Donald Trump, Richard Nixon and the long radicalization of the Republican Party

One thing that often gets obscured in the entirely justified outrage over Trump's criminal conduct and contempt for Constitutional institutions is that Trump is very much carrying on the radicalization of the Republican Party that has decades-old roots.

There are several ways to break down the trends. Eisenhower's Administration in retrospect is a model of "moderate" Republicanism, although he gets more credit for a peaceful foreign policy than he deserves. His "tripwire/massive retaliation" nuclear policy was a genuinely high-risk position. And he actually threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea.

The Goldwater candidacy in 1964 was a major marker in the process. But it did not yet define the national party. The Nixon Administration was path-breaking in authoritarian usage of Presidential power. But his nuclear arms-control policies, his diplomatic bridge-building to China, and even his Vietnamization policy diverged from the positions that the Goldwater right and the John Birch Society types favored. Nixon used wage-and-price controls to limit inflation, and even proposed a limited form of national health insurance that was arguably more comprehensive than "Obamacare".

Jerry Ford established a major precedent for Presidential impunity for serious crimes by issuing a blanket pardon to Richard Nixon. He also elevated the careers of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who have the dubious distinction of being two of the most destructive characters in American politics.

The Presidential candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was a decisive turning point for the Republican Party, representing a convergence of neoliberal market fundamentalism, a general endorsement of hard right politics, and focused authoritarianism. The Iran-Contra affair was itself a real Constitutional crisis, which the Republicans took in stride and the Democrats didn't dispute as actively as they should have. Old Man Bush expanded Republican official impunity by pardoning Iran-Contra criminals. And Bush's own actual role in the possible (I would say likely) 1980 "October Surprise" dealings with Iran.

The fall of the Warsaw Pact and the decline in the fall of the USSR changed the international picture so dramatically that it makes it hard to describe the nature of the continuity and change during the Bush-Quayle Administration. They initiated a serious of closing military bases that would have seemed like a pacifist dream a few years before. But they also conducted the first Gulf War, which in retrospect was a fateful escalation toward what became the current Middle East situation. In general, the Bush family ties to the Saudi monarchy that Craig Unger ably described in House of Bush, House of Saud (2004) have had serious negative consequences for US foreign policy and the well-being of ordinary people in the Middle East.

But since the 1994 midterms elections which marked the so-called Gingrich Revolution, the radicalization of the Republican Party has seemingly proceeded steadily. They keep getting more authoritarian, more crassly oligarchic and rightwing, more bitterly divisive, and generally more fanatical and sleazy. And this is definitely not a case of Both Sides Do It. Nothing remotely similar has happened on the Democratic side. In fact, one of the most important defining facts of American politics since 1994 has been the asymmetric polarization beteen the two political parties.

But I always want to give Richard Nixon his due in this process. Henry Steele Commager (1902 – March 2, 1998) was a major liberal American historian in the 20th century. He was a classic "Cold War liberal" in the Truman years, very much a supporter of Truman's containment policy against the Soviet Union. During the 1960s, he became an activist critic of the Vietnam War and actually developed a sometimes radical critique of American politics based on his understanding of how Cold War foreign policy was undermining the liberal principles on which the US government and Constitution were based. In other words, an imminent critique founded on his focus on the democratic elements of classical liberal political theory.

A collection of essays published in 1975 under the title The Defeat of America features that perspective, in particular with relation to the Nixon Administration. Including the essay from which the title of the book is derived, which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books (10/05/1972 issue). He had this to say about how Nixon was undermining the system (text from the book):

Basic to an understanding of the usurpations, duplicities, and irresponsibilities of the Nixon era, then, is paranoia, which has a life of its own, and which still lingers on - even after the "end" of the [Vietnam] war and the rapprochement with China - polluting the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the country. Certainly there is little evidence that Mr. Nixon or his underlings think the new relationship with the Soviet Union and China justifies the mitigation of their own paranoia about "national security," or their conviction that any attack upon official policy is itself a potential threat to security. How else explain the vindictiveness of the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg and the readiness to subvert justice in that prosecution; how else explain the political skulduggery that persisted long after the 1972 election, the persistent use of the FBI and the CIA for political purposes, the readiness to employ provocative agents, the contumacious boast at the POW dinner that reliance on secrecy, even useless secrecy, would go on and on; how else explain the determination to bomb Cambodia back to the Stone Age? ...

Is the crisis of the present so imperative that it requires an unconstitutional revolution - requires, that is, abandoning the separation of powers, discarding limitations on the executive authority, weakening legislative control of the purse, repealing the Bill of Rights, subverting the traditional rule of law, and covering with a fog of secrecy the operations of government? Clearly Mr. Nixon and a good many of his followers think that it is. Now we are back with the phobia about communism and paranoia about national security. [my emphasis]

It is noteworthy that Commager viewed the approach of Nixon to government and politics as an attempted "revolution". Or, as he puts it, "an unconstitutional revolution"; Commager would later describe Nixon's impeachment as a legal and constitutional revolution. But he viewed the Nixon version as being revolutionary in the sense of revolutionary dictatorship as in the Terror during the French Revolution, which both classical liberal and conservative political theory regard as a cautionary tale of arbitrary excess. And which Edmund Burke, a godfather of modern reactionary political thought, used as his prime bogeyman.

It was from reading Commager among others that I first became aware of the pragmatic criticism that a big problem for US foreign policy has been a failure to understand revolutionary processes, even losing sight of the revolutionary traditions in the US itself. That is still true today, for both parties. But the Republicans have long since become accustomed to thinking and talking in terms of revolution, or "unconstitutional revolution" in Commager's somewhat awkward phrase: the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, the Tea Party, today's armed protests by Trump cultists in favor of unrestricted spread of the COVID-19 virus, the lunatics of QAnon, even Alex Jones' advocacy of murdering and eating his neighbors. (On the latter, see: Oliver O'Connell, Alex Jones says he'd kill and cook his neighbours to feed his kids Independent 05/01/2020. Though I don't recall ever hearing that cannabalism was a feature of the French Terror.)

Meanwhile, on the "other side of the aisle," when Bernie Sanders talked about having a "revolution" involving broader voter participation and national health insurance of the type that is standard in European democracies, conservative Democrats professed to see vision of guillotine blades dropping. A good illustration of how asymetric partisan polarization works in American politics.

But going back to Tricky Dick, his administration established a practice of authoritarian illegality that took deep roots in the Republican Party. It also established a defensive mentality among Nixon's hardline fans that the law should be just another political tool in the partisan war. One used only by Republicans, of course. The rabid allegiance of Trump's cult followers is the most recent flowering of that attitude. It won't be the last. And it won't be eliminated by Democrats chasing a chimera of Bipartisan harmony with today's extremist Republican Party.

A more radical critic of the Nixon Administration, the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose perspective was not restricted to the liberal political tradition, formulated this view of the situation at the time of Commager's observations quoted above (Countervrevolution and Revolt, 1972):

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. ...

The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution. It runs the whole gamut from parliamentary democracy via the police state to open dictatorship. Capitalism reorganizes itself to meet the threat of a revolution which would be the most radical of all historical revolutions. It would be the first truly world-historical revolution. [my emphasis in bold]

For anyone who is wondering, by "world-historical revolution" Marcuse had something more drastic in mind than simply national health insurance. Which, as I mentioned, was an entirely respectable idea in 1972, even among some senior Republicans, and not seen as remotely "revolutionary" in the then-mainstream of both parties.

Was the Obama Presidency a "last chance"?

Trump is threatening to use an actual Constitutional power that he does have to full some appointive vacancies and de facto deprive Congress from reviewing it. (Brett Samuels and Jordain Carney, Trump threatens to adjourn both chambers of Congress The Hill 04/15/2020)

What legal complications there might be, I don't know. And, yes, someone other than he came up with the idea because it's unlikely in the extreme that Trump himself has ever read the Constitution, much less understood what he read.

I'm very concerned about the overextension of Executive power in the US, especially in foreign policy and intelligence matters. John Dean's Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (2004) focused heavily on how the Cheney-Bush Administration abused government secrecy during their first term. They continued to do so afterwards. Al Gore's book The Assault on Reason (2007) was largely an highly critical look at the abuses and dangerous expansion of Executive power throughout that Administration.

The exaltation of the Executive Branch longs preceds the neoliberal era identified with the Reagan Administration. Andrew Bacevich writes in The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (2020):

Today, with Donald Trump occupying the office that was once Kennedy's, it is useful to recall how, in the decades after World War II, the president became something bigger than a head of government and grander than a chief of state. Entrusted with the authority to order a civilization-obliterating nuclear attack, he served by common consent as "leader of the Free World."

By and large, Americans approved of this development, deeming it necessary and perhaps even fitting. After all, who better than a white heterosexual God-fearing American male to shoulder such awesome responsibilities? Presiding over the West's most powerful nation, the president was, by common consent, the most powerful man anywhere outside the Communist Bloc. The Free World obviously needed a leader. Who but our guy could possibly do the leading? [my emphasis]

But the Executive Branch today operates in a context of asymmetric partisan polarization.

Which means that the Republicans are both more aggressive in using Congressional power to stymie Democratic Presidents (Clinton and Obama) and employing election chicanery (segregationist voter suppression, stealing the 2000 Presidential election in Florida with the help of a partisan Supreme Court) and in aggressively expanding Executive power under Republican Presidents. While the Democratic leaders have to be dragged kicking and screaming into fighting the Republicans, as we saw in the Trump impeachment.

And when we look at the current Trump threat on appointments - it's difficult to even imagine Barack Obama or Joe Biden making a comparable threat against a Republican-dominated Congress.

And that brings my mind back to real lost opportunities from the Obama Administration:

• Obama ran for and won the President in 2008 using a movement-building model. When he became President, he folded the Obama for America organization into the Democratic Party structure and discontinued the "50 state strategy" that Howard Dean as chairman of the party had used to build the party organization nationwide.
• When he took office, he proposed a notoriously "pre-compromised" proposal for stimulating the economy after the 2008 crash, at a time when he had maximum popular capital taking over in the middle of the Great Recession much to the chagrin of more progressive economists like Paul Krugman.
• As Ryam Grim describes in detail in We've Got People (2019), Obama's team was ready to throw in the towel on the Obamacare program, and had to be pushed by grassroots organizers and Nancy Pelosi (!!) to keep pushing for it. And he tossed the public option overboard, never seeming to take it seriously. (Hillary Clinton had supported a public option in the 2008 primary race, Obama had not.)
• Obama was at his eloquent best in denouncing the disastrous Citizens United decision early in 2010. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he declared. "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest." But his response amounted to a half-hearted attempt to get a legislative fix which the Republicans quickly shot down. After that, the issue was essentially just added to the standard list of issues on Democratic Party fundraising appeals. I don't see how anyone could seriously argue that Obama's response on Citizens United and campaign financing more generally even came close to taking his own initial rhetoric on it seriously: I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.
• When the death of rightwing Justice Antonin Scalia presented him with a Supreme Court vacancy in early 2016, Obama nominated Merrick Garland. "Widely regarded as a moderate, Garland had been praised in the past by many Republicans, including influential senators such as Orrin Hatch of Utah." But, "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared any appointment by the sitting president to be null and void." (Ron Elving, What Happened With Merrick Garland In 2016 And Why It Matters Now NPR 06/29/2018) Did Obama bring anything like the pressure on the Senate Trump is threatening over Administration appointments this week? Not remotely.

And now we have Joe Biden as the Democratic Presidential candidate, ready to continue the asymmetric polarization, looking for compromises with a continually radicalizing Republican Party, without remotely attempting the partisan pressure that Republican apply against Democrats. Here are Michael Brooks and his team discussing Obama's endorsement of Biden, with the Obama video included, Obama’s Biden Endorsement: Talking Left, Walking Right (TMBS 135):

Although I take it for granted that Obama's Administration was far better than the low bar set by the Trump Administrtion, he was much more a transactional rather than transformative President. And it could be many years before the Democratic Party has the chance that Obama clearly had to change the asymmetric partisan polarization in a way that favored Democratic and progressive priorities. But that was not what he or the Democratic establishment wanted.

Trump's continuing scam, the COVID-19 crisis, and critics' desperate to believe the situation isn't as bad as it looks

Peter Wehner writes, "Trump’s success as a politician has been built on his ability to impose his will and narrative on others, to use his experience on a reality-television show and his skill as a con man to shape public impressions in his favor, even—or perhaps, especially — if those impressions are at odds with reality." (The President is Trapped The Atlantic ß3/25/2020)

One big mistake the Democrats made in campaigning against Trump in 2016 was to smugly assume that Trump's professional-wrestling style of politicking couldn't win him the Presidency. Wehner continues, "He convinced a good chunk of the country that he is a wildly successful businessman," which he wasn't. Now that he has essentially $4.5 trillion dollars that he can allocate to pretty much any companies he wants including his own, maybe he will finally make his business fabulously successful.

But being a lucky and unscrupulous grifter isn't the same as being the business genius he claimed to be. David Cay Johnston has been telling anyone who would listen for years that Trump was a mobster and a scamster, not a brilliant business titan.

Wehner continues that sentence by saying that Trump's persuasion of "a good chunk of the country" also extended to conning them into thinking that he "knows more about campaign finance, the Islamic State, the courts, the visa system, trade, taxes, the debt, renewable energy, infrastructure, borders, and drones than anyone else."

And Wehner predicts that as the COVID-19 crisis proceeds:

Trump’s hallmarks will be even more fully on display. The president will create new scapegoats. He’ll blame governors for whatever bad news befalls their states. He’ll berate reporters who ask questions that portray him in a less-than-favorable light. He’ll demand even more cultlike coverage from outlets such as Fox News. Because he doesn’t tolerate relationships that are characterized by disagreement or absence of obeisance, before long we’ll see key people removed or silenced when they try to counter a Trump-centered narrative. He’ll try to find shiny objects to divert our attention from his failures. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, Wehner's piece reflects a lot of the weaknesses the American commentariat has displayed in dealing with Trump's Malicious Orange Clown Show. He presents Trump's success at selling his con job image of himself as due to Trump's own talent for scamming. Which is part of the story.

But there is a great deal of the story to which Beltway media types don't want to call attention. One of those factors is the corporate media itself. CBS Executive Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonvies described his view of the Trump campaign at a media conference in early 2016 (Paul Bond, Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: "It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS" Hollywood Reporter 02/29/2016):

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," he said of the presidential race.

Moonves called the campaign for president a "circus" full of "bomb throwing," and he hopes it continues.

"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," he said.

"Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun," he said.

"I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going," said Moonves.

"Donald's place in this election is a good thing," he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.

"There's a lot of money in the marketplace," the exec said of political advertising so far this presidential season. [my emphasis]

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as corportate media. And their approach to covering politics is radically different from the classical image of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite that many older Democrats still have in their heads as the normalcy that a successful Make America Boring Again campaign this year would restore.

That doesn't diminish Trump's own success in working that system. He's unmistakably a talented demogogue. But Wehner's article also reflects the very narrow and unrealistic framing of NeverTrumper rightwing Republicans and the Democratic "Resistance" types, which portrays Trump as a unique aberration whose departure from the political scene will somehow restore a lost normal state. The Republican fever will break, conservative Democrats keep telling themselves and the public, year after year, and decade after decade.

The media malfunction, which has very much to do with the business laws that frame the media market, won't go away without serious reforms to the legal framework that currently controls matters such as media concentration.

The political environment that made Trumpism and a President Trump possible is one of asymmetric partisan polarization in a system in which essentiall all meaningful limits to spending in political campaigns have been aboloished. (On the latter point, I don't mean to imply it can't get worse!) The campaign financing model in the US is a system of legalized bribery in which even illegal bribery and corruption become much harder to detect, deter, and prosecute.

For Democrats - to the extent that they actually want a healthy representative democracy - it's especially important to stop pretending that Trump is akin to a Thanos or Cthulhu dropping in from space. The criminal and anti-democratic aspects of the Trump Presidency were present and on very prominent display during the Bush-Cheney Administration. And the subsequent Obama-Biden Administration gave Cheney's project to establish an authoritarian Unitary Executive system of government the one thing a Republican Administration could never give itself: immunity from prosecution for criminal activity granted by an administration of the other party.

Status Quo Joe Biden, the new Eisenhower and ... the best we can do? (!?!)

So it looks like Status Quo Joe is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. We all have to hope he can pull it off with an at-least-I’m-not-as-bad-as-Trump campaign. Harold Meyerson writes of him:

Comes now Joe Biden, promising the restoration of White House calm and, more hopefully than realistically, an end to our civil strife. For the specter of nuclear war, substitute that of the coronavirus, which is more than a specter. In his talk last night, Biden projected the diligence and empathy Americans want in a president in times of trouble.

Otherwise, however, there’s no way the 2020s will resemble the 1950s. The consciousness of our huge levels of inequality already demands and will require major change, all against a background of demographic transformation. If a President Biden has the manner of Ike, he must have the substance of FDR or LBJ (well, the domestic-policy LBJ).

I think Biden should adopt this Steve Earle song as his campaign theme. It even includes his position on no-Medicare-For-All-never-no-matter-what:

Look around
There's doctors down on Wall Street
Sharpenin' their scalpels and tryin' to cut a deal
Meanwhile, back at the hospital
We got accountants playin' God and passin' out the pills
Yeah, I know, that sucks that your HMO
Ain't doin' what you thought it would do
But everybody's gotta die sometime and we can't save everybody
It's the best that we can do

Meyerson's point on Biden and Eisenhower is about how SQJ tries to invoke a stereotypical, imagined, Father Knows Best, ideal version of the 1950s as seen by comfortable white people:

Comes now Joe Biden, promising the restoration of White House calm and, more hopefully than realistically, an end to our civil strife. For the specter of nuclear war [in the 1950s], substitute that of the coronavirus, which is more than a specter. In his talk last night, Biden projected the diligence and empathy Americans want in a president in times of trouble.

Otherwise, however, there’s no way the 2020s will resemble the 1950s. The consciousness of our huge levels of inequality already demands and will require major change, all against a background of demographic transformation. If a President Biden has the manner of Ike, he must have the substance of FDR or LBJ (well, the domestic-policy LBJ). [my emphasis]

Andrew Gawthorpe recently warned against assuming that the COVID-19 fiasco will crater Trump's popularity, such as it is (Be careful. Trump may exploit the coronavirus crisis for authoritarian ends Guardian 03/14/2020):

In short, nothing in Trump’s record – or that of his ardent base, whose political support is all he cares about – can lead us to believe that he will use his power to protect and serve all Americans equally in a time of unprecedented crisis. He might look like a deer in the headlights right now, but soon enough he will snap back to the unreality he lives in and deploy the only political trick he knows: rallying his base, abusing his power, trashing his foes. Many Americans will have to deal with the reality of a president who is not only incompetent to defend them but doesn’t even regard them as legitimate Americans worthy of protection. This epidemiological crisis is also a political one. We should prepare to defend against both.

Yet the diagnosis of polarization - true enough as far as it goes - obscures what makes that polarization so destructive. Elite discourse frequently implies that the two parties are mirror images of each other, as if both were moving at the same rate toward the political fringes, shedding norms and principles as they did so. But this is simply not what is happening. The core problem is not equal polarization but asymmetric polarization.

The Democratic Party has moved modestly leftward, mostly due to the decline in the party's presence in the South. But it still aspires to solve problems and so is relatively open to compromise. (For example, Obama's signature health-care law, now so reviled by Republicans, was built in considerable part from past Republican proposals.) By contrast, the Republican Party has moved dramatically rightward and now represents a radically disruptive force that the U.S. political system is ill equipped to contain. [my emphasis]

I was with him until the last paragraph, which could be read to mean that it's great that the Democrats are willing to compromise with hardcore rightwing Republicans for the sake of Compromise, and that the only problem is that the Republicans haven't adopted the same attitude.

No, the problem is that we have a Citizens United campaign-finance regime in the US which allows essentially unlimited campaign contributions by the wealthiest. That creates this "asymmetric polarization" situation in which the Republicans see maximum reason to be radical and intransigent on issues prioritized the One Percent. And for the Democrats to continually compromise/surrender to those positions. In the partisan political dynamic, the Republican Party is in a long and still continuing trend of self-radicalization and the Democrats refuse to take that radicalization as being as serious as it is and are still resisting developing targeted and effective strategies to counter it. It's not a question of manners.

Charlie Pierce tries to look on the bright side in Joe Biden Is a Party Man. Will He Go Along With the Party's New Progressive Direction? Esquire Politics Blog 03/16/2020:

Biden’s career has spanned the entire stretch of the Democratic Party’s nearly 50-year retrenchment. Already scared away from progressive policies by the destruction of George McGovern in 1972, the Democrats saw Jimmy Carter, hardly a progressive champion, lose to Ronald Reagan in large part because huge pieces of the old New Deal coalition fled to him. This scared Democrats for another three decades. The party committed itself to half-measures, and to a little discreet whoring after corporate cash. Only now, with the proof staring them in the face that the policies that began with old Dutch lead only to the abyss, have substantial parts of the Democratic Party returned to the party’s post-FDR roots. [my emphasis]

And we are seeing SQJ making verbal concessions to Elizabeth Warren's proposal to correct some of the harm that Biden was active in imposing on the country with things like his bankruptcy bill. But even in his Sunday debate with Sanders, he was taking his hardcore anti-Medicare-for-All position and indulging in cheap McCarthyist redbaiting against Sanders. Biden's a conservative. He can be counted on to fight for progressive policies on anything. Yes, if the Democratic base can bring enough pressure on him if he manages to get elected, he may have to concede. But it will be because he's forced into doing it like Nancy Pelosi was forced, reluctantly and belatedly, into proceeding with impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Digby Parton also warns that we don't see any real signs yet that the Trump Cult, aka, the Republican base, are losing faith in their Führer (Are the Trump voters getting nervous? Nah. Hullabaloo 03/16/2020):

According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday, Trump’s job approval stands at 46 percent, exactly the same as it was last month before the crisis really hit. His core fans truly do believe he’s doing a heckuva job. And because of that, they see this unfolding crisis differently than the rest of the country ...

People keep saying that this is Trump’s Katrina, referring to President George W. Bush’s bungling of one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. But it pays to remember that Bush’s approval rating also didn’t fall much in the immediate aftermath of that storm. He was right where Trump is at the time, mired in the low 40s. That rating briefly dipped in the two months after the disaster hit and then bounced back up to 43%. It wasn’t until the next year that he drifted down into the 30s.

Maybe it took a while to sink in for Republican voters that their hero was failing them, and perhaps the same thing will happen with Trump. If this epidemic hits their own communities - and it will hit everybody’s - you’d think the Trump bubble might finally pop. I wouldn’t count on it. Their devotion runs deep and I’m not sure anything can break it, not even a disaster of unprecedented scale like this one. He could let their grandmother die of COVID-19 on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. [my emphasis]

Digby reads polls. This is a very useful thing for political commentators to do.

Asymmetric polarization - the defining phenomenon of partisan politics in the US

"Democratic activists in 2002 were actually slightly more moderate than run-of-the-mill voters who identify with the Democratic Party. By contrast, Republican activists are not only far to the right of independents; They are also far to the right of ordinary voters within their own party. And they have been heading ever more sharply right since the 1980s." - Andrew Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005) [my emphasis in bold]

"Consider the large cut in payroll taxes in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [during the Obama-Biden Administration]. To boost consumer spending most effectively, it was carefully designed to attract no notice ... Similarly, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has not become accepted within corporate circles, and few Americans appear to have grasped its favorable consequences for them. And while the ACA ["Obamacare"] is now producing modestly positive feedback effects, these were perilously slow in coming. Early on, ACA beneficiaries neither reliably perceived the benefits they received nor consistently voted or acted to protect the law ... Worse, the ACA catalyzed a political backlash that not only exacted considerable electoral costs but also left the program struggling to survive." - Andrew Hacker and Paul Pierson, Policy Feedback in an Age of Policy Polarization," The Annals Sept 2019 [my emphasis in bold]

The defining characteristic of partisan politics in the US today is asymmetric polarization.

The Republican Party has been radicalizing itself since 1980 when Ronald Reagan became the party's Presidential nominee and got elected President.

As with anything in politics, trends don't just drop on a certain date as a judgment from heaven. Like with the Judgment of Korah, as related in this 1865 painting by Gustave Doré:

"Death of Korah, Dathan and Abiram"

This derives from the story of judgment against Korah, Dathan and Abiram who rebelled against Moses' authority, as related in the Biblical Book of Numbers 16-17, a divine intervention that changed the situation radically in a moment. In our more mundane politics, there are memorable dates we associate with major events and decisions that represent major changes in direction: the American Revolution, the firing on Fort Sumter, the untimely end of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939. The tendencies that led to those turning points were there long before and different decisions or accidents of luck could have moved events in a very different direction.

In the Republican Party, the far-right trend represented by the McCarthyist red-hunters, the John Birch Society, and the Goldwater movement in 1964 were all clear predecessors of 1980. And Reagan himself was decisively influenced by all three. But after 1980, the remnants of the "liberal Republicans" who were still a visible presence in American political life in 1980 faded quickly away. And the party generally embraced what they happily called the Reagan Revolution. A key shift involved in that process which was largely completed by the 1990s is that former conservative Southern Democrats shifted to the Republican Party. (See: Earle Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans, 2003; Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, 2002) To the extent that nostalgic memories among Democrats of liberal/progressive goals achieved through bipartisan cooperation with Republicans have a basis in historical fact, it is because left-right/liberal-conservative ideological trends in Congress cut across party lines prior to 1980 far more than they have since.

It's a sign of the shift in the Republican Party that with Reagan and thereafter, the increasingly reactionary party was happy to describe its own proposals in terms of "revolution". The Oxford University Press' "A Very Short Introduction" series has a volume on The Reagan Revolution (2009) by Gil Troy. A 1981 book by the then-popular journalistic duo Rowland Evans and Robert Novak The Reagan Revolution: An Inside Look at the Transformation of the U.S. Government celebrated the numbers of Republican radicals and revolutionaries who were being brought into Reagan's Administration.

Meanwhile, on this past Sunday during the Democratic debate, Status Quo Joe Biden was horrified and shocked, I tell you, shocked, that Bernie Sanders has occasionally in his life said things about China, Cuba, and the USSR that were something other than complete and total condemnation of them. That's only one of the sillier symptoms of the asymmetric polarization dominating the American political party scene. On the "other side of the aisle", Trump cheerfully embraces and praises dictators across the ideological spectrum.

Our American pundits are seriously addicted to insisting that Both Sides Do It, meaning that partisan excesses are equally distributed in each and every situation between Republicans and Democrats. But the reason that asymmetric polarization is asymmetric is that in the face of four decades of radicalization from Reagan's friendly-grin, ditsy version of Bircherism to today's Führer-worshipping adoration of Trump's orgy of massive corruption, lawlessness, and anti-science whack-a-doodle policy. While the Democratic Party has ... sought polite Bipartisan compromise with the fundamentalist cult on "the other side of the aisle". And tried as much as possible to frame their own policies - to the extent they can be distinguished at all from the Republicans' - in Republican terms. The Simpson-Bowles delusion, we might call it.

A key aspect of the Democrats' asymmetric attitude is the notion that "the fever will break" on the Republican side. As Joe Biden cheerfully explained to Chris Matthews just prior to the 2012 Presidential election:

Biden seemed optimistic that both parties would work together if Obama is re-elected, arguing the “fever will have broken” and lawmakers could focus more on passing legislation than politics.

“There are still some solid Republican conservatives who understand what principled compromise means and are not wrapped up in ideological purity,” said Biden insisting he knew a dozen Republican senators and up to three dozen House members that want to work with the Democrats.

After the election is over, Biden said members will say “’Hey man I no longer have an obligation to stick with the right of the party’... I really believe you’ll see movement. Real movement.” [my emphasis]

He was only echoing what the man at the top of the ticket, Barack Obama, had said earlier that year (Byron Tau, Obama: Republican 'fever' will break after the election Politico 06/01/2012):

I believe that If we're successful in this election, when we're successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there's a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn't make much sense because I'm not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again. [my emphasis]

This hope, which may have been real on Obama's and Biden's part, proved to be delusional. Just this miraculous breaking of the fever failed to take place after Obama's surprising election in 2008 after eight years of the rightwing-radical Cheney-Bush Administration. In 2009, Obama and Biden had Bowles and Simpson pushing for conservative Republican policies. The Republicans had the Tea Party pushing even more loudly for rightwing Republican policy. This is known as "asymmetric polarization".

The fever became Trumpist fever by 2016. But in 2019, Biden was still predicting that if Trump were voted out in 2020, the Republicans were return to the golden days of Bipartisanship: "With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change. Because these folks [Republican politicians] know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing." (Kevin Drum, Who Cares If Joe Biden Really Believes in Bipartisanship? Mother Jones 06/10/2019)

Drum offered a generous reading of this:

I have no idea what Joe Biden “really” believes about working with Republicans. But I will say this: he’s a politician. There’s zero reason to think he truly believes what he’s saying here. There’s also zero reason to think he doesn’t believe it. The fact that he said it is simply a null input.

At the same time, Biden isn’t an idiot. Of course he knows what the modern Republican Party is like. But like Obama before him, he also knows that lots of people really like to hear paeans to bipartisanship. We political junkies may hate it, but ordinary people who don’t inhale cable news are suckers for the idea that we can all get along if we just give it a try - and there are way more of them than there are of us. Biden knows this, so that’s what he tells people. Whether he really believes it or not matters not a whit. [my emphasis in bold]

The evidence of the last few decades show rather than while TV pundits and Democratic moderate political activists/"political junkies" love this Bipartisan fantasizing, Republican politicians, activists, and large portions of the Republican voting base see it as a sucker play to undermine Democrats. It also works to the advantage of large wealthy donors, who are particularly happy to see Bipartisanship tilted heavily to Republican preferences on tax and regulation policies and on international trade treaties.

But Biden's 2019 comment and Kevin Drum's response point to an essential reason why asymmetric polarization works so well for the Republicans.is that the Democrats - both the Party establishment and many activists - really do seem to think if the Democrats are "moderate" and "pragmatic" enough, we could easily return to some imagined golden time when bipartisanship and dignified debate and reflection could dominate politics again.

But it's a mythical past. Even before the "Reagan Revolution", the Administration of Richard Nixon was anything but a time of moderate harmony. And no one under the age of 55 can be said to have any personal adult memory of a time when the Republican Party wasn't in the process of radicalization which has currently given us Donald Trump and will give us worse if they aren't defeated politically. As Charlie Pierce likes to say, 1980 was when the Republican Party ate the monkey brains. (A reference to prion-related neurodegenerative diseases like Creutzfeldt–Jakob.)

But to balance the symmetry between the two parties better, the Democrats don't need to adopt a Republican-style fanaticial, authoritarian approach to politics and governance, which conservative Democrats very falsely accuse Bernie Sanders of practicing. What they do need is a more realistic sense of what today's Republican Party is and how long it's being going in that direction. And that includes - and this is critical - that any new Democratic Administration takes seriously providing a professional, independent legal investigation and prosecutions against serious illegal acts committed by government officials from the previous Republican Administration. And any others on which the statute of limitations has not yet run. In my mind, basic humanity would require a thorough independent legal investigation and prosecution of anyone and everyone involved in the ICE practice of kidnapping refugee children from their parents.

Boris Johnson and the road to "illiberal democracy"

There's a difference between revolution and revolutionary methods. Sociologists and political scientists can come up with more-or-less well-delineated definitions to clearly distinguish them. For most people, the distinction is about as vague as it is irrelevant.

Britannica Online provides a useful general definition of the concept as it evolved since antiquity (Revolution, 2019), including references to these modern theories of revolution:

The 16th-century Italian writer Niccolò Machiavelli recognized the importance of creating a state that could endure the threat of revolution; but, at the same time, his detailed analysis of power led to a new belief in the necessity of changes in the structure of government on certain occasions. This new acceptance of change placed Machiavelli at the forefront of modern revolutionary thought, even though he never used the word revolution in his texts, and he was primarily concerned with the creation of a truly stable state.

The 17th-century English writer John Milton was an early believer in revolution’s inherent ability to help a society realize its potential. He also saw revolution as the right of society to defend itself against abusive tyrants, creating a new order that reflected the needs of the people. To Milton, revolution was the means of accomplishing freedom. Later, in the 18th century, the French, Haitian, and American revolutions were attempts to secure freedom from oppressive leadership. Modern revolutions have frequently incorporated utopian ideals as a basis for change. [my emphasis]

The Britannica editors also give credit to Immanuel Kant, who "believed that revolution was a 'natural' step in the realization of a higher ethical foundation for society," noting that the Kantian "idea helped serve as a basis for the American and French revolutions." Although in the former, more people got it directly from Thomas Paine rather than from Kant.

They even give credit to Hegel as "a crucial catalyst in the formation of 20th-century revolutionary thought" who "saw revolutions as the fulfillment of human destiny, and he saw revolutionary leaders as those necessary to instigate and implement reforms." A new biography of Hegel by Klaus Vieweg that emphasizes Hegel's republican thought rooted in the French Revolution, as suggested by its subtitle, Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit [Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom] (2919). Hegel, like Thomas Jefferson, was deeply engaged with the political ideals of the French Revolution and supportive of them, while of course keeping a critical view of its actual outcomes. Paine himself was an elected deputy to the French Revolutionary National Convention, though his service was interrupted for a year when he was imprisoned for his criticism of the Terror.

In the United States for the last 40 years, Republicans have tended to be more comfortable than Democrats with using "revolution" to describe their goals, e.g., the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution. Although Bernie Sanders' use of "political revolution" currently has Republicans, corporate Democrats, and poor babbling Chris Matthews reverting to a more classical conservative view of at least feigning horror over the very notion.

But in our current, much-discussed trend in the world of rising authoritarianism, including in the US, Europe, Latin America, and India, some governments and parties are using and advocating methods that the Founding Father of modern reactionary thought, Edmund Burke, might have regarded as French Jacobin approaches.

The authoritarian, "illiberal democracy" that Viktor Orbán established after winning the Hungarian Presidency in 2010, he moved rapidly to build the current version of government in Hungary, using extreme gerrymandering, wide-ranging control of the press with help from allied oligarchs, politicized institutions of justice, without resorting to tactics like jailing or murdering journalists. Elections are still nominally free and competitive and people aren't arrested for political reasons. But the system is sufficiently rigged that Orbán's party can retain control without winning a majority in elections.

Peter Oborne has a thought-provoking take on Britain's Trumpish Prime Minister which is a reminder that there are various potential models for those seeking to get rid of democracy (Boris Johnson as a revolutionary figure, Boris Johnson is leading a revolution, and this time it's coming from the right Middle East Eye 02/08/2020:

Most of us were taught in college to think that revolutionary movements come from the left. It seemed to make sense: Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, Mao. It may be time to reconsider. Johnson is leading a revolution, and this time it's coming from the right.

He's either forgotten, does not know, or most likely does not care that the Conservative Party came into existence in the wake of the French Revolution as a defender of great institutions - monarchy, parliament, rule of law, the church - against abstraction, ideology and political violence.

This means that Johnson repudiates the doctrines of every Conservative leader from the Duke of Wellington onwards. Johnson's hostility to institutions is so striking that I don't believe he can be viewed as a Conservative in the way the term has been understood over the last two centuries.

The party he leads has detached from its moorings, while Johnson himself should be understood as part of a group of populist leaders that includes Donald Trump, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and most relevantly Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. [my emphasis]

He cites various examples of Johnson's authoritarian bent, including trying to politicize the courts, attacked and restricted journalists Trump-style, and a five-week shutdown of Parliament last fall that the British Supreme Court ruled illegal.

Oborne also calls attention to the often-mentioned charismatic leader in building an authoritarian political order. He cites an article by New Statesman international editor Jeremy Cliffe (Central Europe’s authoritarians show where an unleashed Boris Johnson could lead Britain 12/18/2019) on authoritarianism in the Visegrad nations - Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Cliff sees Boris Johnson as having just followed an "electoral narrative of 'people versus politicians' requiring rescue by a muscular father-of-the-nation type" that "is straight out of the Visegrad playbook."

But I try to be cautious about the notion a single charismatic leader as a ncessary element of authoritarian rule. All movements, including democratic ones, need leadership. Conventional wisdom often equates populism with authoritarianism and rightwing politics. I take a more restrictive view of populism as a way of doing politics that pose an antagonism between "the elite" and "the people." There are left and democratic versions of populism. And charismatic leadership does not equate to authoritarian or antidemocratic political goals.

But the institutional moves toward dismantling democracy and the rule of law need to be taken very seriously. And in the United States, the Democrats need to take "revolutionary" actions by the Republicans as the sign of asymmetric polarization that need to be countered within the rule of law. But they need to give up the fantasy that they can be countered with covering and "bipartisan" platitudes.

Hillary Clinton and the lingering ideology of the Democratic Leadership Council

Hillary Clinton is still throwing shade on Bernie Sanders: Caroline Kelly, Clinton doubles down on Sanders criticism, warns that he's promising 'the moon' CNN 02/07/2020.

Which I'm starting to find amusing. Could it be that Hillary knows that her criticism will Help Sanders more than hurt him in the primary contest? And is therefore playing the famous "three-dimensional chess" with this to boost his prospects?

Still, it's hard to see how the comments of the leader who won the popular vote for the Presidency in 2016 is effectively grappling with the current state of American democracy:

When asked by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres if she wanted to address her prior remarks about the Vermont independent, Clinton noted that while she originally made them about a year and a half ago, "I have a pretty clear perspective about what it's going to take to win, and as I said earlier, that's what I think the key calculation for any voter has to be."

"You've got to be responsible for what you say, and what you say you're going to do," Clinton added. "We need to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and in our institutions, and if you promise the moon and you can't deliver the moon, then that's going to be one more indicator of how, you know, we just can't trust each other." ...

On Thursday, Clinton followed up her comments on responsibility by pointing to health care, a key issue for Sanders, who is a well-known proponent of "Medicare for All." In October, Sanders said he doesn't need to come up with a detailed plan "right now" for how much his signature health care plan would cost individual Americans.

"I want quality affordable health care for everybody. ... But let's remember what's at stake. We have a current President who's trying to take away fundamental health care rights," Clinton said, referencing the Trump administration's support for a lawsuit looking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, including protections for people with preexisting conditions.

"So we can have a big argument about ideally what kind of health care we should want for everybody, because I'm on the front lines on that battle, but let's remember: If we don't win, people will lose what they have right now," she added. "So I just want everybody to understand how high the stakes are and to hold every candidate and every public office holder accountable for what they do or they don't do." [my emphasis]

I view those quotes as showing the extent to which Clinton is still fighting the DLC battles of the 1980s. Assuming the CNN quotes convey her comments fully enough there, what she seems to be saying is that not only should Democrats not even be talking about Medicare for All but instead should focus on the minimum goal of containing the damage the Trump Administration has already done to the health insurance system in the US.

This strikes me as a version of the Make American Boring Again message that is essentially one of mildly disturbed complacency.

Corporate Democrats generally aren't going to challenge drastic descriptions of the danger of the Trump Administration. But even during the Reagan years, Democrats had an advantage in national public opinion when it came to polls showing people were generally more attracted to Democratic positions than Republican ones. But the Democrats went into a defensive crouch in which they courted corporate cash more actively and they accepted Republican framing of issues from defense to fiscal conservatism to law-and-order. The corporate-centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was the chief organized expression of that political tendency.

But what at least as frustrating to Democratic activists as their centrist positioning on issues was their seeming unwillingness to fight for their own stated positions, in dramatic contrast to the steadily increasing zeal of the Republicans to fight for theirs.

Clinton's appeal to Democrats to Settle For Less that shows up in that article seems like a tired repetition of DLC centrism. Long after the DLC itself disbanded, which is did in 2011. (Ben Smith, The end of the DLC era Politico 02/007/2011)

And it's a reflection of the continuing asymetric polarization between the Democratic and Republican Party, with the former struggling to get past timid centrist and the latter having descended to an authoritarian party in a continuing process of radicalization. (See: Norman Ornstein, Yes, Polarization Is Asymmetric—and Conservatives Are Worse The Atlantic 06/19/2014: Edward Lempinen interviewing Thomas Mann, Impeachment puts GOP’s divisive tactics center-stage, says Berkeley expert Berkeley News 12/17/2019)