Holding the Center

November 26, 2024

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The latest issue of The Week has a cover depicting several of Trump’s cabinet appointees setting off explosives. The caption is “The Wrecking Crew: How Trump’s nominees could blow up the government.”

The conventional wisdom has been that in a two-party system, the winning party is the one that manages to straddle the center. It is the one that avoids the extremes and appeals more to the large middle of the electorate. Of course, that can be easier said than done. When society is more polarized, middle ground is harder to find. In addition, the center is a moving target. Policies that were once considered extreme, like Medicare or legalized abortion, have become more mainstream; and policies that were once considered normal, like segregation of the races, have become practically unmentionable. Nevertheless, election losses have often occurred when liberals got too far to the left of the voters—like George McGovern in 1972—or conservatives got too far to the right—like Barry Goldwater in 1964.

This year we have a more confusing situation. Many observers want to attribute the Democratic loss to the party’s excessive radicalism, putting them out of touch with “ordinary Americans.” And yet it is the winning party that seems more intent on blowing up the government. What’s going on here?

Radical-left Democrats?

Many of the post-mortems on the election fault the Democrats for endorsing too many unpopular ideas. A common accusation is that Democrats strayed too far from the bread-and-butter issues that interest most working-class voters (often defined as the non-college-educated). That left room for Republicans to claim more of the middle ground, perhaps becoming the new party of the working class.

On some issues, such as protections for transgendered persons, the Democratic position does appeal more to educated liberals than to the general public. However, let’s not forget that when Joe Biden got the Democratic nomination in 2020, he was considered a moderate Democrat, and one with a strong record of supporting working-class interests. As Vice President and eventual presidential candidate, Kamala Harris stuck close to the Biden agenda, so much so that she was criticized for not putting more distance between them. Notice also that other Democrats with moderate positions and solid pro-working-class credentials—Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania—also lost this year. Democratic extremism seems hardly a good enough explanation.

Two developments early in the Biden presidency damaged his reelection prospects, a spike in inflation and a surge in illegal immigration. Covid played a role in both, creating supply shortages that raised prices and a backlog of migrants who came in only when Covid restrictions were lifted. Biden’s responses to these problems may have been less than fully successful, but they were hardly radical. He supported a bipartisan bill that would have increased border security and processed asylum applications faster, and he acted unilaterally to tighten security when the bill failed. He increased energy production to bring costs down, and supported the Federal Reserve’s use of monetary policy to reduce the rate of inflation.

Or radical-right Republicans?

I think that a fair comparison between the candidates shows Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans taking the more radical positions. Trump was the one who asked Congressional Republicans to kill the bipartisan immigration bill, so he could keep the issue alive and gather support for his more radical solution of mass deportation. His major economic proposal, high tariffs on imports, has been out of the economic mainstream for the past century. Most economists believe that his policies would hurt the economy and raise costs for consumers. In foreign policy, Trump’s affinity for dictators places him at odds with our foreign policy establishment and pro-democracy forces within his own party.

As he ran for president this time, Trump was being prosecuted for one of the most radical actions in American history, trying to overturn the previous election by illegal means. He could only be reelected by convincing  most of his followers that (a) he had really won the 2020 election despite all evidence to the contrary, and (b) his indictments for this and other illegal behavior were nothing but politically motivated witch hunts.

How did a person so far outside the norms of political policy and behavior manage to capture the middle (almost), by getting just below 50% of the popular vote? One reason was the advantage of not being the incumbent this time. Incumbents have had a tough time winning lately, not only here but in other democratic countries. Voters are restless and dissatisfied, especially because the benefits of economic growth have been going mainly to the richest segments of society for the past half-century. Meanwhile, working-class families have been struggling to get ahead. Neither party has come up with a very good solution to this problem.

As the non-incumbent, Trump could make dubious claims about his proposals without having to test them in the real world, at least not yet. He could exaggerate the revenue gains from his tariffs while pretending that the costs would be borne by foreigners, instead of by US importers and their consumers. As details of the Republican Project 2025 plan came out, and the public turned against it, Trump could say, “I never heard of it,” while knowing full well that his own political associates and allies were writing it. Now he has put its co-author, Russ Vought, in charge of the Office of Management and Budget.

Perhaps most important, Trump had the support of a well-funded right-wing propaganda machine that constantly portrayed his opponents as dangerous radicals and “the enemy within.” He distracted attention from his own radicalism by constantly referring to Biden and Harris as “radical-left Democrats.” One of the campaign’s most effective ads claimed that Harris cared more about “they/them”—a reference to transgender pronouns—than about “us.” A negative campaign does not have to be fair or true to be effective.

How will Trump govern?

No one who follows the news closely should be surprised at the radicalism now on display in the Trump cabinet selections and policy proposals. (Some less informed voters may be scratching their heads and asking, “Is this what I voted for?”) But the federal government is a huge and complicated institution, one that does not change quickly. Many of Trump’s “concepts of a plan” may be too radical to implement fully.

Critics are pointing out that actually rounding up and deporting millions of migrants—and their children, even if they were born here?—would be prohibitively expensive, as well as very disruptive to many communities and industries, such as agriculture and construction. High tariffs on imported goods could also be very costly, especially if they trigger trade wars that hurt our own exports. Trump is promising 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, our biggest trading partners, which would violate the existing trade agreement that Trump himself signed. However, his appointed Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is said to be approaching tariffs more cautiously.

MAGA Republicans are now claiming a popular mandate to “dismantle the administrative state.” Half the popular vote is a shaky basis for claiming a mandate for anything this controversial. Thousands of federal workers staff the agencies that make and implement the day-to-day decisions that make the government work. They decide who gets prosecuted (DOJ), how to get the lead out of our water supply (EPA), what qualifies as a charitable deduction (IRS), what drugs get approved (FDA), who qualifies for assistance after a hurricane (FEMA), and on and on. The federal government is a huge employer, and many of these positions are good middle-class jobs that are important to the economy.

Dismantling the administrative state could mean many things, all of which are now under discussion:

  • Placing people in charge of agencies who have neither experience in managing large organizations nor much knowledge of the organization they are supposed to head
  • Reclassifying merit-based civil service jobs to make them political appointments rewarding ideological or financial support for the party in power
  • Centralizing decision-making in the White House, so that the President decides who gets prosecuted, who gets audited by the IRS, which states get disaster relief, and so forth
  • Impounding and refusing to spend money authorized by Congress for government agencies (technically illegal, but appealing to a rogue administration anyway)
  • Eliminating entire departments or agencies (such as favorite Republican targets like the Department of Education, the EPA, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau)
  • Drastically cutting the nondefense discretionary parts of the federal budget

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been asked to head a “Department of Government Efficiency,” oddly named because it will not be a real government department. Musk has claimed that he can cut $2 trillion dollars from the government’s $6.75 trillion budget. Critics are quick to point out that without cutting defense spending, Social Security or Medicare, which Trump has promised to protect, and without defaulting on debt payments, the portion of the budget available to cut is less than $3 trillion. Musk’s proposal would require cutting about two-thirds from all the other government programs, from running federal prisons to inspecting meatpacking plants, funding veterans’ benefits, and everything else. Few informed people in their right minds think this can be done.

The administrative state will survive, I trust. But it could come to function less on merit, expertise and political neutrality, and more on partisanship, cronyism and favoritism. That’s how it worked in the bad old days of the “spoils system,” before the Pendleton Act of 1883 reformed it. To me, the attack on the administrative state belongs in the same category as attacks on other democratic institutions—the justice system, the free press, public schools and universities. We need to improve them, yes, but also defend them against destruction by autocrats and oligarchs. Here the Democrats have a responsibility to claim the center and defend it against the radical right. Assuming the more radical designs of the Trump campaign and Project 2025 prove unworkable, the administration may have to settle for smaller victories—a few deportations here, a few new tariffs there, and a few federal regulations eliminated. That may be enough to satisfy many Trump supporters, especially when they are spun as great victories.

The party of the working class?

Maybe the most we can hope for is that the most radical members of Trump’s administration are held at bay, prevented from doing too much damage to the federal government’s ability to carry out its democratically legislated missions.

But where does that leave the working class, who would like to see their government do things that actually improve their economic position? Since Trump won 56% of non-college-educated voters, many pundits have suggested that Republicans are now the party of the working class, possibly a crippling blow to Democrats going forward.

To that, I say that Republicans need to earn that designation by delivering solid economic gains to the working class, as Democrats did from the 1930s to the 1960s. While Trump at least talked about struggling working-class families, he did not do much to address their economic concerns with relevant policy proposals. What he did very effectively was scare them with stories of exaggerated social threats like immigrant crime waves. (Immigrants do not commit more crimes; their crimes just get more publicity.) He took advantage of the fact that so many of his supporters are “low-information” voters who have trouble figuring out who’s telling the truth. Researchers have found that the less people follow the news, the more likely they are to support Trump.

Once he is back in office, President Trump will need a positive program to expand working-class opportunity, or his administration may be no more popular than Biden’s. The working class may benefit slightly from a new round of tax cuts, although most of the gains are likely to go to corporate stockholders and other wealthy Americans. But Republicans may try again to offset those tax cuts with cuts to safety-net programs on which working-class and poor families depend, such as subsidized health insurance. Trump and his health-care appointees are no fans of Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act.

I would be very happy if Republicans, despite their track record, would come up with a formula for sustainable, broad-based economic growth. If not, working-class voters will have supported them in vain, and the political center will remain up for grabs.

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Posted by Ed Steffes

Trump’s Dilemma: Debate or Just Deceive?

September 12, 2024

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It matters who won or lost this week’s presidential debate, but it also matters how they won or lost. In their post-debate analysis, many commentators focused on issues of style or tactics. Kamala Harris looked more presidential, they say, and she managed to goad Donald Trump into making some silly assertions, like claiming that “people don’t go to her rallies; there’s no reason to go. And the people who do go she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.”

What about substance? Who was more effective in persuading voters to support their policy proposals? Here Trump has a big handicap, since he has trouble debating ideas on their merits. Doing so effectively requires some command of the facts. But Trump does not so much assimilate facts as try to ignore them. He can get away with this when he is ranting within his MAGA bubble in campaign rallies or on right-wing media. In a debate setting, he can only hope that his opponent—and the moderators—are either too timid or too unprepared to call out his distortions of reality. Vice President Harris was neither.

Here are a few examples of the deceptions Trump presented in lieu of reasoned, fact-based arguments. Here I draw on the excellent fact-checking provided by the Washington Post.

On the economy, both candidates expressed concern about high prices, but only Harris had specific policy proposals to control consumer costs, such as the high cost of housing. Trump preferred to devote his time to blowing the problem out of proportion and placing the blame for it entirely on his opponent. He claimed that the recent inflation is “probably the worst in our nation’s history,” that his administration had “the greatest economy” of all time, and that the Biden-Harris administration “destroyed the economy.” In fact, inflation was higher in 1946, 1979 and 1980; the Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton administrations had stronger economies than his; and the Biden-Harris economy is also doing well by most economic measures. The rate of growth and job creation has been high, unemployment has been low, and the rate of inflation has come back down.

Trump also refused to acknowledge that his own tariff proposal would increase costs for consumers. He claimed, contrary to what economics teaches, that his tariff will be paid for by the countries that export goods to the United States. In fact, tariffs are taxes on importers, who usually pass them on to consumers. Cost estimates vary, but generally indicate that the tariffs will cost the average family several thousand dollars a year. A tariff is also a regressive tax, hitting low-income households the hardest.

On immigration, Trump claimed that 21 million immigrants have entered the country in the past four years, while the true number is closer to 5 million. He said that “they’re at the highest level of criminality,” when immigrants actually have a lower rate of crime than the U.S.-born population. Undocumented immigrants have an especially low rate, because they know that if they are arrested they can be deported. Trump described “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” so many that “crime is down all over the world except here.” These are total fabrications, even before we get to the immigrant cat eaters of Springfield. He also asserted, without evidence, that Democrats are deliberately letting undocumented immigrants into the country and then trying to get them to vote illegally. That’s one of the assertions he makes to support the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. He repeated such claims over and over instead of debating the bipartisan immigration bill that Biden and Harris supported but he effectively killed.

On abortion, Trump tried to defend his successful effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Here he conveniently manufactured a consensus that doesnot exist: “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote.” He also falsely accused Democrats of supporting late-term abortion and even execution of newborns. Harris supports the Roe standard, which calls for unrestricted abortion rights only during the first trimester, when about 90% of abortions occur. Trump refused to say whether he would sign or veto a federal ban on abortion.

In response to a question on climate change, Trump had no proposals to do anything about it. Instead, he went on the attack, saying, “If she won the election, the day after that election, they’ll go back to destroying our country, and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” In fact, Biden and Harris promote both fossil fuels and cleaner energy in the short term, and production of both have increased under their administration.

On the war in Ukraine, Trump claimed that he could end it quickly, but refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win. He implied that the U.S. is already spending too much on the war, by stating that we have provided more aid to Ukraine than European countries have. That’s not true either.

Some may dismiss these falsehoods by claiming that all politicians lie, and that both sides are equally guilty. However, factchecking has turned up only a few problems with Harris’s debate positions. She did try to downplay her former opposition to fracking. She did take a couple of Trump’s quotations out of context, as when she said, “It is well known that he said of Putin that he can do whatever the hell he wants and go into Ukraine.” Trump was not talking specifically about Ukraine, but about a warning to a NATO country that we would not defend them if they did not increase their financial contribution to NATO.

Harris’s own positions and policy proposals deserve scrutiny and debate. But fruitful debate becomes impossible when the other candidate would rather rage against imaginary demons than engage with the real issues. Trump’s failure to propose an alternative to Obamacare after vilifying it for nine years shows that he prefers outrage to constructive governing.

Stretching the truth a little within a debate is one thing. Substituting outlandish claims for fact-based debate is something else. That defeats the whole purpose of debate, which is to inform the public of the candidates’ proposals and their arguments for them. Donald Trump displays such a flagrant disregard for truth that one must wonder if he really believes what he is saying. If he does, he is deluded. If he does not, then he is habitually dishonest. Neither trait is easy to change, so an improved performance by Trump in some future debate seems unlikely. Either should be disqualifying for the presidency.

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Posted by Ed Steffes