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Greg Sargent Profile picture
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7 Apr, 4 tweets, 3 min read
Republicans can whine all they want about "woke corporate virtue signaling." But here's the truth: This situation is their fault. It's in no small part the result of the continuing GOP refusal to fully renounce Trump's lie about the election. New piece:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Another Republican threatening companies who criticize voter suppression: Texas' Dan Patrick.

He says they might “have a bill they want us to pass for them. Good luck!”

And he says voting limits are needed to boost voter confidence, which he undermined.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The current war reflects big ongoing cultural shifts.

Trump attacked kneeling players, blasted BLM protests as urban anarchy and fomented violence to overturn an election.

Companies were pushed to take sides throughout. We're seeing the culmination now:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
There's precedent for companies taking sides in national civil rights battles.

In the 1960s some companies felt pressure to navigate the conflict, and some ended up on the right side.

It's highly relevant history. I talked to @julianzelizer about it:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

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Greg Sargent Profile picture
8 Apr
Amazing: Gov Brian Kemp has done 14 Fox News interviews on Georgia's voter suppression law, in a frantic bid to atone for his heretical refusal to help Trump steal the election. And it's still not enough! I tried to unpack the deeper pathologies here:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Republicans keep telling their voters to fear "woke" corporations and "cancel culture."

But what Republicans really fear is *more Democrats voting.*

And what they really object to is corporations defending a future shaped by Dem voters' participation:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… ImageImage
Republicans are relying on what you might call the "confidence" canard.

They don't say 2020 was illegitimate. Instead, they say voting limits are needed to restore "confidence" in elections.

This is central to the ongoing GOP voter suppression project:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… ImageImage
Read 4 tweets
Greg Sargent Profile picture
6 Apr
McConnell is threatening "consequences" against corporations that defend voting rights. So surely he'll back the new Dem push to bring back revenues multinationals are sheltering abroad, right? Stop calling the GOP "populist." You're getting scammed:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
GOP threats against woke corporations are toothless. This is deliberate! Rs are targeting tax privileges to create the aura of acting in the public interest. But they won't target real tax privileges in a way that has serious distributional consequences:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… ImageImage
“If Republicans are interested in ensuring megacorporations pay their fair share — not just punishing perceived enemies that support voting rights — I’m all ears."

@RonWyden to me. Dems have a new plan to tax multinationals. It exposes sham GOP populism:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… ImageImage
Read 5 tweets
Greg Sargent Profile picture
5 Apr
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.

My latest, on the MLB debate:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
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:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
A new poll finds 6 in 10 Republicans say the election was stolen from Trump.

You *cannot* analyze the Georgia law's impact without reckoning with the larger degradation Republicans are inflicting.

This may be why corporations are coming out so hard now:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
Greg Sargent Profile picture
2 Apr
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:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Here's how you know Republicans are full of it.

They say they only want to do a bill on roads, bridges, waterways and ports.

But they almost certainly won't support *either* higher taxes on corporations *or* deficit spending to pay for it:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
Greg Sargent Profile picture
31 Mar
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:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
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:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 5 tweets
Greg Sargent Profile picture
31 Mar
This thread reflects a very bad tendency: The idea that if you can't bumper-sticker your position, it's inherently problematic.

If the Dem position on immigration is hard to articulate, it's because Dems are trying to engage the issue's many complexities, not demagoguing them.
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.
Read 5 tweets

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