits that are already out of control from the perspective of conservatives. This sets up Democrats nicely to deplore the whole mess as a matter of “cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for Trump’s billionaire friends,” a very effective message that has vulnerable House Republicans worried.
To interrupt this line of attack while making the overall agenda slightly more affordable, anonymous White House sources lofted a trial balloon earlier this month via a Fox News report:
“White House aides are quietly floating a proposal within the House GOP that would raise the tax rate for people making more than $1 million to 40%, two sources familiar with discussions told Fox News Digital, to offset the cost of eliminating taxes on overtime pay, tipped wages, and retirees’ Social Security.
“The sources stressed the discussions were only preliminary, and the plan is one of many being talked about as congressional Republicans work on advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda via the budget reconciliation process.
“Trump and his White House have not yet taken a position on the matter, but the idea is being looked at by his aides and staff on Capitol Hill.”
The idea wasn’t as shocking as it might seem. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts reduced the top income-tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, so just letting that provision expire would accomplish the near-40 percent rate without disturbing other goodies for rich people in the 2017 bill like corporate-tax cuts, estate-tax cuts, and a relaxed alternative minimum tax for both individuals and corporations. One House Republican, Pennsylvania’s Dan Meuser, suggested resetting the top individual tax rate at 38.6 percent, still a reduction from pre-2017 levels but a “tax increase on the rich” as compared to current policies.
Crafty as this approach might have been as a way of boosting claims that Trump had aligned the GOP with middle-class voters (the intended beneficiaries of his recent tax-cut proposals) rather than the very rich, the idea of backing any tax increase on the allegedly super-productive job creators at the top of the economic pyramid struck many Republicans as the worst imaginable heresy. You could plausibly argue that total opposition to higher taxes, or even to progressive taxes, was the holy grail for the party, more foundational than any other principle and one of the remaining links between pre-Trump and MAGA conservatism. At the very idea of fuzzing up the tax-cut gospel, old GOP warhorses like Newt Gingrich and Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist arose from their political rest homes to shout: unclean! Gingrich called it the worst potential betrayal of the Cause since George H.W. Bush cut a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal in 1990 that included a tax increase.
As it happens, it was all a mirage. In virtual unison, both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have said a high-end tax cut won’t happen this year, as Politico reports:
“President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday came out against a tax hike on the wealthiest Americans — likely putting the nail in the coffin of the idea.
“Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he thought the idea would be ‘very disruptive’ because it would prompt wealthy people to leave the country. …
“Johnson separately knocked the idea earlier in the day, saying that he is ‘not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that traditionally.’”
Trump’s real fear may be that wealthy people would leave the GOP rather than the country. Many are already upset about Trump’s 19th-century protectionist tariff agenda and its effects on the investor class. Subordinating the tax-cut gospel to other MAGA goals might push some of them over the edge. As for Johnson, the Speaker is having to cope with the eternal grumbling of the House Freedom Caucus, where domestic budget cuts are considered a delightful thing in itself and the idea of boosting anyone’s taxes to succor the parasites receiving Medicaid benefits is horrifying.
If Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill runs into trouble or if Democrats set the table for a big midterm comeback wielding the “cutting Medicaid to give billionaires a tax break” message, squashing the symbolic gesture of a small boost in federal income-tax rates for the wealthy may be viewed in retrospect as a lost opportunity for the GOP. For the time being, that party’s bond with America’s oligarchs and their would-be imitators stands intact.