Eric Cantor now outside GOP mainstream

By Frank Moraes 

It is a funny old world. It seems upside down. It is as if the drunk dozing in an alley has more wisdom to offer that the local pastor. (Which may be true!) And that is the sense that I have today, at least in politics. When Eric Cantor starts sounding reasonable, anything seems possible. But it isn't really that the world is out of balance. Nor is it the case that Cantor is actually being reasonable. As I wrote just a few days ago, the Republican Party has gotten more and more nihilistic ever since Reagan. The critical phrase here is "more and more," because it is indeed getting worse.

Eric Cantor has long been one of the great examples of Republican nihilism. But the Republican Party seems now to have passed him by. Back in April, he put forward a bill to extend health insurance coverage to people with preexisting conditions. The idea was to make the Republicans look good while harming the overall framework of Obamacare. It would at least have put Democrats in a awkward position. It was a great example of old-fashioned political strategy. As much as I may disagree with what he wanted to accomplish, at least he was doing something that might work. The House Republicans would have none of it, however, and the bill was pulled without a vote. Since then, I think they've voted for a full repeal of Obamacare another three times or something.

Yesterday, I learned thanks to Steve Benen that Cantor thinks that a shutdown of the government is a bad thing. Can you imagine?! According to National Review, he said:

To get 60 votes in the Senate, you need at least 14 Democrats to join Republicans and pass a CR [continuing resolution] that defunds Obamacare. Right now, I am not aware of a single Democrat in the Senate who would join us. If and when defunding has 60 votes in the Senate, we will absolutely deliver more than 218 votes in the House.

If it weren't for the arm rests, I would have fallen out of my chair. Is he actually suggesting that shutting down the government for the purpose of "sending a message" is a bad idea?! The next thing you know, Cantor will switch parties. I mean, this short, two data point trend of Cantor's seems to indicate that he has some interest in doing something, and that puts him well outside the mainstream of his current party.

Of course, just look at how far expectations have fallen. All Cantor is doing is making political calculations. But that is a big deal. For a lot of the House Republican caucus, doing nothing -- with the inevitable result that it will destroy the whole system -- is the point of going to Washington! That and stopping abortion and lowering the corporate tax rate. (You know what they say: "To God, every corporate dollar is sacred.") In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king! Eric Cantor is that one-eyed man.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go find a drunk to discuss some problems in my life.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Read More

With seniors turning on Republicans, are Republicans done?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(See also Frank's post on this.)

Carville and Greenberg notice something interesting, and perhaps transformational, going on:

There's something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP. This is apparent in seniors' party affiliation and vote intention, in their views on the Republican Party and its leaders, and in their surprising positions on jobs, health care, retirement security, investment economics, and the other big issues that will likely define the 2014 midterm elections.

We first noticed a shift among seniors early in the summer of 2011, as Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare became widely known (and despised) among those at or nearing retirement. Since then, the Republican Party has come to be defined by much more than its desire to dismantle Medicare. To voters from the center right to the far left, the GOP is now defined by resistance, intolerance, intransigence, and economics that would make even the Robber Barons blush. We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens.

It's never made much sense to me why seniors would vote Republican given the the Republican effort to dismantle the social safety net, the government programs so many seniors rely on, but I suppose there's something to be said for tradition, and of course part of voting Republican is being motivated by fear of change, of the new, of what is young and different.

But the Republican Party is moving further and further to the right, becoming the party solely of anti-government Tea Party types, right-wing Christian fundamentalists, neocon warmongers, and, of course, the Romney-style rich. And for all the post-election talk of rebranding, the Republican Party is doubling down on pushing away minority voters as well, it seems, as anyone else who isn't of this ideological stripe, including seniors generally.

We'll see if this holds next year. Midterm elections are characterized by low voter turnout dominated by an older, whiter electorate. But if Republicans are losing old white people, at least enough of them to make a difference, what hope do they have?

Read More

America's imaginary lavish social welfare safety net that exists only in Republican minds

By Marc McDonald 

In America, we hate the poor. We really, really hate the poor. We are indoctrinated from birth to hate the poor. Jesus may have said, "Blessed are you who are poor." But America has no time for that Jesus. Our motto is "Screw the poor."

The Century Foundation

As a result, America has never been big on social welfare programs for the poor. Even during the peak years of U.S. social program spending (during LBJ's "Great Society" years), America had a skimpy social safety net, compared to other industrialized nations.

Compared to generous European social safety nets, America these days more closely resembles the likes of Mexico than a modern First World industrialized nation. Jobless benefits, for example, are far more meager and stingy in the U.S. than they are in Europe. In fact, for one reason or another, millions of Americans don't even ever qualify for jobless benefits. (I know: I was one of them. Years ago, I applied for jobless benefits and was turned down.)

The other pillar of the U.S. social safety net, food stamps, is also very meager. I recall recently playing around with the food stamp eligibility program on a Texas state government Web site. I was curious as to exactly how low one's income had to be in order to qualify. I kept plugging in lower and lower income numbers and kept getting a response page that said, "You earn too much to qualify for food stamps." Eventually, I concluded the Web site must be broken. It was only later that I discovered, much to my amazement, that the Web site was in fact working just fine and the Third World-like wages I'd plugged into the search form were indeed considered too high to qualify for aid.

In short, in America these days, if you're poor, you are screwed.

The fact is, many low-income and poor people never even qualify for any type of aid. And the shocking numbers of homeless in the U.S. demonstrates that our social safety net is grotesquely inadequate to meet the needs of the needy. The fact that one in five children lives in poverty is a good indicator of that.

In fact, what meager social safety net programs that are around only exist because corporate America wants them to exist (a good indicator of just how corrupt our government is these days).

Take food stamps, for example. This program simply wouldn't exist were it not for the likes of Walmart. Since Walmart (a vastly profitable mega-billion-dollar corporation) can't be bothered to pay their workers a living wage, we the taxpayer in effect subsidize their wages via food stamps, (as well as other programs like Medicaid).

Give corporate America credit: they do know how to exploit a situation to boost their profits.

Despite all this, today's Republican Party is convinced that the reason America is going broke is that we supposedly fund all these lavish, generous social safety net programs. Indeed, the likes of Rush Limbaugh constantly ramble on about "trillions of dollars" that are supposedly spent on welfare. The typical Limbaugh listener these days is convinced that America is going broke because of "excessive welfare spending" and "lavish foreign aid."

It's all a lie, of course.

Welfare programs for the non-working poor are in fact a tiny part of the federal budget (five percent, in fact). And, as a percentage of GDP, America's foreign aid budget is smaller than virtually any other industrialized nation. (In fact, what foreign aid we do spend is often nothing more than backdoor military aid.)

It's one thing for clowns like Limbaugh to lie about welfare. But I also routinely hear other, more mainstream Republicans lie through their teeth about America's "lavish" welfare spending.

The reason is obvious. It's easier to beat up on the poor and the needy and make them a scapegoat for America's economic crisis. The real reason for America's titanic deficits (out-of-control military spending and insane trillion-dollar wars) rarely gets a mention in our mainstream political discourse.

Republicans are happy to shovel trillions of dollars into the wasteful, corrupt monster known as the Military Industrial Complex. And then they have the gall to blame needy children for bankrupting the American nation.

The reason is obvious, of course. The Military Industrial Complex employs thousands of lobbyists who are willing to shower billions of dollars on "our" representatives in Congress.

By contrast, needy children don't have any lobbyists to represent their interests.

America is a nation that has a serious addiction to massive trillion-dollar military budgets. By contrast, programs for the poor are a small slice of the federal budget. To blame the latter for America's fiscal woes is the equivalent of a drug addict who spends $500 a day on crack cocaine and then blames his budget woes on the fact that he spends a quarter a day on a newspaper.

I believe today's Republicans are playing with fire when they continue to attack the poor and continue to work to slash what little remains of the U.S. social safety net.

The poor, the needy, the impoverished have been crapped all over by this government for decades. Their growing ranks (and their growing desperation) is a ticking time bomb that will eventually blow up in the face of our corrupt government and the plutocrats that it serves.

(Cross-posted at Beggars Can Be Choosers.)

Read More

Not so long road to GOP authoritarianism

By Frank Moraes 

Last week, Robert Reich wrote an article trying to explain, Why Republicans are Disciplined and Democrats Aren't. Basically he argued that this is because of the kind of people who are attracted to the two parties. Republicans tend to lean toward authoritarianism, and thus it isn't surprising that their politicians would be good at delivering the same brainless talking points over and over and over again. I don't think there is much question of this. When I was a libertarian, I hated the Republican Party and still had a certain fondness for the Democrats for exactly this reason. (Sadly for the movement, most people are exactly the opposite, which ought to tell you all you need to know about libertarianism as a practical matter.)

What confuses me is that according to Reich, it ever was so. He quotes Will Rogers saying, "I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." He likely said that before the first World War. But I'm not sure it means what Reich claims. After all, people normally make that kind of joke about whatever organization they are associated with. But I do think the joke works because Democrats have long recognized themselves in it and Republicans have felt superior for that reason. But is that image correct?

In many ways, the Republican Party has always been conservative. When the party started in the 1850s, it had a very compelling slogan, "free labor, free land, free men." The "free land" part of that referred to the fact that plantation owners tended to own all the good farm land in an area. As a result of this, free (white) farmers were kept down because the system was proto-feudal. But it's clear that the slogan is laser focused on slavery. The first and third phrases are about slavery and the second is about slave holders. The truth is that from the beginning, the Republican Party was very much pro-business, although it is certainly true that business then was quite different from now.

Moving forward into the progressive era, Theodore Roosevelt would seem to push against the idea that the Republican Party was always conservative. But his liberal policy of trust busting was very unpopular within his party and he eventually went on to run as a Progressive. That can certainly be seen as a practical matter -- he just wouldn't admit defeat. But that was also true of Joe Lieberman, who has also stood outside his party on important issues.

Since I was a kid, I've wondered how it is that a liberal party becomes a conservative party. I think what I've talked about here is part of the issue -- but not all of it. To some extent, the GOP has reached its current position by starting out as rather conservative -- at least on economic issues. Equally important, in many ways the party simply hasn't evolved.

In the 1950s, there were lots of Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower who had made their peace with progressivism and the New Deal. But there was always a strong minority in the party that accepted nothing -- people who wanted to return to 1880. During the beginning of Obama's presidency, there was a wave of conservative concern about the 17th Amendment to the Constitution: direct election of senators. That was a movement that started in the 1890s that became law in 1913. This part of the party has been ascendant in recent years.

In many ways, the party has regressed. There is a tendency among all of us to learn narrow lessons rather than broad ones. For example, most Americans now think the Nazis were bad simply because they killed so many Jews and other "undesirables." But even without the Final Solution and the racism, the Nazis were a terrible authoritarian political movement.

I think the same thing is going on with Republicans regarding slavery. There is little doubt in my mind that if slavery were an issue today, most Republicans would be apologists for it. The Christians would rightly note that slavery is in the Bible; it wouldn't be their fault; it is God's law. The economic conservatives would make arguments like, "Slavery is not optimal, but eliminating it would be terrible for the economy." Conservative economists would come up with complex models to show how slavery actually makes poor whites better off than they would otherwise be. Am I going too far here? Maybe, but I seriously doubt it based upon some of the outrageous claims that otherwise good economists have made over the last five years especially.

I'm come to the conclusion that what ties conservatives together is authoritarianism. Their rhetoric is all about freedom, but you hardly need to scratch the surface to see what they really think. Tax cuts are not for the poor, they are for the power elite. And when taxes are cut to a point where the poor pay no federal income taxes, Republicans grouse about how outrageous that is. And that's the best case they have for not being an authoritarian party. Certainly their positions on guns, war, welfare, abortion, and just about anything else you can think of are explicitly authoritarians. Does anyone really doubt that if abortion was a medical procedure done to men that it wouldn't be controversial?

The Republican Party is doubtless more authoritarian than it has ever been. But for a long time it has been authoritarian and the roots of this have always been present. What's more, there has been a steady trend toward authoritarianism in the Republican Party. And the opposite has been the case with the Democratic Party. And this is why, despite my great disappointment with it, I self-identify as a Democrat. It is also why any thoughtful person should distance themselves from the party of Abraham Lincoln. Because other than the issue of slavery, they weren't so great. And today, it hardly stands out as a party that would end slavery.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Read More

There's no Tea Party rift

By Frank Moraes 

Ed Kilgore reflected yesterday on the fact that the only real ideological divide in the Republican Party is over national security. That is true, although even Rand Paul has shown himself to be nothing is not malleable when it comes to ideology. But it is true that a large bipartisan minority voted for an amendment to the half-trillion-dollar defense authorization to restrict the NSA's ability to collect telephone metadata on U.S. calls. The final vote was 205-217, so it only barely lost.

Kilgore speculated that there would have been more Democratic votes for the amendment if a Republican had been in the White House. Of course that's true. Even still, I'm pretty happy with the party; they voted in favor of the amendment 111-83 -- that's 57% of the caucus on a bill where the leadership and the White House were very vocal about how it would mean the end of free society and would effectively mean the terrorists won.

On the Republican side, Kilgore is less certain about how the White House control affected the vote. As it was, while Republicans voted for the amendment in large numbers, they did not have a majority. The vote was 94-134 -- that's just 41%. I suspect that had a Republican been in the White House, that number would have gone down to perhaps 30%.

The main question is why some Republicans care about privacy issues while others do not. Kilgore noted, "I certainly haven't figured out any consistent principle... that makes it possible to predict which fire-eating Tea Party conservative these days is frothing for an immediate war with Iran and perhaps domestic profiling of Muslims, and which is worried about excessive overseas commitments or domestic surveillance." For example, Michele Bachmann and Steve King both voted against the amendment.

I think what explains this is the same thing I've been arguing for years: the Tea Party is no kind of small-government libertarian movement. It has always been just a branding campaign for the Republican base. But because all of their supposed worship of the founding fathers, "Tea Party" is a moniker that appeals to libertarian minded politicians. But these people don't get elected because of their isolationist leanings; they get elected because they are against abortion rights and are no-tax ideologues.

So that is what defines the Tea Party. Beyond that, we can generally say that they are supporters of big military and big surveillance. Some of them (a distinct minority) do have libertarian leanings. But that's not what the Tea Party movement is all about because that's not what the Republican Party is all about. And so it shouldn't come as a surprise that there might be small disagreements inside, because they are distinctly not what the movement is about. 

Afterword 

Note that libertarian-minded people would be crazy to vote for libertarian-"sounding" members of the Republican Party. If you care about actual libertarian policy, all you will get from such people is lip service to ideals and votes that push the country further toward a big military feudalism. Sad as it may be, the Democratic Party is far more inclined toward libertarian policy than the Republicans.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Read More

Who said anything about "rebranding"?

By Mustang Bobby 

All that talk about rebranding the GOP after the beatdown in last year's election was just that: talk.  They really didn't mean it, according to RNC Chair Reince Priebus:

Speaking with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network posted today, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus confirmed that the party will try to reach out to groups like gays and lesbians by simply appearing to be more respectful without actually changing its views on issues such as marriage equality.

After Brody said conservative evangelical voters are nervous that the GOP thinks "we have to be more tolerant," Priebus said there is nothing to worry about. "I don't know if I've used the word 'tolerance,' I don't really care for that word myself. I don't have a problem with it, I just think it has another meaning politically that can go the other direction," the party chairman said.

"It's not what you say, I think, it's sometimes – like our moms used to tell us – it's how you say it. And I think that's really the issue. And quite frankly, I think some of that has been overblown."

Priebus assured Brody that the GOP will continue to represent "things that are very square with our beliefs as Christians" and recognize that "there's only one sovereign God."

How very reassuring. For a while there we had a hope that they might become tolerant and open-minded, which would have been a major change and might even attract voters who previously saw them as sniveling patriarchs and bigots who saw the error of their ways. Not to worry; they're still the same old cranks.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Read More

In GOP Land, America is 89% white

By Frank Moraes 

Benjy Sarlin has a great article about the New Southern Strategy that I've been writing about, "How the GOP Stopped Worrying About Latinos and Learned to Love the Base." It lays out the best statistical counter argument to Sean Trende that I've read. As you know, I don't think any of this really matters. The Republican Party has no intention of changing. For one thing, they have a long history of getting people to vote against their best interests by voting Republican. That's what the "Reagan Democrats" were: people who resented blacks more than they cared about their own well-being. So it only makes sense that they would continue to think that they can win elections while remaining unpopular. And the recent damage to the Voting Rights Act only makes that opinion all the more compelling to the Republican Party.

And that got me thinking: voter suppression. There is a very old theory about liberals and conservatives. It claims that liberals make policies based upon the way they want people to be, but conservatives base their policies on the way people actual are. I think there actually used to be something to this. A lot of socialist thought assumed that incentives didn't matter whereas conservatives were all about incentives. For the last few decades, though, liberals have been all about incentives. In as much as conservatives think about incentives, they now believe they are the only thing that matters, which is just as big a mistake as thinking that they don't matter at all.

But in a more fundamental way, the Republican Party believes things that are clearly untrue. We saw this most clearly last year where even Mitt Romney went into election day thinking he was going to win despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But more to the point, I have noticed that a lot of conservatives really do think that any time a Republican loses an election it is a sign of voter fraud. I believe this comes from the extremely insular nature of conservative politics. Just look at the Deer Lady: it is clear she never hears anything about politics that is not filtered through a right-wing extremist.

It goes much deeper than this. Much of the conservative base really thinks that the world is the way they "remember" it. They think it is still 1976 when whites made up 89% of the electorate. So to them, the coming "demographic death spiral" is just a myth like global warming. The only reason that white voters have been declining is that ACORN has been committing vast voter fraud (even though it no longer exists). And by enacting voter ID laws we will return to the halcyon days of old.

Note: this is not what people like Sean Trende and Byron York are talking about. As I've explained before, they are just the intellectual rationalizations of what the Republicans were always going to do. But I think there is much more here than stubbornness from the Republicans. They are just convinced that America is still a white man's country and that if everything is fair, they win. Personally, I don't see why so many liberals are trying to educate them on the matter. The time would be better spent trying to educate both parties on some basic economics.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Read More

The kids are not all right

By Mustang Bobby

A new report from the College Republicans says that the GOP has totally trashed their chances with younger voters.

Titled the “Grand Old Party for a Brand New Generation,” the report is sharply critical of the GOP on several fronts. The study slams some Republicans’ almost singular focus on downsizing Big Government and cutting taxes; candidates’ use of offensive, polarizing rhetoric; and the party’s belly-flop efforts at messaging and outreach, even as the report presents a way forward and, at times, strikes an optimistic tone.

In the report, the young Republican activists acknowledge their party has suffered significant damage in recent years. A sampling of the critique on:

Gay marriage: “On the ‘open-minded’ issue … [w]e will face serious difficulty so long as the issue of gay marriage remains on the table.”

Hispanics: “Latino voters … tend to think the GOP couldn’t care less about them.”

Perception of the party’s economic stance: “We’ve become the party that will pat you on your back when you make it, but won’t offer you a hand to help you get there.”

Big reason for the image problem: The “outrageous statements made by errant Republican voices.”

Words that up-for-grabs voters associate with the GOP: “The responses were brutal: closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.”

“[The] Republican Party has won the youth vote before and can absolutely win it again,” the report says, pointing to presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who were competitive with that demographic. “But this will not occur without significant work to repair the damage done to the Republican brand among this age group over the last decade.”

Shorter version: “You know how you’ve always been? Stop being like that. Then everything will be really groovy.”

(Cross-posted by Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Read More

Tea Partier: Louder-shouting Republican

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, Ed Kilgore wrote, "Please Listen Up, Political Reporters: What Ted Cruz Means When He Says He Mistrusts Both Parties." In it, he took on Ted Cruz and his habit of claiming that he doesn't trust either political party. As Kilgore noted, "Does it mean, as political reporters often blandly repeat, that 'Tea Party' pols like Cruz are hardy independents who care about principle rather than about the GOP, and represent a constituency that is up in the air?" He provided two answers: "No" and "Hell no!"

This is an issue that I've been hammering on for a while. The only difference between the Tea Party and the Republican Party is that the Tea Party is only made up of the stronger Republicans. So it makes no sense to even have a different name for the Tea Party; they are just the base of the Republican Party. What's interesting is that the Democratic Party has a progressive base too but no one labels it as a separate party. And that's strange when you consider that the this base is far more likely to abandon its party than the Tea Party is.

As you all know, I am constantly disappointed in the Democratic Party. Yet when someone asks me, I tell them I am a Democrat. I think it is disingenuous to say otherwise. This comes from my many conversations with conservatives who claim to be "independent." (This doesn't tend to happen with liberals; the independents who tend toward the Democrats really are in the muddled middle.) You aren't an independent if you agree with everything the Republicans say but think they aren't quite pure enough. And that is exactly what Ted Cruz is all about.

What the Tea Party movement was about from the beginning was the Republican base upset that it lost big in 2008. It was the outgrowth of the widely held opinion that the 2008 crisis and the presidency of George W. Bush were caused by not being conservative enough. There was also all that racial insecurity. "I'm losing control of my country!" I won't go as far as Bobcat Goldthwait who says they are just racists, "Obama's a... a... a Socialist! What's a Socialist? I don't know, but they like fried chicken." But there is a lot of that. The whole birther movement is not because Obama is black but because he is "other."

Whenever talking about the modern Republican Party, all roads lead back to Life of Brian. The only ones the People's Front of Judea hate more than the Romans are the Judean People's Front. So it is madness to suggest that the Tea Party is somehow independent of the parties. That makes it sound as if its members disagree equally with the two parties. But the fact is that they always (By definition!) disagree with the Democratic Party. And they always agree with the Republican Party. Except, of course, they shout louder. But what they shout is same thing.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Read More