Today's GOP, in a nutshell: Republicans are telling their voters to rage at "woke" corporations for defending African American voting rights while also telling them raising corporate taxes to fund infrastructure is socialism.
It's dumb to analyze the Georgia law only in terms of impact on turnout. Even if burdened voters do turn out, limiting voting to skew elections is wrong. And it erases the larger context, in which the GOP is ramping up anti-democratic tactics everywhere:
The ridiculous GOP claim that Biden's infrastructure plan is "socialism" actually reveals Republicans, not Democrats, as the real ideological outliers. Which helpfully confirms exactly why Democrats will all but certainly have to pass it alone. New piece: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The GOP claim that investing in green technologies isn't "real" infrastructure spending is just another way of saying Republicans will never accept the need to fund the transition to decarbonization.
It makes the GOP an outlier relative to its own past:
Biden's new plan makes a very big bet: That huge public expenditures are the kryptonite to defeat Trumpism. While Trumpists remain lost in deranged anti-leftism, in reality center and left are rolling out the most ambitious policies in 50 years. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Biden's plan is both nostalgic and forward-looking. It looks back to the big public expenditures and public works of the prosperous 1960s, while addressing climate, racial inequities, and the needs of the multi-racial health-care-oriented working class:
This is a strikingly idealized vision of what a Dem center-left alliance can accomplish.
As Tucker Carlson fantasizes about leftist extremism provoking the right into full fascism, a broad liberal-left coalition is working to solve vast public problems:
It's true that there are tensions and ambiguities in the Dem position. So what? These tensions and ambiguities flow from the moral and policy complexities of the challenges themselves.
Dems are trying to figure these things out right now. But that's good, not bad.
Also, this idea that the GOP message is "effective" is sort of nonsense. Rs lost the last two national elections. We have to get our heads out of 2016. Trump *lost in 2020.* Rs *lost the House in 2018.* Immigration was central both times. Stop pretending this never happened.
It's growing more likely that a GOP-controlled legislature will subvert a 2024 election result. Republicans are laying the groundwork to do just that, right now. Trump's backing of a radical GOP candidate for Georgia Sec State makes it explicit. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The war over voting is often covered as a “partisan” struggle, as if each side is trying to manipulate election rules to its advantage in a vaguely equivalent way.
That erases the profound moral differences between being anti-democracy and pro-democracy:
Time to dispense with the silly myth that the GOP is "moving left" on economics in any meaningful sense. They're dismissing tax hikes on the rich with rhetoric that hasn't changed in 30 years. And they can't even support a family-friendly child allowance: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
A new "populist" GOP? Republicans are dismissing tax hikes on the rich with rhetoric that hasn't changed in 30 years. Meanwhile, they're calling the child allowance "welfare," using language that echoes Paul Ryan's attack on the welfare state "hammock":
When Republicans pretend their concerns about voter fraud are rooted in a desire to restore "confidence" among Trump voters who supposedly "believe" the election was stolen from him, we are not obliged to pretend it's a real argument. It isn't.
Everybody should watch @ossoff debunking this dumb lie.
"Public concern regarding the integrity of the recent election," Ossoff said, is due only to a "sustained misinformation campaign led by a vain former president unwilling to accept his own defeat.”
@ossoff The insulting lie that Republican voters lack confidence in the 2020 election, and that this justifies various anti-democratic moves, is everywhere.
It's been pushed by the head of the RNC's Orwellian "election integrity" group and many others: