A conservative-leaning centrist tries to get Trumpistas to re-evaluate their current relationship to the real world

This video from New Economic Thinking, Our Own Worst Enemy 12/13/2021 is an interview with political scientist Tom Nichols of the Naval War College talking about his latest book, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy (2021):



The analysis of current American politics he presents is sloppy in some ways. For instance, in the interview he seems to miss the significance of the decline of real wages since the 1960s that has coincided with the massive entry of women into the labor force, which is the main thing that kept household income from crashing much more than it did.

He talks here about the increase of partisanship as though Both Sides Do It. When the most distinguishing feature of partisan polarization in the last 30 years in the US has been the asymmetric polarization in which the Republicans have become increasingly radical to the point of being now an overtly insurrectionist party.

But I find it interesting because he's taking the position of conservative-leaning centrist who is addressing the demographic represented by the insurrections who raided the Capitol on January 6. "January 6 Republics" is probably a good shorthand for them. That means relatively affluent, middle-aged men and women who embrace far-right radicalism. And he is engaging in what he himself calls "moral hectoring" to tell those people: hey, get real! Stop trying to blow up the democratic system. Stop thinking of politics as a way to piss off people you hate. Get a grip.

It's not the analysis I would make. But it has some useful insights in how to address conservatives who are not diehard Trumpistas. And to try to tell the actual hardcore Trumpistas that they need to look at a broader picture.

Filibuster about to be defanged?

This post is a follow-up on the Republican obstructionism I discussed in yesterday's post.

Heather Cox Richardson explains the background of the filibuster at the first part of this talk, History & Politics Chat: March 16, 2021:

Digby Parton has been one of the best observers and analysts of Republican obstructionism since she started blogging in the early 2000s She looks at the latest developments related to the Senate filibuster in McConnell's filibuster threats are already backfiring: Biden signals support for major Senate reform Salon 03/17/2021

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went into full snapping-turtle mode and growled out the bluff Digby discusses in that post. Mitch McConnell warns or 'scorched earth' over filibuster Reuters 03/16/2021:

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey talks about his (fairly recent) opposition to the filibuster in this interview, Sen. Markey Says 'Filibuster Has to Go,' Rules are Being 'Perverted' by GOP The Mehdi Hasan Show 05/18/2021.

I was pleasantly surprised to see President Biden come out explicitly for going back to the "talking filibuster," which as Richardson explains requires Senators to hold the floor by having someone speaking continually, the classic way the filibuster was used in most of the 20th century. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) has a report on the Filibuster and "cloture" rule by which the Senate can end debate and forced a vote on the measure at hand, Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate 04/07/2017.

This Reuters article (Susan Cornwell, What is the U.S. Senate filibuster and why is everyone talking about it? 03/17/2021) explains an important aspect of the current conflict over the filibuster. The current filibuster rule allows a Senator to hold up a bill without having to have someone continually talk on the Senate floor.

In 1975, the Senate reduced the requirement for limiting debate to three-fifths of the Senate - currently 60 senators.

In that decade, the Senate leadership began agreeing to allow measures that were facing a filibuster to be put aside while the chamber acted on other bills.

The move was intended to prevent opposition to a single bill bringing all work in the Senate to halt, but it also meant that the filibuster changed from an energy-draining maneuver involving lengthy speeches to a mere objection, or threat to object.

Over time the number of filibusters skyrocketed. There is no sure-fire way of counting how many bills are filibustered in a year because of the nebulous nature of the threats. But a count of votes to try to overcome a filibuster, the nearest reliable proxy, shows 298 such votes in the 2019-2020 legislative session. That’s up from 168 such votes in the previous two years. In 1969-1970 there were six.

Putting filibustered bills aside “made filibustering actually more successful, and even less costly, which was not intended. And it might have, paradoxically, made things worse,” said Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University who co-wrote a book on the filibuster. [my emphasis]

Under the current rules, one Senator can "filibuster" by raising an objection to a bill being voted on - it's called putting a "hold" on a bill - and it requires a (filibuster-ending) cloture to end it. In practice, that creates a de facto supermajority requirement of 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.

The filibuster has been already been abolished altogether for consideration of judicial nominations. And the "reconciliation" procedure that was used to pass the COVID relief bill recently is also a way around the filibuster, though it is restricted to matters that have a significant budget impact.

Returning to the "talking filibuster" concept would definitely be a big improvement over the current situation. However, the filibuster was often used successfully in the 20th century to block civil rights legislation like federal anti-lynching laws. The Senate is already by its composition with two Senators for each state, so that Utah with its 253 thousand inhabitants has the same Senate representation as California with its 40 million. That would be reason enough to abolish the filibuster altogether, which can be done by majority vote in the Senate.

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in their 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, explained how the Republicans changed the function of the filibuster qualitativly and for the worse after Obama became President in 2009:

[A]ttempts at filibuster and formal responses to them-meaning actual cloture motions to shut off debate-remained relatively rare, even during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. The number of cloture motions did increase after that, mostly because a handful of individual conservative senators, especially Democrat James Allen of Alabama and Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina, seeing the role of Southern conservatives as a bloc decline, began to use more creative ways to gain leverage. This included finding ways to extend debate after a filibuster was invoked by offering hundreds of amendments and insisting on a vote on each. Still, even with Allen remaining active until his death in 1978, the average number of cloture motions filed in a given month was less than two; it increased to around three a month in the 1980s, jumped a bit in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, and then leveled off in the early Bush years. But starting in 2006, this number spiked dramatically and even more with the election of Barack Obama. In the 110th Congress, 2007-2008, and in the 111th Congress, the number of cloture motions filed when the Senate was in session was on the order of two a week! [my emphasis]

(For philosophy fans, that could be used as an example of Hegel's notion of quantity turning into quality.)

As Digby observes in her post, "let's not kid ourselves. Those norms [of government institutions including the Senate] had always only been as strong as the people who were charged with upholding them and those agreements were unraveling long before Trump entered politics."

Mann and Ornstein give a quick overview of how the radicalization of the Republican Party continued until Trump became President in How the Republicans Broke Congress New York Times 12/02/2017.

And the radicalization continues, even after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. As they famously put it in their 2012 book:

[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country's most pressing challenges. [my emphasis]

Jennifer Silva study on working-class voters in Pennsylvania

The Jacobin Show podcast for 02/10/2021 takes a look at the rural/urban divide in US politics, including an interview with the author of We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (2019), Pain and Politics in Rural America w/ Jennifer Silva:

I haven't yet read her book. But her project seems like a very useful complement to the much discussed study by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016). I've criticized Hochschild's book that focuses on white people in the Lake Charles, Lousiana, area because she took too credulous a view of common white supremacist narratives. Silva, also a sociologist like Hochschild, focused on working-class people in Pennsylvania. Her study also apparently relies heavily on examining people's personal narratives of themselves and their lives but also takes a critical view of how closely those narratives reflect their larger social reality.

Silva is also the author of Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (2013), which is also briefly discussed in the interview and discussion with host Jen Pan and Ariella Thornhill that begins in the video after 55:00. It deals with the perennial political dilemma for the left of how is it so that many poor and working-class people decide to support candidates who pursue an economic agenda that primarily, or even overwhelmingly, favors the narrow material interests of the very wealthy.

In this interview, she has some worthwhile reflections on how social powerlessness can make conspiracy theories attractive.

One point that comes out in the discussion here is that Silva's working-class subjects were often proud of the way that had overcome real hardships in their lives and learned from the experience. The discussion suggests that this could be a reason Trump fans among this group were not put off by his bankruptcies because they understood in the context of their own life lessons of learning from failures.

And while it's an interesting point, we have to also remembers that reality matters. Trump's repeated bankruptcies were part of his own often dishonest, even criminal, approach to business. And risk and setbacks are qualitatively different for a trust-fund baby like Trump who benefitted from some $300 million in funds given to him by his father than they are for the average children of coal miners or factory workers in Pennsylvania.

Trump's business career also shows his fondness for thuggish, mob-like practices. His political mentor was Roy Cohn, who after his service as counsel for Joe McCarthy's redhunting Senate Subcommittee went on to prosperity and success as a mob lawyer in New York City. Jesse James or Pretty Boy Floyd or Bonnie and Clyde understandably make entertaining folk heroes, especially once they are dead and gone. But do you really want to put Al Capone in charge of the government you depend on to save your neighborhood and city during a sudden pandemic?

Trump certainly provided a real-world experience of what that looks like!

The question the video discussion addresses is variously framed but comes down to asking, "Why do so many working people vote against their own economic interests?" It's actually gets at a multifaceted phenomenon. That formulation of the question can easily create the hope that there is some "magic bullet" answer.

But there's not. One thing that is especially good about the interview with Silva is that it brings out the contradictions and inconsistencies in the way people express political opinions and attitudes. That's true of everybody to some extent, of course. This requires organizers and political campaigners to look for key areas they can use to mobilize voters and activists to their cause. And even if we take economic class and socially-constructed gender roles as being the basic formative forces of political consciousness, at any given time and place, political alignments do not correspond exactly to those categories. Factors like racism, authoritarian personalities, religion, and general social atomization are all factors at work. And timely access to relevant information on political issues and elections is also extremely important.

It's also important to remember that even though individuals may express a variety of opinions and attitudes that seem to be spread out all over the left-right political spectrum, voting behavior is more consistent. People have an inclination to vote or not to vote. And in the US, voters tend to lean Republican or Democratic from one election to the next. Navigating the working-people-voting-for-oligarchic-interests problem involves longer-term organizing and development of political identity, not just elevating the importance of single issues. We've recently seen state ballot initiatives on the minimum wage win a notably larger vote than the Democrats win in those jurisdictions. Which means some minimum-wage-increase advocates also voted for Republican politicians that are dead set against it.

In Jen Pan's opening commentary at the start of the program, she plays a portion of a CBS news report from 2017 on political polarization which indulges a basic failure of the corporate press, the Both Sides Do It trope. The Pew study referenced in that 2017 report showing 81% of people saying that cannot agree on basic facts is only meaningful in the context of what facts are being talked about.

The partisan polarization in the US is distinctly asymmetric, with the Republicans in a decades-long process of radicalization and the Democrats slowly dragging themselves out of the neoliberal bog. But if One Side says that space-alien lizard people are conspiring with George Soros to import Central American refugees, and the Other Side says, well, no, that's not true at all and it's also crazy and anti-Semitic, then Both Sides would be part of the 81%. But one side's reality-testing abilities are functioning far better than the other's in that case.

Jen Pan in her commentary also references this Jacobin article by Meagan Day, The Indifferent and the Defiant 02/08/2021, which looks at the question of Trump's increased percentage of the Latino vote in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas in 2020, a surprising and much-discussed outcome of the election.

Paul Krugman and the coming fight with Republicans over austerity economics

Ron Wyden, the incoming chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is the only Democrat quoted on the record by Greg Sargent in this column, A hidden reason that Joe Biden is trying to go big Washington Post 01/15/2021. But I hope they all recognize the lesson from 2009 and the following years:

[M]any Democrats have lived through what happened when former president Barack Obama inherited another major economic crisis from another Republican president.

As has been endlessly hashed out, Obama opted for a stimulus that fell short of what was needed. Putting aside why that happened, what everyone now knows is that it was a serious mistake. Democrats lost the House in 2010 and spent the remainder of Obama’s presidency locked in brutal fiscal trench warfare with a GOP determined to starve the recovery with austerity to cripple his presidency under the guise of fake concerns about spending and deficits.

The actual position of Republicans in the Senate and House is the one Dick Cheney articulated back during his (and Bush II's) Presidency: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

That's their position. When they say something different, they are just trying to sucker Democrats into deals they then won't honor. As this article recounts, that was a successful *partisan* strategy for the Republicans during the Obama-Biden Administration because the economic results were so damaging.

Paul Krugman was warning about exactly that in real time during the Obama-Biden Administration. His current analyses are certainly worth following.

Neither defunct ideology, nor bogus economic concerns, nor the vain hope of comity should be allowed to stand in the way of delivering the policies America needs 1/ https://t.co/tWt0uHEq6r

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 15, 2021

His four rules are:

1. Don’t doubt the power of government to help.
2. Don’t obsess about debt.
3. Don’t worry about inflation.
4. Don’t count on Republicans to help govern.

That last point is especially important, and something even the most left-leaning Members of Congress would say in that form: The Republican Party has no interest in bipartisanship as any kind of governing principle. Democrats may be able to pick off some Republican votes in Congress on particular issues. But the notion that make the hearts of TV pundits go pitty-pat that we will see some kind of Bipartisanship consensus on major issues is just wrong. The only exception would be issues on which a large number of Democrats are willing to capitulate to a Republican position.

Krugman caught some deserved criticism from the left for his seeming to pooh-pooh the importance of the $2,000 check issue last month. To his credit, he recognized that he was being tone-deaf on the politics of it. His larger economic argument wasn't wrong: extended unemployment insurance is more important to economic recovery than immediate $2,000 payments. But, as he recognized, that debate was taking place in a very particular political context.

Krugman has actually generally been good on the political side of economic issues. He even uses the term "political economy," which was what economics was called in the 19th century.

The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites 1/ https://t.co/R9CO8GK2kz

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 1, 2018

In current economic trends, Krugman is a "neo-Keynesian," not a post-Keynesian or an adherent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Although Keynesian is generally identified as a left-leaning economic theory, it's not inherent left or progressive. Keynesianism is a way of understanding how economies work. It can be employed for conservative as well as liberal/progressive ones. Andrés Velasco, who was Michelle Bachelet's Finance Minister in Chile 2006-2010, explains in Are We All Keynesians Again? (Project Syndicate 08/25/2020), "we must remember what Keynes taught: fiscal policy should be tightened during good times, precisely so that it can be expansionary during bad times."

That concept is known as balancing the budget across the business cycle with deficits during recessions and surpluses during expansions. But the idea of running surpluses during expansions is particularly inappropriate to the United States today. Jamie Galbraith provides an accessible description of why in his book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008). Short version: as long as the US is a net importer and the dollar is still the de facto world reserve currency, the collective federal, state, and local government spending will be in surplus only in years in which the private sector is in deficit, i.e., investing more than earning.

That is an accounting definition that is based on real-world phenomenon. But it means that assuming that government surpluses are automatically needed in expansionary periods would make for really bad policy. But Jamie Galbraith's father John Kenneth Galbraith had explained in The Affluent Society (1958) a very practical political reason that balancing the budget across the business cycle is near-impossible. That is because lowering taxes or increasing spending during recessions is much easier politically than raising taxes or cutting spending during an expansion.

After the $2,000 flap, I saw some progressive/social-democratic dismissals of Krugman as being just another neoliberal. At least on Twiiter ...

If you look at some of his columns from the 1990s, that might seem plausible, because he is an authority on international trade and he was generally friendly to the neoliberal deregulation trade treaties. But politically, he was one of the most visible critics of the Iraq War and the dishonest claims around it in his New York Times column. And on one of the most spectacular neoliberal fiascos, the imposition of brutal austerity policies on Greece in the 2015 euro crisis, he was severely critical of it. And more generally, he was intensely critical of austerity economics and its adherents' false claims after the 2007-8 crisis. He was also very specific in real time during the Obama-Biden Administration of warning about exactly what Greg Sargent write about in that recent column.

He also popularized the concept of the Very Serious People (VSPs), his mocking term for people like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles of Simpson-Bowles Commission fame, officially the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, aka, the Catfood Commission, as in let-Grandma-eat-cat-food, because of their focus on cutting Social Security and Medicare. In Krugman's use of the term VSPs, he saw them as people who were accepted by political and media elites because the VSPs repeated familiar ideas they found comfortable, even when there was little real-world basis for them. (See: Joe Wiesenthal, PAUL KRUGMAN: Alan Simpson Is 'All Wrong' And Conventional Wisdom On Economic Policy Is 'Stark Raving Mad' Business Insider 07/14/2012)

Krugman was particularly scornful of the media reverence for Paul Ryan, a once-prominent radical Republican Congressman who pimped austerity policies for years and was treated as a VSP by the media. "Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted." He called Ryan "an obvious con artist" who nevertheless managed to "get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity." (The Paul Ryan Story: From Flimflam to Fascism New York Times 04/12/2018)

Krugman has also been notable in stressing for years that the asymmetric partisan polarization in American politics was overwhelmingly due to the still-ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party. He was no friend of the lazy mainstream media convention of Both Sides Do It. (Joe Wiesenthal, KRUGMAN: It's Entirely One-Sided: Republicans Are To Blame For Today's 'Nightmarishly Dysfunctional Political Situation' Business Insider 07/12/2012)

In the column on Paul Ryan quoted above, he also addressed one of the key points in Sargent's 2021 column:

Some commentators seem surprised at the way men who talked nonstop about fiscal probity under Barack Obama cheerfully supported tax cuts that will explode the deficit under Trump. They also seem shocked at the apparent indifference of Ryan and his colleagues to Trump’s corruption and contempt for the rule of law. What happened to their principles?

The answer, of course, is that the principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.

As Sargent puts it:

Many Democrats who lived through that, a lot of whom are still in Congress and some of whom are advising Biden — who himself experienced it as vice president — must be wary of a repeat.

Making them even more wary, one hopes, is the fact that Republican deficit concerns evaporated once a Republican (Donald Trump) became president. Indeed, the Trump economy was good (at least until the coronavirus shattered it) precisely because it was fueled by stimulus. [my emphasis]

So, yes, there are areas, especially on neoliberal deregulation "trade" treaties, where progressives will disagree with Krugman. But on some of the biggest and most urgent issues - the radicalization of the Republican Party and the damage of austerity economics - he has a solid record.

Stopping Trump's authoritarianism doesn't end of January 20

"A majority of the Republican Party has, thus far at least, made it clear they would abrogate the Constitution to see Donald Trump remain in power, even if it means trading away their own institutional prerogatives and dignity," writes Marcy Wheeler in Curing the Donald Trump Spell: The Problem Emptywheel 01/02/2021.

She describes the challenge of backing the US away from Republican authoritarianism as encompassing two closely related accomplishments. On the one hand, both should seem obvious. But with our corporate media so addicted to horse-race reporting on politics and a bizarre commitment to an abstract form of centrism that endless assumes Both Sides Do it, it won't be so obvious to a lot of people.

One is that Biden-Harris Administration have to not address the COVID-19 pandemic and the closely related economic effects with substantive policies but that they must be perceived by the public as having meaningfully addressed them:

[I]n the middle of a pandemic and a time of escalating inequality, [Biden-Harris will have] to prove that democracy can still provide tangible benefits to Americans. That will require that President Biden not only choose to pursue policies to address the malaise that made Trump possible, but that he’ll succeed in implementing such policies.

I stress the perception part of that because the Republican Party's strategy of fundamental opposition against Obama-Biden was not only successful in limiting what he they could accomplish in the face of a recession that had begun under Bush-Cheney but whose worst phase hit after Obama became President. They were also able to create an impression among many voters that the Obama-Biden Administration was detached from their problems and blur credit for even popular accomplishments.

Biden and Harris will face a very similar problem. Only the Republican Party is far more radicalized than it was in 2009. And it has a full-blown obstruction strategy - and worse - also well under way.

The second aspect she stresses is closely related to the first. Somehow the Democrats have to find a way to deradicalize at least part of the Republican Party:

With limited exceptions, [getting substantive legislative accomplishments] will first require convincing a sufficient number of Republicans to act to benefit the US rather than just the party, or at the very least, to understand benefit to the GOP to be something other than lockstep loyalty to Trump. It requires doing so at a time when much of the GOP believes (Trump’s underperformance compared to down ballot races notwithstanding) that they need Trump’s support to get reelected in 2022...

Neither timid legislative initiatives nor rhetorical "bipartisanship" are at all likely to achieve those two goals.

The asymmetric partisan polarization that is a central fact of American politics is something that the mainstream press consistently refuses to acknowledge.

But the Democratic leadership also refuses to take it seriously. Or at least not seriously enough to address it effectively enough. They are stuck in a strategy that they wholeheartedly embraced in the Clinton-Gore era under which they embrace a neoliberal economic and social approach that tries to embrace conservative Republican framing of issues while putting a more friendly face on the policies. The steadily increasing importance of large donors also Obviously had a huge influence on this development.

It's also a strategy that still bears heavy traces of the days when left-right ideological divisions really did cut across Democratic and Republican Party lines. That was still very much the case in 1973, when Joe Biden first became a Senator from Delaware.

That cross-party ideological phenomenon also had a geographic aspect. The Southern states were often represented by conservative Democrats even after the end of the segregation era. And until 1992, California with its huge number of Electoral College votes was considered a Republican-leaning state in Presidential elections. So it was considered necessary for a Democratic national ticket to be competitive in the South. The ticket in 1992 of Bill Clinton from Arkansas and Al Gore from Tennessee was an expression of that political assumption.

But in 2021, we have situation in which Republicans can to a large extent successfully block distinctly Democratic programs while Democrats are not only unable to block destructive Republican proposals but too often don't try particularly hard to do so.

Unless the Democrats can find a way to effectively reverse this trend, the Republican drive against democracy and the rule of law will continue. There is just no significant countervailing force inside the Republican Party itself. There are no Jacob Javitses or Mark Hatfields left in tot party of Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump.

The $2,000 payment and the Republican game around means-testing

David Sirota and Andrew Perez report on this week's maneuver by the Democrats to force Republican Senators to go on the record about an addition $2,000 payment in Senate Democrats’ Motion To Concede On $2,000 Checks Daily Poster 12/30/2020. It ge ts into the weeds of the parliamentary plays the details even those of us who followed it closely are unlikely to remember in a few weeks.

But we are currently seeing a preview of the kind of obstructionist approach the Republicans have already determined to use against the incoming Biden-Harris Administration. So these weeks are giving us clues on what to look for after Inauguration Day. This section talks about a move by corporate Democrats and centrists that proved useful for the Republicans in defeating this popular measure.

First came a barrage of attacks on the $2,000 checks initiative from Summers, a former hedge fund executive who as President Barack Obama’s national economic director stymied the push for more stimulus after the 2008 financial crisis.

Then the New York Times’ Paul Krugman pretended the wildly popular initiative is “divisive” and said “the economics aren't very good.” Timesman Tom Friedman, who married into a real estate empire, called the idea “crazy” and fretted that checks might go to “people who don't need the help.” The minions of billionaire Michael Bloomberg joined in with a house editorial demanding Congress block the checks.

Meanwhile, only weeks after the Washington Post news page told the harrowing tales of rising poverty and starvation in America, the paper’s editorial board argued against stimulus by insisting that “the economy has healed significantly.”

The Post — which is owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos — argued against the $2,000 checks by saying it is unjust that some rich people might in theory end up benefiting from the proposal (this, from the editorial board that still vociferously defends the 2008 Wall Street bailout that financed bonuses for wealthy bank executives who destroyed the global economy). The Post also borrowed spin from Summers, arguing that people probably won’t use the money because “restaurants are closed and air travel limited.”

This isn’t even close to true: Indoor dining was recently shut down in New York City and D.C., but restaurants are fully open in most states, and an unfortunate number of people are still flying.

All of this noise was quickly weaponized by McConnell, who in a Senate floor speech directly cited Summers and the Post as justification to stop the $2,000 checks to the two thirds of households in his own state who would benefit.

The argument that Krugman made was that unemployment insurance was more significant in providing aid to people than the one-time payment, though he later made it explicit that he understood that the "political economy" of the position, which I assume he meant as kind of "inside joke," because what we now call the academic field of Economics was previously known as Political Economy, a term still used by some left-leaning economists to emphasize the centrality of political decisions and institutions in macroeconomics.

My take: the economics aren't very good, but the political economy may make such checks necessary 2/ https://t.co/XY7d9E8SDY pic.twitter.com/EahrnNCGaj

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 29, 2020

Krugman is right on the macroeconomics. The sums involved in extending unemployment insurance are larger than one-time payments of $2,000. And they are targeted to people who have lost their jobs and are still unemployed, but state unemployment funds are running short.

But unemployment insurance is distributed through state unemployment offices. And the systems in some states including Florida have been restricted by Republican governors and legislators in order to make it more and more difficult for people to qualify for unemployment insurance. In terms of distributing money quickly, the method used for the COVID relief payments in the spring which was also proposed for the new $2,000 checks of sending the funds to people who paid federal taxes last year is definitely quicker.

But as Krugman also recognized, a particular proposal in a particular moment may need to be judged differently than a longer-term program. The discussion of this was muddled by talking about by talking about the value of the one-time $2,000 payment in terms of it being economic stimulus. Because it is primarily a matter of emergency payments to people whose stimulative effects would be of some significance, but it's not an economic recovery program.

Sirota also notes how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used the argument of need against voting for the payment_

“The liberal economist Larry Summers, President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and President Obama’s NEC director says, ‘There’s no good economic argument for universal $2,000 checks at this moment.’ McConnell said, adding: “Even the liberal Washington Post today is laughing at the political left demanding more huge giveaways with no relationship to actual need.”

This is part of a narrative that Republicans are accustomed to using, with their usual (minimal) regard for consistency. One of the political strengths of the Social Security and Medicare programs over decades has been that they are universal programs. They aren't means-tested, i.e., the benefits are not determined by the personal wealth or current income of the recipients. In fact, they provide much more critical support for the vast majority of the public than for the wealthiest. Especially for Medicare, because private health insurance would be unaffordable for pretty much anyone 65 and over.

Public schools are also a case of a government service that is not means-tested. Children of the poorest families can attend them as well as the children of the One Percent, although the financing mechanisms and the private school systems have in fact created radical class differences in education opportunity even in K-12 schooling.

On the other hand, programs like food support or Medicaid that are means-tested government programs targeted specifically to the poor can be and are stigmatized by Republicans as "welfare". The school privatization movement championed by the current national Secretary of Education, the plutocrat Betsy DeVos, has actually made major progress in stigmatizing public schools as inferior, i.e., "welfare."

But as McConnell demonstrated this week, Republicans will shamelessly argue against an emergency payment like this on the grounds that it is not means-tested and therefore an unnecessary giveaway to rich people. How it fits together is that they make this argument against programs that benefits ordinary people because (1) they are against them and (2) if they can't stop a program from being enacted, they prefer to have it means-tested so they can stigmatize it as "welfare." This is the approach they take with proposals for free public college, as RJ Escrow explained last year in What the Fight Over Means Testing Is Really About The American Prospect 08/07/2019.

It's disappointing as always to see that the Democrats are less agile with tactical maneuvers than the Republicans. Though not surprising, because that's been a feature of the asymmetric partisan polarization for decades now.

But the Democrats actually did better with the tactics and the way they used this issue to push their own narrative for the critical January Georgia Senate elections. Elect more serious left Members of Congress including by successfully primary-ing conservative corporate Democrats and - what do you know? - even Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer start feeling pressure to act like actual Democrats!

The (Democratic) President-elect: I will never embarrass *Republican* Senators

I hope it's not going to be a weekly ritual for me the next four years to post quotes like this with some form of the commentary, "I don't think this is gonna work. (Eye roll, Deep sigh)"

Rebecca Klar, Biden on working with Senate Republicans: 'I'll never publicly embarrass them' The Hill 12/25/2020:

President-elect Joe Biden expressed optimism that he will be able to work with Republicans because of his years working alongside them, despite a sharply divided Congress.

“My leverage is, every senior Republican knows I’ve never once, ever, misled them,” Biden said on a telephone call Wednesday with several columnists, according to The New York Times. “I’ll never publicly embarrass them.” [my emphasis]

The sad part is, that's not even the biggest groaner in the story:

Asked this week if he is up to the fight with Republicans and members of his own party, Biden told the columnists, “I respectfully suggest that I beat the hell out of everyone else.”

The president-elect noted he topped Trump with more than 7 million votes and won the Democratic presidential nomination, beating several prominent progressives, according to the Times.

“I think I know what I’m doing, and I’ve been pretty damn good at being able to deal with the punchers. I know how to block a straight left and do a right hook. I understand it,” he said. [my emphasis]

Can one of Biden's advisers please explain to him that the left Democrats are the ones he has to depend on to fight for even his most minimalist domestic proposals because they are on the same side as him, i.e., the Demcoratic Party? His own party, the one that he is the official head of?

And that the Republicans are the other party, aka, his opposition? You know, Republicans? The ones out there howling at the moon about how Trump really won the election and that Biden is a ChiCom agent who is protecting a child self-trafficking ring being run out of underground bunkers by Satan-worshippers like George Soros, the Clintons, and Hunter Biden?

The politics of economic rescue for the Biden-Harris Administration

One of the factors that Theda Skocpol emphasized about the politics of Obama-Biden Administration during its first term in Obama and America's Political Future (2012) was the way that Obama became identified with the unpopular "bailouts" of banks and large corporations. One way this happened was that Obama even as a candidate was doing what was arguably a very responsible thing: working closely with the Cheney-Bush Administration on anti-recession measures even before the 2008 election.

As Michael Kazin has explained, there was a big contrast from the time when Franklin Roosevelt became President in March 1933 (yes, March, the transition period was longer back then) three-and-a-half-years from the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 and Obama's ascension to the office soon after the spectacular financial crash of September 2008. The recession in the US technically began in December 2007, but the financial crisis made the seriousness of it dramatically clear weeks before the 2008 Presidential election. That meant that Bush and the Republican Party were not nearly so clearly identified with the economic problems that worsened in the months after Obama's election.

One of 2008 Presidential candidate John McCain's favorite political stunt was to declare he was "suspending" whatever campaign he was running at the moment in order to go to Washington and be a statesman over some serious issue. How effective it ever was, I don't know. But he tried the stunt again after the September financial crisis. But Obama at least exploited the political optics of the moment more effectively. As Skocpol explains:

Obama’s electoral triumph over McCain gained momentum during the Wall Street meltdown that became apparent in September 2008, as conventional wisdom has long recognized. But looking deeper, we can see that candidate Obama was drawn into cooperation with the outgoing Bush administration starting well before the November election, as well as during the presidential transition. Decades earlier, FDR had deliberately avoided invitations to work together from outgoing Republican president Herbert Hoover. But in 2008, with the economic meltdown just getting started, Obama could not avoid transitional efforts to prevent the initial Wall Street crisis from spiraling out of control, a catastrophe that would have taken down the world financial system and plunged the United States into a massive and prolonged depression. FDR came into office when the patient was near death, while Obama wanted to keep the patient’s raging fever from turning into pneumonia. In consequence, just as he was winning the 2008 election and preparing to move into the White House, Obama seemed to be holding hands with the modern- day equivalent of Herbert Hoover, discredited outgoing GOP president George W. Bush. [my emphasis]

As she notes there, it was unavoidable for Obama to have some kind of involvement in economic policy deliberations during the transition. But the politics of it can also be tricky. Particularly with asymmetric partisan polarization in which the Democrats seek to model bipartisan cooperation while Republicans are highly ideological and intensely partisan, with a media network and real as well as "astroturf" grassroots organizations the party can easily mobilize.

Skocpol further emphasizes the point:

Cooperation to deal with Wall Street woes started in earnest during the 2008 presidential campaign in mid- September, when GOP candidate McCain tried to call off the first presidential debate and hold a summit at the Bush White House. As Jonathan Alter reminds us in The Promise: President Obama, Year One, this campaign stunt backfired on McCain because Obama was the one who looked cool, calm, wise, and in charge. Another aspect of this episode mattered just as much, if not more. Soon-to-be president-elect Obama became engaged with Bush administration efforts to mitigate the financial crisis through the politically unpopular decision to build congressional support for a massive financial rescue plan, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Starting at that misguided September 2008 session at the White House, Obama gained confidence that he could master complex issues and work with financial experts. Ironically, the insurgent Democratic candidate who campaigned by promising a bottom- up approach to economic growth and renewal in America started his “presidential” economic efforts amid a bipartisan scramble to help Wall Street first. [my emphasis]

Joe Biden didn't have a comparable pre-election opportunity, because there was no comparable September financial crisis this year. And with the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump was careening down a muddy road in a rickety pickup trying desperately not to get stuck in the mud. About all the strategy he had to fight the pandemic was to call it a hoax and hope for herd immunity to take effect. A strategy of trying to coopt Biden into identifying with his COVID policy (such as it was) was not in Trump's bag of bombastic theatrical tricks and in any case wouldn't have been compatible with his hyperpartisan posturing.

But Biden's situation right now does bear some uncomfortable similarity to Obama's, in that a recission began in February 2020. Since the onset coincided with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, there is no strong identifiication of the recession with specific failures of the Trump-Pence Administration. And the Biden campaign was based on the theme of I'm Not Trump and it didn't emphasize the problems of Republican Party economics.

So Biden and Harris do face the risk of being blamed for the results of the recession/depression that began during the Trump-Pence Administration. The Republicans are currently working hard during the transition to limit any emergency aid or economic stimulus from being enacted. And they have already pivoted to warn of the horrible threat of the public debt and the budget deficit, a concern that only occupies the Republican Party when a Democrat is in the White House. The first President Bush actually did have some concern about the deficit, and his deficit-control efforts damaged his political prospects in 1992. In any case, they were based on faulty economic assumptions.

The Republicans are already pursuing the same strategy the used against Obama: block effective efforts to address the depression while blaming the Democratic President non-stop for the problems of the economy.

In that context, this posture of Biden's on which David Sirota and Walker Bragman report seems to be politically inept, assuming as I do that he actually wants to have a successful Presidency: Biden Goes To Bat For BlackRock, Stays Vague On Direct Aid To Struggling Americans Daily Poster 12/19/2020.

For weeks, Joe Biden’s team has tiptoed around the [stimulus bill being endlessly negotiated in Congress], and avoided strongly and consistently pushing for direct aid to Americans, even as the country faces mass starvation and rising poverty. But yesterday, Biden’s designee to run federal economic policy suddenly weighed in in an uncharacteristically forceful way — to demand Congress protect a program that has provided little relief to ordinary Americans, but has significantly benefited his Wall Street firm.

In a formal statement from Biden’s transition team, the president-elect’s designee to run the National Economic Council Brian Deese demanded Congress reject Republican-backed legislative language designed to curtain special Federal Reserve lending programs created in the first pandemic legislation passed earlier this year.

“It is in the interests of the American people to maintain the Fed’s ability to respond quickly and forcefully,” Deese said. “Undermining that authority could mean less lending to Main Street businesses, higher unemployment and greater economic pain across the nation.”

While the Fed programs have been criticized for being underutilized, they have significantly boosted BlackRock, the firm that was hired to advise the Fed and that has been employing Deese as a managing director.

For more on Brian Deese, see David Dayen's BlackRock Executive Brian Deese Could Get Major White House Position The American Prospect 11/24/2020.

The Democrats should oppose the malicious proposal on which the Republicans just started insisting to curb the existing power of the Federal Reserve to combat recessionary tendencies and financial crisis. This is part of the Republicans' program of economic sabotage against the Biden-Harris Administration. (And the moment of this writing, Congressional negotiators are announcing some kind of "compromise" on the issue, whatever that may mean. See: Marianne Levine et al, Stimulus deal in sight after compromise reached on Fed dispute Politico 12/20/2020)

But politics is not identical with policy. And if the Biden team is going to weigh in very publicly on that proposal, they need to be very careful to identify with genuinely popular measures like individual relief payments and aid to state and local governments. Unfortunately, the Biden team seems to be at least partially falling for the Republicans' Lucy-holding-the-football-for-Charlie-Brown trap:

At one point, he seemed to signal vague support for direct aid, but at another point when the House and Senate seemed close to reaching a deal that included state and local aid and a corporate liability shield, but no stimulus checks, he seemed to signal his support for such an agreement.

Asked about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ opposition over the lack of checks, Biden acknowledged that the deal would be better with checks and that those may still be “in play.” However, he said, “This is a democracy and you’ve got to find a sweet spot where you have enough people willing to move in a direction that gets us a long way down the road, but isn’t the whole answer.”

That rhetoric is a lot more squishy and noncommittal than the assertive demands to protect the program helping BlackRock — which tells us a lot about priorities. [my emphasis]

The dilemma that Skocpol identified in Obama economic policy image was real. And it had significant political effects, including contributing to the loss of the Democrats' House majority in the 2010 midterms. Outside of the Beltway press, nobody actually cares about having Bipartisanship for its own sake.

Theda Skocpol on successes of the first two years of the Obama-Biden Administration

Theda Skocpol analyzed the Obama-Biden Administration during its first term in Obama and America's Political Future (2012). It's obviously relevant today, since Joe Biden is now coming back as President with a White House team heavily populated with veterans of the Obama Administration. It's also facing the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic depression exacerbated intensely by the pandemic, both requiring immediate and massive federal action.

Both also came to office presenting themselves as conciliatory leaders to replace deeply unpopular, bitterly divisive Republican predecessors. Skocpol's work provides some helpful reminders of what kinds of obstacles Biden and Harris are likely to encounter from a highly polarized, politically reactionary Republican opposition. The asymmetric partisan polarization in American politics, with a highly combative and ideologically far-right Republican party confronting a comparatively timid, centrist Democratic Party that nevertheless has a more powerful and vocal progressive wing than in 2008, is still a central feature of the American political situation in 2020.

One important difference is that Obama-Biden came to office in 2009 with the considerable advantage of a solid majority in the House and a 60-vote majority in the Senate. If the Democrats win the two Georgia Senate elections on January 5, they will have a razor-thin majority in the Senate and a House majority reduced from what it has been the last two years. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer have proven themselves to be sadly weak and flat-footed in confronting the many outrageous misconduct of the Republican Trump-Pence Administration. Their leadership mainly based on their fund-raising prowess, their political strategy and messaging leave very much to be desired from a partisan Democratic perspective.

I plan to return a few times to Skocpol's Obama book in trying to illustrate the context in which Biden will be fighting - or choosing not to fight - with the Republicans. In 2009, the Republicans began pursuing from the very start of the Administraration what Skocpol calls "all-out opposition to Obama and Democratic initiatives" that she calls "a cold-blooded political bet." From the Republican partisan viewpoint, that strategy was effective for them. And they appear to be already taking the same approach to the incoming Obama-Biden Administration.

In this post, I'm quoting her summary of Obama's accomplishment during his first two Presidential years:

Given all of the difficulties the president and Democrats faced in 2009 and 2010, if we are just toting up legislative and regulatory accomplishments, the bills passed and decisions issued, Obama’s ambitious agenda for policy change progressed quite remarkably — to institute comprehensive health reform, reform higher education loans, tighten regulation of financial institutions, and tweak many other realms of law and regulation. A new New Deal of sorts was successfully launched by President Obama and congressional Democrats in 2009 and 2010. But much of what happened was either invisible or ominously incomprehensible to the majority of American citizens. Big, worrisome, and easily caricatured — especially at a time of economic stress when people know one thing for sure: the national economy is not getting stronger fast enough to ensure that a rising tide lifts all boats. To advance major governmental reforms in such a context was an impressive accomplishment — but it was also a recipe for endless political controversy and electoral blowback. [my emphasis]

There is a UC-Berkeley lecture from 2012 by Skocpol on "Obama, the Tea Party, and the Future of American Politics". Podcast available here. This is the YouTube version (dated 10/25/2012):

In the book and the lecture, she uses the experience of the Roosevelt Administration and the New Deal to frame the experience of the first term of Obama-Biden.

Joe Biden denounces Trump's clown coup as "an unprecedented assault on our democracy"

I was glad to see that President-elect Biden yesterday came out to emphasize how anti-democratic the Trump clown coup really has been, and didn't try to present that message in the form of some saccharine “bipartisan” pablum. (And only a small amount of corniness.)

Biden speaks after Electoral College certification results PBS NewsHour 12/15/2020:

Instead he called it "unconscionable," "stunning," an "abuse of power" that relied on "baseless claims," and named it a direct threat to democracy in the US. Specifically, "an unprecedented assault on our democracy". Biden makes a straightforward defense here of democracy and the rule of law. And he called out the seditious Texas-led attempt to throw out 20 million votes in other states in order to "hand the Presidency to a candidate who lost the Electoral College, lost the popular vote, and lost each and every one of the states whose votes they were trying to reverse. It's a position so extreme, we've never seen it before, a position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution."

For literal accuracy, he maybe should have said "so extreme that we haven't seen it since 1861". But Abraham Lincoln's winning vote total in 1860 was 1.7 million - the total number of votes he won, not the margin of victory - so the Confederate secessionists were trying to wipe out 18 million or so fewer votes than the Texas lawsuit this year attempted.

I'm also happy to see that Biden emphasized what a LOSER Donald Trump is.

So for future reference, it's clear that as of now, the incoming President recognizes that the real existing Republican Party of 2020 is not a party that respects democracy and the rule of law, much less one that respects precedents set over decades or centuries that they decide are inconvenient at any given moment. That doesn't mean he can't get some Republicans in Congress to support some of his bills. It *does* mean that as of mid-December 2020, he recognizes that the Republican Party and its main leaders are operating in deeply bad faith, rather than seeing themselves as some kind of "loyal opposition." They see themselves as a Confederate opposition.

The most distinguishing feature of the American political scene right now is not "division" or "partisanship". It's asymmetric partisan polarization. And there no reason to believe that will suddenly change in the next four years.

I'm under no illusion that anything so petty as "facts" make any difference inside the QAnon/Newsmax/OANN bubble, where even FOX News is now considered part of the "deep state". But facts do matter in the real world.

When anyone in such a prominent position describes an event like the Trump clown coup in blunt terms like this, it's worth noticing. Because we don't see things like this nearly often enough.

Norm Ornstein on the 2020 Republican Party: "This is a cult"

Norman Ornstein appeared yesterday on the Mehdi Hasan Show talking about the authoritarian state of the Republican Party, Inside The Deep Roots of the GOP’s Ongoing Denial of Reality 12/05/2020:

He co-authored a 2012 book with Thomas Mann, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).

It's only gotten worse since. Much worse, as Orstein discusses in that interview. (And, yes, he does say, "This is a cult, Mehdi.") Their book made me more intensely aware of how much the fact of asymmetric partisan polarization is a defining fact of politics in America now. And not just because the ideological center of gravity of both parties both moved to the right. But also because of the Republican Party far more aggressive and combative style in fighting for their own side.

As they said in the book, "Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier." Trumpism was a kind of "desublimation" that made even more raw and obvious what the Republican Party has become. Trump is a freakish manifestation of it. But he's not pursuing a fundamentally different political project than the authoritarian course that has been taken in recent decades.

I'm going to quote here a review of the book I did in Parties and government dysfunction in the US 03/15/2013:

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein attracted quite a bit of well-deserved attention last year for their book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism (2012).

It has been much discussed and reviewed. I saw the two of them do a presentation based on the book last year, of which they did quite a few in the process of promoting the book.

They discuss the current toxic partisan environment in the national government in the US. And they rightly identified the main culprit, not relying on the lazy pseudo-centrist both-sides-are-to-blame truism of which the Beltway Village press are so fond:

Today's Republican Party ... is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.

Their book offers a number of ideas of reforms that might be sensible and improve the general functioning of the federal government. And they make critical examinations of a number of popular explanations of the current widely-recognized problems. They argue, for instance, that the assumption that gerrymandering is responsible for party polarization as such doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. They argue that its "impact is relatively minor and marginal" on party polarization.

They also use a phrase "the new nullification" that may prove to be a useful term, though I'm still digesting it myself:

Republicans' efforts in the tacit cause of partisan rivalry to block the confirmation of nominees - to embarrass the president and hobble his ability to run the executive branch-are troubling enough. But the new strategy has an additional, even more disturbing element: blocking nominations, even while acknowledging the competence and integrity of the nominees, to prevent the legitimate implementation of laws on the books. In many cases, if no person is running an agency charged with enforcing a law, the agency can't easily implement or enforce the law; career bureaucrats are reluctant to make critical decisions without the imprimatur of the presidential appointee who should be running the agency. We call this - together with other tactics, including repeal of just-enacted statutes, coordinated challenges to their constitutionality, and denial of funds for implementation - the new nullification, in reference to the pre-Civil War theory in Southern states that a state could ignore or nullify a federal law it unilaterally viewed as unconstitutional. [emphasis in original]

They also mention a salient fact that is typically ignored entirely when Village pundits wring their hands at the incivility of all this partisanship: "for most of the past century, the parties were less internally unified and ideologically distinctive, and more coalitions in Congress cut across parties than is the case today." So, of course in that situation, ideologically divisive issues were often settled on a "bipartisan" basis. But that's something very different than the Village's fetish for bipartisanship as a goal in itself.

Still, Mann and Ornstein don't entirely avoid the peril inherent in focusing on process and institutional issues, which is failing to give full significance to the reality that content matters.

Bipartisanship or consensus isn't a good thing in itself. Ever. It may feel good, but it's never a good thing in itself in isolation from what action or lack thereof is being decided. Some of the worst decisions the American government has ever made were done so on a broadly bipartisan basis. The ending of Reconstruction in the South in the 1870s, for instance, in which Democrats and Republicans agreed to withdraw federal forces discontinue using federal forces against armed white terrorism and leave the laws unenforced, while white Democrats overthrew the democratic governments there by force and violence, and many states sustained segregation and un-Constitutional voter suppression laws against black citizens (which also affected poor whites) well into the 1960s.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed in 1964 on a broad bipartisan basis, becoming the legal and political figleaf on which the Johnson Administration justified the full-blown escalation of the Vietnam War - an escalation he was elected in 1964 opposing.

The list could go on: the open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF)after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the rush bipartisan approval of the PATRIOT Act that same year. The debate in Congress over Old Man Bush's Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 may have been more nominally civil. But it resulted in a decision to authorize military intervention, a decision I supported at the time but in light of subsequent events and revelations about how the Bush I Administration made its case for war, I regard now as very much a bad one.

The debate over the Iraq War and the authorizing resolution in 2002 also passed on a bipartisan basis, though Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd opposed it intensely. The fact that it was bipartisan didn't make the decision any less destructive, irresponsible and reprehensible.

Mann and Ornstein devote their first chapter, "The New Politics of Hostage Taking," to the debt-ceiling fight in 2011, using it as example of how asymmetrical political polarization torpedoed a Grand Bargain, which they characterize this way: "What that produced was a year of hostage taking and wrangling in Congress, misdirected steps to deal with the deficit, and nothing whatsoever to remedy the public's greatest concern - chronic unemployment."

But what was the content of that Grand Bargain likely to have been? "Grand Bargain" basically means cutting benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Very bad policy, a very bad idea. (See Bob Kuttner, The Grand Bargain We Don't Need Huffington Post 3/10/2013) And we know that the Democratic President was in full Heinrich Brüning mode, as he is again at this present writing. We know he offered up a large and very damaging increase of the Medicare eligibility age by two years. He was also pushing for using the "chained CPI" scam to cut benefits on current and future Social Security recipients.

And the whole debt-ceiling debate was about how much austerity to impose on the US economy that was then and still is now in a weak recovery, employment levels still a long way from the 2007 level and well-paying jobs even scarcer. All this while Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain were demonstrating dramatically and in real time how damaging austerity policies in the middle of a depression are.

So, while the debt-ceiling fiasco did illustrate the partisan and institutional dysfunctions that Mann and Ornstein describe, in that context a more successful partisan and institutional process would have produced a really bad set of policy decisions. We can distinguish between process and result. But they can't be treated in isolation from one another. And that's not only true for that particular incident.

But the thrust of the book is to point out real problems that block the functioning of healthy democratic processes in a major way. And they do point out the massively corrupting role of big money, which is intimately connected with policy outcomes. If wealthy donors dominate the political process, outcomes will be skewed in a way that favors the narrow interest of that class.

Mann and Ornstein are also not promoting some pseudo-centrist "postpartisan" or end-of-ideology perspective here. For instance, they write:

... beware of nonprofit political groups bearing independent presidential candidates and balanced, centrist tickets. Americans hate political parties in general but the parties are essential vehicles to represent their values and views and to give direction and purpose to government. A democracy cannot float above politics; politics - and parties - are critical components of our democratic DNA. Political groups promoting the siren song of transcending politics instead of working to change the dysfunctional behavior of those in politics and government suffer from their own democratic deficit and are more likely to play spoiler or produce an ungovernable administration than to remedy dysfunctional politics. [my emphasis]

"Radical extremism" in US politics in 2020

Jay Bookman takes a look at Who is the true radical extremist in Georgia U.S. Senate race? Georgia Recorder 11/24/2020.

His answer is, the two Republican Senate candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.

And he's right:

Who but radical extremists would attempt to overturn the clear results of a presidential election? Who but radical extremists would insist that millions of valid, legitimate votes – from Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — be tossed aside as if they don’t exist, as if the American citizens who cast those votes don’t exist?

I do have a reservation about the conventional framing he uses, "Our system of government is built upon compromise and moderation."

That's true in terms of the normal functioning of government. But practical compromises and moderation (in the sense of civility) in routine dealings among politicians and government officials are procedural concepts. Which is not the same as political-ideological moderation, which is defined by situation rather than by some kinf of timeless content.

I often mention how democracy in the US has evolved since the Revolutionary War in the 18th century. Having a government without a king that is run by representatives elected by the votes of property-owning white men was a revolutionary-democratic idea in the 1770s. And was for quite a while afterward. The left-right convention in talking about political positions came into usage a bit later with the French National Assembly after the 1789 revolution there. But a democracy of property-owning white men was a radical left idea at the time.

In 2020, of course, the concept would be downright reactionary. Because a great deal of American history has been over the expansion of or restrictions on democracy and who deserved to be included in it. I think it's fair to say that as recently as 20 years ago, the idea of same-sex marriage was generally considered a distinctly left, or far left, or radical extremist idea. But public understanding of that issue has now moved so much that prohibiting same-sex marriage is more a radical right idea.

So, yes, let's not have Preston Brooks clubbing Charles Sumner within an inch of his life on the Senate floor. Let's do have equal rule of law that includes Presidents and members of his administration.

But whether a political idea is "extreme" at a given moment in a particular political configuration is not a measure of whether it's a good or bad idea. That's especially important to remember that a main defining characteristic of American politics for the last 30 or even 40 years has been asymmetric partisan polarization.

Conversely, bad political ideas are still bad ideas. No matter whether they are "moderate" or otherwise in the political spectrum. It's worth remembering that in the US in early 2003, the "moderate" position was to support the invasion of Iraq. God save us from that kind of "moderation".

Krugman on the serious dangers of romantic "bipartisan" illusions and pretensions about today's Republican Party

Paul Krugman was one of the few major columnists who was not only talking sense about the Iraq War in the runup to that disastrous invasion, he was also sounding the alarm from the start of the Obama-Biden Administration on the dangers of a too-timid approach to economic stimulus and the vapidity of the "Very Serious People" (aka, VSPs) advising austerity policies in order to soothe what he called the "confidence fairy" who, similar to Tinker Bell, would wither and die if more attention were not given to balancing budgets and cutting civilian government programs. All this in addition to playing Cassandra during the last euro crisis, giving good advice that the relevant policymakers cheerfully ignored.

Krugman has also been pretty cold-eyed in recognizing the Republican Party's authoritarianism during the Cheney-Bush Administration and ever since.

So his current warning is something everyone in the Biden-Harris Administration should take very seriously (How Will Biden Deal With Republican Sabotage? New York Times 11/30/2020):

When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge — and I don’t mean the pandemic, although Covid-19 will almost surely be killing thousands of Americans every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous.

And he expands the observation with this critical point: "And this won’t simply be because they fear a backlash from the base if they admit that Trump lost fair and square. At a fundamental level — and completely separate from the Trump factor — today’s G.O.P. doesn’t believe that Democrats ever have the right to govern, no matter how many votes they receive." (my emphasis)

Historians still refer to the German Weimar Republic of 1918-1933 as a "Republic without republicans," by which they mean not only the Communists on the left and hardcore rightists who each for different reasons rejected the notion of a liberal democratic republic, but especially conservatives in establishment institutions from the army and government bureaucracies to corporations and universities. Many of the supposed respectable conservatives were especially interested in conserving democratic government. Which led to increasing authoritarianism is the form of a conservative President and conservative Chancellors (prime ministers) like Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher, ending with Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. Krugman himself during the last euro crisis referred repeatedly to Brüning's brutal austerity program during his 1930-32 Chancellorship as a dire warning that is still relevant.

If Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are successful in obstructing needed economic measures, Krugman urges the Biden-Harris team to do the thing that always seems so difficult for establishment Democrats. That is, to fight for their own side.

First, he needs to start talking about immediate policy actions to help ordinary Americans, if only to make it clear to Georgia voters how much damage will be done if they don’t elect Democrats to those two Senate seats.

If Democrats don’t get those seats, Biden will need to use executive action to accomplish as much as possible despite Republican obstruction — although I worry that the Trump-stacked Supreme Court will try to block him when he does.

Finally, although Biden is still talking in a comforting way about unity and reaching across the aisle, at some point he’ll need to stop reassuring us that he’s nothing like Trump and start making Republicans pay a political price for their attempts to prevent him from governing. ...

[W]hat Biden needs to do is what Harry Truman did in 1948, when he built political support by running against “do-nothing” Republicans. And he’ll have a better case than Truman ever did, because today’s Republicans are infinitely more corrupt and less patriotic than the Republicans Truman faced. [my emphasis]

This is absolutely critical. Today's Republican Party doesn't just pursue bad policies and oppose constructive ones. It wants to do away with the current democratic system of governance.

Asymmetric partisan polarization in the US and the Orbanization of the Republican Party

The asymmetric partisan polarization in the United States has a continually radicalizing Republcian Party facing off against a Democratic Party mostly controlled by leaders who would rather not have to be bothered to fight for anything that might discomfort the comfortable in any way. Or, for that matter, anything that might mildly irritate outright oligarchs.

The Republican Party has now been fully Trumpified. Or Orbanized, as Europeans might say. It's done with liberal democracy and wants something like a Hungarian-type "illiberal democracy" which maintains the forms of a democracy with competitive parties but institutionally arranged so that the oligarchical ruling party keeps a secure hold on power even when they lose elections. That includes installing a pliable partisan-political judiciary. An authoritarian government with at best formal democratic forms without the actual democracy and rule-of-law parts.

The Republican Party was well along the authoritarian road during the Cheney-Bush Administration. And once Trump became President, the party essentially collapsed as a democratic institution. It is now an authoritarian party that is even making open alliances with far-right political militias aspiring to be death squads.

Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote (The Republican Threat to the Republic Project Syndicate 10/02/2020):

Even more disturbing [than his secrecy about his taxes during his first debate with Joe Biden] his refusal to denounce white supremacists and violent extremist groups like the Proud Boys, whom he instructed to “stand back and stand by.” Combined with his refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power and persistent efforts to delegitimize the voting process, Trump’s behavior in the run-up to the election has increasingly posed a direct threat to American democracy. [my emphasis]

He calls attention to how even the most solid governmental and political institutions depend on sufficient support for them and for norms that sustain them being observed by sufficient numbers of people and politicians in order to properly function. And even to survive. Stiglitz notes:

When I served as chief economist at the World Bank in the late 1990s, we would travel the world lecturing others about good governance and good institutions, and the United States was often held up as the exemplar of these concepts.

Not anymore.

It's useful to recall that Hitler came to power in Germany as Chancellor in 1933 through the institutions of the Weimar Constitution, which had been eroded by President Paul von Hindenburg, who was not really a fan of the democracy of which he was the head of state, and by the conservative and parties who allied with him and eventually with Hitler, as well. The Nazi governmental institutions didn't stick with the forms of the Weimar Constitution - but never even bothered to formally abolish it.

The Republican Party's program bears less direct resemblance to Hitler's than to some mashup of that of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Mississppi's notoriously racist one-time Senator Theodor Bilbo. But there goal is to set aside liberal democracy as we have known it in the US. As Stiglitz explains:

The bad news is that Republicans know they are increasingly in the minority on most of the critical issues in today’s politics. Americans want stronger gun control, a higher minimum wage, sensible environmental and financial regulations, affordable health insurance, expanded funding for preschool education, improved access to college, and greater limitations on money in politics.

The clearly expressed will of the majority puts the GOP in an impossible position: The party cannot simultaneously pursue its unpopular agenda and also endorse honest, transparent, democratic governance. That is why it is now openly waging war on American democracy, doubling down on efforts to disenfranchise voters, politicize the judiciary and the federal bureaucracy, and lock in minority rule permanently through tactics like partisan gerrymandering. [my emphasis]

Stiglitz doesn't discuss there the GOP's demographic problem of being heavily dependent on older white voters. That demographic disadvantage is real. But it's not some kind of developing Malthusian determinism. After all, many people who were young during The Sixties not are counted among Trump supporters.

Paul Waldman wrote about the current state of that demographic shift in Is the Emerging Democratic Majority Finally Coming to Pass? The American Prospect 08/11/2019, with particular reference to the 2020 election, then well over a year away:

There is no mystery about how Trump plans to get re-elected: He believes that with enough race-baiting to encourage them, his supporters will flock to the polls as they did in 2016. But there’s an emerging fear among Republicans that Trump has been so personally repellent and spent so much time focusing on his project of racial revanchism that it could be putting the suburbs—where a majority of Americans now live—out of the GOP’s reach. ...

One can imagine a different kind of Republican Party that could compete better with suburban moderates, not to mention do better with non-white and younger voters. It might advocate for lower taxes and a lighter government footprint, but consent to more sensible gun policies and get rid of its race-baiting. The trouble is that the current Republican Party has decided that no priority is higher than holding on to its white, rural base—and in Donald Trump’s view, that requires a commitment to a white identity politics based on hatred and resentment. In an America that grows more diverse by the day, the GOP is actually getting whiter.

Three years into Trump’s term, it is no longer possible for any Republican voter to deny what their party is about. [my emphasis]

Never say never is always a good caution to keep in mind in politics. So it's always possible that the Republican Party will soon dramatically change itself and respond to Nancy Pelosi's plea last year, "To the Republicans in the crowd, I say: take back your party, the Grand Old Party." Although what she may have meant by that is less than clear. She continued, "America needs a strong Republican Party, not a rubber stamp." (Pelosi tells Republicans: 'Take back your party' The Hill 01/23/2019)

For rank-and-file Democrats, the Republican Party already looks way too "strong" as it is! Especially when it comes to rolling over Democrats on issue after issue after issue in Congress.

Even after the last year-and-a-half-plus, after the failed effort to remove Trump from office by impeachment, after Trump's spectacular failure on the COVID-19 epidemic, after the spectacular corruption, after seeing the Republican elected officials at all levels stick staunchly by his misdeeds, Pelosi was saying the same thing on Morning Joe just last week! "One of my prayers is that the Republicans will take back their party. "The country needs a strong Republican Party. It's done so much for our country, and to have it be hijacked as a cult at this time is really a sad thing for America. (Jason Lemon, Nancy Pelosi Says America 'Needs a Strong Republican Party,' Not a Hijacked 'Cult' Newsweek 09/30/2020)

He's Pelosi's sad segment itself, providing a great illustration of the Democratic side of the very asymmetric partisan polarization, Nancy Pelosi: I Pray The Republicans Will Take Back Their Party 09/30/2020:

But given the Republican Party's history of 30 years of basically continuously and severely radicalizing and moving further and further away from a commitment to liberal democracy, Steve M's observations at No More Mister Nice Blog, looking in particular at the examples of how the Republican Party handles school shootings and the COVID-19 pandemic, describes the state of the party speaks more to the present condition of that party (Don't Confuse Us With the Facts 10/03/2020):

Republicans are never abashed. They're never crestfallen. They never admit the error of their ways. They're the Double Down Party.

You can argue that this is why Republicans are successful or you can argue that this is a demonstration of their sociopathic tendencies. (Or both.) Just don't expect them to change in response to new facts -- ever.

We can find examples of authoritarian rightwing parties that have evolved into more traditional democratic parties. But it's a long and difficult process. When it happens at all.

Also with particular reference to Trump's explicit appeal to the far-right Proud Boys hate group, David Masciotrra gives this picture of the current asymmetrical partisan polarization There's only one political party in the United States — the other one has descended into madness Salon 10/03/2020

It's certainly true that Republican officials are afraid of the bloodlust of the Trump cult. But it is also true, and more important to recognize, that Trump's hatred for democracy — which critics and commentators view as a liability is largely an asset for his supporters. Many of those who hold office at the national level, as evident from the ghoulish statements of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and others, along with the voters who applaud Trump's every act of cruelty, are glad to see him waging war on a system designed to give representation and power to a diverse group of citizens.

If Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and their enablers in Congress can succeed in subverting the presidential election, and "making America great again" by enshrining the minority rule of white Christians, the average Republican will celebrate. There is no other reasonable conclusion to draw from the fact that between 80 and 90 percent of Republicans approve of Trump's performance in office.

Among Democrats, there is an ongoing, interesting and important argument between moderate figures like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, and progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez regarding the expansion of the social welfare state, federal regulation of economic activity and the extent of measures necessary to curb inequality and climate change.

The Republican Party offers nothing to the American people. They have no policy agenda. Despite Trump's meaningless and inane boasting of nonexistent "plans," they articulate no agenda to address the converging crises of American life. [my emphasis]

As John Dean and Bob Altemeyer writes in their excellent new book, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers:

As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out, most of the democracies overthrown since World War II died at the ballot box when authoritarian leaders were voted into power. Usually these totalitarians did not even bother to throw out the country's constitution. They just subverted it bit by bit until they controlled everything, and it became irrelevant. We do not relish playing Paul Revere now, but it seems to us that American democracy is nearly at the point of no return in this process. Americans elected a very traditional type of authoritarian leader with Donald Trump - a demagogue. [my emphasis]

The collapse of the Republican Party as a democratic political institution does not mean that the Democratic Party as an institution is necessarily able to avoid its own kind of collapse. But it have a much better opportunity to do so at the moment than its counterpart.

Also, when I talk about the Republican Party having collapsed as a democratic political institution, that does not mean it has collapsed as an effective political organization. It means it no longer functions as an institution that supports a liberal democratic political system and the rule of law.

Republicans and Democrats on the Supreme Court fight: more asymmetric partisan polarization, of course

I don't like being defeatist about the immediate political situation. But the fight over the open Supreme Court seat is so far looking like a rerun of the show that we've had playing out pretty much since 1992: Republicans politicians fight aggressively for the "red meat" issues their base supports; Democratic politicians surrender.

Once again, we're seeing The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said played out in real time: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away last Friday. In the five days since, the Republicans jumped out immediately saying they were going to jam her replacement through during Trump's first term.

Senior leaders in the Democratic Party have basically taken two of their most promising procedural options off the table following options off the table for this fight: holding up the continuing resolution on funding the government (Nancy Pelosi, who sneered that only people "on the left" were suggesting that) and sending a series of impeachments to the Senate to gum up the process and create negative publicity for Republicans (anti-abortion-rights Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016). But Pelosi, Kaine, Joe Biden, and Biden surrogate Cory Booker all called on Republicans to be consistent and honorable and stand by their word from 2016 that they wouldn't consider Supreme Court appointments during Presidential elections. Threaten to pack the Court if they take the Senate? Please, this the establishment leadership of the Democratic Party we're talking about here. Although we're at least getting a bit of nothing-off-the-table talk from them on that option, for what that's worth.

Dahlia Lithwich comments, "The question to me isn’t so much whether structural court reform is on the table, of course it has to be. The question is whether to talk about it explicitly for election purposes." (What Should the Democrats Do Now? Slate 09/22/2020) She's right, although I'm not seeing much sign that the real existing leadership of the Democratic Party agrees with her.

Jamelle Bouie talks about some of the options the Democrats have to fight the Trump SCOTUS nomination, in some alternative universe whether the establishment Democrats are actually willing to fight for their own side: Democrats Can Still Play Hardball Slate podcast 09/23/2020.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) is technically correct when he says that the Democrats can't prevent the Republicans from jamming this through. (Suzanne Sammle, Top Dem: Republicans can't be stopped on SCOTUS nominee AOL/Yahoo News 09/22/2020)

Of course, defeating Trump's Supreme Court nomination will mean getting at least four Republican Senators to refuse to go along. And the only way to do that if for the Democrats is to put up a serious, visible fight. And the Democrats at this point show no obvious intentions of doing so.

The drama element of this is important, especially with a very critical Presidential election coming up on November 3. The Republican voters and potential Republican swing voters see the Republicans fighting and winning. The Democrats voters and potential Democratic swing voters see the Democrats basically surrender without a fight. Or even bluffing about putting up a fight.

Nancy Pelosi was on ABC's This Week (09/20/2020) saying she had "arrows in our quiver". ('We have our options' if GOP push a SCOTUS nomination before election: Speaker Pelosi) But one of the times George Stephanopoulos asked what some of those arrows were, she answered, "Good morning. Sunday morning." (?!) But wouldn't describe any of those "arrows". Except he asked her if she would use the House's fiscal power for leverage, she assured him that, oh no, they wouldn't even consider "shutting down government." She did mention that there was some "enthusiasm" and "exuberance" for that "on the left." (But of course if Biden loses she will happily blame it on those same dang hippie lefties.)

Cory Booker on "Face the Nation" was downright fascinating. Not because he gave any indication of being ready to fight, of course not. His top stratagem is to make "a moral appeal to people who clearly stated what they would do in these circumstances," meaning Senate Republicans. "For them to go against their word is pretty significant in the public space in terms of their own honor and legitimacy." He wants them to consider the "larger view of history" and "the long-term strength of our democracy." He is surprised at the idea that Republicans might "so severely violate their own words."

This means that our Cory Booker has been body-swapped with a Cory Booker from another dimension. Because the one on TV Sunday clearly isn't familiar with the Republican Party in this plane of reality, Face The Nation: Booker, Gottlieb 09/20/2020:

Here's anti-women's-rights Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, Sen. Kaine: GOP Trying To 'Bum Rush' SCOTUS Nominee MSNBC 09/21/2020:

This is Schumer, Senate Democratic leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Death and Supreme Court Nomination Process C-SPAN 09/21/2020

Here is Biden's first speech after Ginsburg's death. Which I have to say by Biden standards isn't bad. A call to make a serious fight, though, sounds different than this. Joe Biden Delivers Remarks in Philadelphia 09/20/2020:

Here is rightwing Republican Rick Wilson hosting a show for the rightwing but anti-Trump Republican Lincoln Project operation on the nomination, LPTV: The Breakdown—September 21, 2020. It's cute. Since they are Republicans, they can't quite believe the Democrats think an aggressive response is, "Gee, what can we do? Send us campaign donations." Their underlying assumption in this video is that the Democratic leadership will make a serious public stink over this, since that's what "their side" normally does. (It's 2020, so I guess anything is possible!):