This is an insightful piece by @chrislhayes on how the GOP is radicalizing against democracy but I disagree with the claim that the GOP is "moderating on policy." /1 theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Yes, "public opinion is trending left" but I don't see a lot of evidence that the GOP "moderated" during the Trump administration, which pushed tax cuts for the rich, repealing ACA, deregulation, conservative judges, all with near-unanimous support from the GOP conference. /2
Hayes say, "If Trump had come out strongly for a $15 minimum wage, the party’s base would have backed him." Perhaps. But Trump opposed an increase in the minimum wage, & as this piece notes, “The vast majority of Republicans" oppose it. /3 cnbc.com/2021/01/26/dem…
Given that the vast majority of the GOP voted for "skinny repeal" of ACA, which would have taken health insurance away from millions, that is is accurate to say that the "GOP under Trump largely abandoned attempts to cut the social safety net."/4
And given that their major legislative achievement was a tax cut that disproportionately favored the wealthy that Paul Ryan helped engineer, that is is accurate to say that, "Paul Ryanism, as an ideology and a message, is dead; it has no real constituency."/5
It didn't necessarily work that well everywhere, but the GOP campaign message from Trump on down was the venerable anti-New Deal mantra that the Democrats were socialists planning to take away freedom. If anything the GOP doubled down on this theme in 2020./6
Chris is surely right that the target of culture war arguments have shifted away from gay marriage toward other targets, but that is the nature of culture wars. And not just Trump but the GOP has doubled down on grievance and victimization. /7 nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou…
So while I agree Hayes's key points that progressive policies are winning in the court of public opinion and that the GOP has become a dangerous anti-democratic party, I don't see much evidence of policy moderation in the party as a whole./8
The near-Party-line House and Senate votes on the Biden Covid relief plan would seem to support the view that the GOP playbook will be similar to what it was in the Obama era. /9 cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bid…
The GOP has built its brand on undermining faith in government (even while enacting government programs that benefit the wealthy and corporations) and as @ThePlumLineGS notes this is a key faultline in the partisan debate about the Covid relief package./10 washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
*Apologies for the typo and some missing words in a few of the tweets in this thread. I hope the meaning was clear. /11
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This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1 washingtonpost.com/politics/senat…
I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2
The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3
Why the divergence between perception and reality? Lots of reasons but it partially has to do, IMO, with the success of anti-New Deal free enterprisers transmuting their ideology into an invented tradition a kind of common sense.
Here’s a link to the excellent piece by @DLeonhardt, summarizing research by the economists, Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson. /2
It calls to mind the statement often attributed to Harry Truman (and here in 1952 to Adlai Stevenson) that, "If you want to live like a Republican these days, you have to vote for a Democrat." /3 newspapers.com/clip/69164274/
This profile of Josh Hawley, which highlights his supposedly “ferocious populism” and quotes somebody calling him a “true populist,” barely discusses his policy positions, which on ACA, taxes, minimum wage & many other issues are not “populist” at all. /1 washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/styl…
We don’t, for example, learn that Hawley, although not yet in the Senate, supported the Trump tax cut for the rich, that he opposed raising the minimum wage, that as AG, he fought to take health care away from millions of Americans./2
If to be a “populist” is to use the word “elite” in almost every paragraph and to condemn “cosmopolitanism,” than perhaps Hawley qualifies. /3
"Charming" Kevin McCarthy met with birther activists in his office in 2013 and accused three Jewish people--Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg--of trying to "buy" the midterms in 2018.
Given McCarthy’s misleading stories about the “deli” that he operated out of his aunt and uncle’s frozen yogurt store, it is interested that this is still up on his website bio.
Here's a @washingtonpost fact check about his deli. "Yet there are no ownership or sales records that can be located for a Kevin O’s Deli in Bakersfield, according to the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration." washingtonpost.com/news/fact-chec…
I’m not a historian of fascism but the idea that we shouldn’t use the term because it only makes sense in the context of its origins seems like an overly restrictive view of how political language (which I do study) works. /1
Many political phrases and ideologies outlast their original use. As Peter Gordon argued in @NYRB, the notion of restricting political terms to their context of origin becomes incoherent./2 nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/…
“Free enterprise” was popularized by abolitionists as part of their critique of chattel slavery. Conservatism was first employed in response to the French Revolution. Like many other political terms, they have been contested and evolved./3
As I have argued, conservative free enterprisers depicted the state and the trade union as the only forces constraining freedom. They underemphasized corporate power or denied it altogether by imagining even large business firms as agglomerations of individuals. /1
This worldview, in which their were only individuals acting in a free market and states limiting their freedom, has left them ill-prepared to mount a serious critique of corporate power and makes their current freakout seem hypocritical./2
Here’s an example from my book (p. 187) of free enterprisers describing the economy “as consisting of individuals only...whose ability to proper faced only one menace: the ever-present threat of ‘government strangulation’”/3