Yesterday I talked about the forces driving the GOP into an attack on public higher education. But there’s a larger and more nefarious Republican drift to perdition on K-12 education, as I discussed at Washington Monthly:

As you may recall, the president nominated and (sort of) elected with the universal and enthusiastic backing of the entire conservative movement made his signal domestic policy initiative (aside from tax cuts!) an education reform law called No Child Left Behind. By the time George W. Bush left office, it was rare to find a Republican politician who did not at some point or another trash NCLB as a godless liberal travesty. Among the more serious conservative types, it was typically touted, along with the Medicare Part D program, as proof W. was no better than his damned RINO tax-raising Trilateral Commission/Planned Parenthood father.
It was, as everyone seems to have forgotten, in no small part the desire to find an alternative state-initiated structure for K-12 education reform–one that wouldn’t have NCLB’s strong federal role or its strict focus on poor and minority kids–that led the business community and Republican governors to spear-head Common Core Standards.
I mention all this because a bill to reauthorize NCLB with “reforms” is about to hit the House floor. The president’s already issued (via OMB) a veto threat, because the bill caps federal education spending and gives states broad discretion to spend it as they see fit, even for non-education priorities; the whole idea of NCLB, of course, was to use federal funds to leverage better state enforcement of their own education standards as they affected the kids most in need of help.
But here’s the interesting thing: the bill is also being attacked from the right because it maintains a federal role in education. Heritage Action has, for example, come out against the bill.
The current trajectory of conservative thinking on K-12 education is definitely towards abolition of any federal role, and possibly towards using “parental choice” to radically reduce the state-and-local government role in schools. If future Republican candidates for president decide they need to show “compassion,” it won’t be in support of public education.

I should amend that final conclusion to note that future Republican candidates for president may claim they are being compassionate by proposing to liberate children from “government schools” and give them subsidies that will partially defray the cost of private schools which will not, of course, have to accept all kids or practice non-discrimination in hiring or agree to achieve any particular results.

Aside from the big New Deal entitlements of Social Security and Medicare, and of course national defense, the government functions most popular among Americans involve public education. Republicans, following radical conservative thinking on education, are increasingly tempted to take an ideological bender into direct attacks on public education, particularly when their lower-tax and less-government agenda forces them to find large areas of the public sector to cut. This week I’ve noted two examples of this dynamic. The first, involving higher education, was at TPMCafe:

Some high-profile Republican governors and legislative leaders are in a particularly deep hole of their own making, and are taking on the state version of the political “third rail” by attacking higher education spending.
There are plenty of reasons why higher ed is an unusually tough place to cut, varying from the power of alumni to football and basketball and the perceived economic payoff of a good state university system. Still, during the depths of the Great Recession, virtually all states cut higher ed subsidies, which non-coincidentally produced a large wave of tuition increases. But some cut more than others, and are doing less to replace lost funding now that the economy’s doing better. Only eight states failed to increase per student higher ed spending in Fiscal Year 2014: Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, West Virginia and Wyoming. And now in 2015 it generates headlines when significant higher education cuts are proposed, as in Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Louisiana.
You may note that these are all states with highly ideological Republican state administrations and legislatures. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback narrowly survived a reelection challenge focused on his credit-damaging tax cuts and unpopular education cuts; now, with little to lose, he’s back for more. In North Carolina, a state often matched with Kansas as a deliberate conservative policy experiment station, state legislators (guided by a conservative think tank founded by highly influential billionaire Art Pope) are seeking shutdowns in ideologically unfavored parts of the university system.
And two Republican governors who are clearly running for president are distinguishing themselves in this areas as well. Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal has fought with his own Republican state legislature over tax and education policy, and is now seeking heavy higher ed cuts to deal with a large budget shortfall attributed equally to his fiscal mismanagement and to lower oil prices. And Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, having signed a $541 million tax cut package last year, is now pursuing $300 million in higher ed cuts, amounting to 13% of state aid to the university system.
What makes the new round of cut proposals interesting, particularly in North Carolina and Wisconsin, is that they are being justified on culture-war grounds, not just a matter of fiscal priorities.
This is clearest in North Carolina, where the most discussed cuts involve “liberal” centers attached to the university system that engage in advocacy work (as noted by the New York Times‘ Richard Fausset):

An advisory panel of the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors has recommended closing three academic centers, including a poverty center and one dedicated to social change, inciting outrage among liberals who believe that conservatives in control of state government are targeting ideological opponents in academia.
Conservatives are cheering the move, seeing it as a corrective to a higher education system they believe has lent its imprimatur to groups that engage in partisan activism.
“They’re moving in the right direction, though I don’t think they went far enough,” said Francis X. De Luca, president of the Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank based in Raleigh. “A lot of these centers were started up with a specific advocacy role in mind, as opposed to an educational role.”

The full name of the Civitas Institute, by the way, is the John William Pope Civitas Institute. There are persistent rumors that Republicans want to crown his hostile takeover of the state by making him president of the University of North Carolina. You’d think conservatives would let the recently deceased Hall of Fame coach and progressive Dean Smith get settled in his grave first, but you never know.
Meanwhile, Walker has given an ideological edge to his own higher ed cuts by seeking to modify the mission statement of the university system to make it clear its job is workforce development for the state’s fine corporations, not any liberal guff about “truth” or “service.” He’s since backed off on that proposal, but is at the same time making it clear he wants the cuts to lead to layoffs or longer hours for faculty, not tuition increases. His combative posture towards the academic circles long deplored by conservatives as a source of “liberal brainwashing” has fed a separate controversy over Walker’s lack of a college degree (he dropped out of Marquette University late in his senior year to take a job). Only one prominent Democrat–Howard Dean–has made an issue of this as a problem for Walker’s presidential aspirations, but dozens, maybe hundreds, of conservative voices have been raised in angry denunciation of “liberal elites” aligned with self-serving liberal academia.

Democrats should respond to such budget-driven risky gambits by Republicans by not taking the bait on culture-war attacks and instead noting the importance of public higher education at a time when parents and students are struggling to pay high tuitions, not to mention their affect on the long-rate economic prospects of the communities they serve. Nobody should care whether Scott Walker finished college. They should care if he’s trying to limit the educational opportunities of the people of his state.

During the last decade, as the Republican Party slid remorselessly towards the extremist Right, its tribunes have had an obvious motive to deny that phenomenon and proclaim the GOP as situated firmly in the sensible center, and/or to make the false equivalence claim that Democrats have matched or exceeded the lurch into questionable territory. So if only in self-defense or for purposes of analytical clarity, Democrats need to pay attention to arguments over ideology and the GOP.
That’s why I paid attention to a polite argument this last week between liberal blogger Kevin Drum of Mother Jones and conservative analysts Sean Trende and David Byler of RealClearPolitics, about where to situate Scott Walker on the ideological spectrum. I wrote up my observations at Washington Monthly:

I somehow missed Kevin Drum’s February 11 post quoting a San Francisco State political scientist who in turn was using a Stanford professor’s methodology to argue that Scott Walker’s more conservative than any GOP presidential nominee since before Ronald Reagan.
This post definitely caught Sean Trende and David Byler’s attention, leading to a very elaborate (if polite) dashing of cold water on the Scott-Walker-as-the-New-Barry-Goldwater hypothesis, if that’s what you want to call it. Trende and Byler come at it from several different directions, illustrating the advantage columnists with relatively few time and space limitations have over a blogger who has to make do quickly with the news material at hand. As it happens, I agree with one of their arguments against the underlying DIME system of Stanford’s Adam Bonica, which assigns ideological “scores” to politicians based on the characteristics of his or her donors.

While donors probably tend to support candidates who generally share their ideology, other factors might affect donor decisions – what issues the candidate focuses on the most, the candidate’s public persona and life history, how much a donor simply “likes” a candidate – and all of these preferences are rolled into this rating.

As Trende & Byler note, Barack Obama’s pre-convention “rating” in 2008 was very far to the “left.” Does that mean lefty donors (assuming that can really be measured accurately) thought he was as lefty as they were? Or simply that he got them all? Or perhaps that they knew he was “moderate” but was less “moderate” than Hillary Clinton? Or maybe that they thought he was more electable? Or because of the historic character of his candidacy? It’s entirely unclear, but it is clear rating a candidate’s ideology on his or her donors is perilous and ignores all sorts of context issues, particularly in terms of the choices available to donors.
In the end, though, my only real disagreement with Kevin involves his conclusion: that Scott Walker is a lot more conservative than he seems. He could have that backwards in a way that helps explain why conservative donors are attracted to Walker: he’s conservative for a blue state governor. Why is Walker, and not, say, Rick Perry, famous for ferocious attacks on the collective bargaining rights of public employees? Because public employees in Texas don’t have any collective bargaining rights to begin with. The same is true of Walker’s famous conservative evangelical religiosity, with God telling him to do this and that. Deep South Republicans talk that way all the time. So thanks to his context Walker seems more conservative than he necessarily is, and–here’s a big bonus for him–in a way that simultaneously creates an electability argument. If he can get re-elected in Wisconsin after taking positions that nobody would think twice about in deep-red states, he’s a brave conservative warrior and one who has proven he can persuade swing voters either despite or because of his hammer-headed characteristics.

So measuring ideology is tricky. Scott Walker is vastly more conservative than blue-state Republicans used to be by any objective measure. And so he exerts an appeal to conservative donors that some (objectively) even more conservative red-state politicians struggle to match. Part of his appeal is attributable to the attention he naturally gets; part comes from the thrill conservatives get from watching him beat the hated enemy on its home turf; and part is indeed an electability argument, made even more attractive because it does not involve compromise or “moderation.” He seems more conservative than he probably is, and in today’s GOP, it’s hard to look too conservative.

Earlier today J.P Green addressed one argument against the “Emerging Democratic Majority” hypothesis that has emerged since John Judis’ expressed second thoughts about the projections made in the 2002 book he co-wrote with TDS co-founder Ruy Teixeira. I addressed others at TPMCafe:

[W]hen John Judis “recanted” his “prophecy” in a National Journal article a few weeks ago with the provocative (if carefully chosen) title “An Emerging Republican Advantage,” joy broke out all over the conservative chattering classes. One of the best and most honest of conservative analysts, however, Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics, who had been writing about the Judis/Teixeira hypothesis for years, noted that the book itself had never supported the myth of “demographic destiny” with which it was associated:

While the debates over demographics and future elections have become filled with triumphalist rhetoric about ascendant coalitions and Republicans potentially suffering a Whig-like extinction, these are the views of popularizers and partisans who have latched onto the book for their own purposes.

He might have added that the Judis/Teixeira hypothesis also became confused with the eternal argument in both parties between those wanting to focus national campaigns on “base mobilization” rather than swing voter persuasion: If the “base” is growing naturally without any special cultivation, all the messy compromises involved in growing the coalition via conversion may not be necessary (again, the opposite conclusion might be reached by Republicans looking at the same trends). This isn’t at all what Judis and Teixeira actually said.
Aside from inadvertently enabling Republicans to claim a phony victory over the straw man of demographic destiny, Judis’ “recantation” wasn’t much accepted by Democrats. His argument for a GOP “advantage,” based partially on a worrying trend he found among college-educated voters, and partially on anecdotal musings over the 2014 gubernatorial victory of Larry Hogan that so stunned Maryland Democrats like himself, drew a response from New York‘s Jonathan Chait, relying in part on emailed advice from none other than Ruy Teixeira:

[T]he core insight of the emerging democratic majority thesis has held up remarkably well. And Judis does not actually refute it in any convincing way. He does not mention continuing Democratic strength among the fast-growing bloc of Latino voters. He does cite exit polling that showed Republicans splitting the Asian-American vote in 2014, a shocking finding that is almost certainly wrong. He does cite a Harvard poll of young voters, which appears to show weakening support for Democrats. But that poll has yielded unusual findings in comparison with other surveys. (The Harvard poll predicted a majority of young voters would vote for Republican House candidates in 2014; in reality, they voted Democratic at the same rate as in 2010.
Judis focuses on white middle-class voters, whom he sees as moving steadily toward the GOP. But the trend he cites begins with (depending on which example he uses) either 2006 or 2008, which were Democratic wave elections, a high point from which at least some regression both would be expected and would still allow a margin of error, given the massive Democratic sweep in both elections. Judis does not mention that Republicans need to ratchet up their share of the white vote continuously, or else dramatically improve their standing among nonwhites, merely to remain competitive.

Like Trende, though, Chait not only concedes but emphasizes one question about “majority” projections that has steadily become more relevant since 2002: a majority of what?

The [Democratic] party’s new base is heavily concentrated in urban areas, whose voting strength underrepresented in both the House and the Senate. Additionally, they are far more likely than core Republican voters to stay home during midterm elections. This has allowed the Republican Party to gain a near lock on holding the House, and a strong geographic advantage in holding the Senate. The Emerging Democratic Majority thus comes with the very important caveat that it applies only to one branch of government. (Likewise, Phillip’s Emerging Republican Majority coincided with a period of continuous Democratic control of the House.)

Indeed, Sean Trende argues that the true “Republican” advantage in the immediate future is that the GOP is more likely to win the White House than Democrats are to win Congress. But the deeper reality is that neither party commands anything like a stable majority, and the long-term Democratic advantage created by demographic trends is countered by a long-term Republican advantage created by the Founders’ decision to give every state two Senate seat and by the superior efficiency in distribution of Republican votes among House districts, reinforced by gerrymandering.
If American politics were a tennis game, we’d be in the final game of the final set, at “Deuce.”

It’s possible, then, for the two parties to enjoy multiple overlapping majorities over a relatively short period of time, depending on how you define “majority.” As Chait indicates, nothing Judis and Teixeira said originally needs to be “recanted;” the picture is just more complex than ever, and there are enough counter-forces to cast doubt on how quickly and thoroughly the Democratic demographic advantage manifests itself.

Sometimes Democrats underestimate the effectiveness of cleverly contrived if superficial gestures by Republicans to neutralize their weaknesses. I wrote about that this week at Washington Monthly:

Buried in a typically interesting if occasionally uneven take on the Republican effort to make the GOP credible on issues like income/wealth inequality and wage stagnation, Tom Edsall has a terrifying insight:

Democrats counter this emerging Republican populism with the argument that Republicans have failed to follow up with legislation that would actually do something about the problem of inequality.
The 2014 midterm elections demonstrated, however, that relatively modest shifts in tone — carefully combined with cost-free proposals like making over-the-counter contraceptives available — could help Republican candidates defuse the accusation that their party is out of touch on issues of importance to women and to show that they are willing to take a more pragmatic path.

The allusion is to the success of Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and even more strikingly (since reproductive rights were central to the messaging of his Democratic opponent Mark Udall) Cory Gardner of Colorado, who used the Bobby-Jindal-suggested gimmick of supporting OTC contraceptives as an anti-government gesture that also superficially rebutted Democratic claims they wanted to restrict access to contraceptives. It was clever, if not especially deep or credible. But what Edsall is suggesting is that if swing voters want to vote Republican, such gestures on economic issues could be effective even if they are shallow and insincere.

Now with understandable frustration, some Democrats attribute the success of such gestures to voter ignorance. That’s a mistake. Yes, media narratives that treat such gestures as substantive repositioning are a problem, and sometimes Democrats don’t do the best job of exposing Republican trickery. But in the end, it takes Democratic weaknesses to produce such artificial Republican strengths. They need to be addressed.