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Just as follow on, and in the spirit that everything related to Trump is culture war:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/19/politics/trump-voters-of-color-analysis/
Pull quotes:
This fact should be the smoking gun that we're not talking about the same thing that we used to with the term "racism". The american public pretends to believe that Trump was more racist than Wallace.
This is political realignment from the inside. It's slow, it could reverse or it could continue. I believe very strongly that the political coalitions are going to change composition quite a bit in the coming decade. I don't know what the issues will be, but the separation between the working class (see our discussion in last week's thread) and the middle class is becoming big enough to win elections on. The question is which party will get which side, and in what quantities.
As a point for discussion, if (and it's a big "if) the Republicans fully take up the flag of the working class, would that make them the left-leaning party?
I think we're not far away from explicitly race-based campaigns by Republicans in some blue districts. Imagine a Hispanic candidate, running as a Republican, campaigning for the following:
Jobs, not welfare
Traditional families
End of anti-Latino racism
Debate catch phrase: "I dare you to say Latinx one more time, Senator."
Hispanics and Republicans seem like natural allies on the culture war at least. All the woke stuff is Anglo imperialism. Successfully tarring Democrats as imperialists would also have the effect of demoralizing progressive white voters.
This has been a Republican pipe dream for a long time, not just for Hispanics but for other minorities as well. The problem is that these kinds of politicians are too beholden to a national party apparatus that is opposed to the kinds of things that would make such a candidate successful. Most voters are savvy enough to realize that "Jobs not welfare" is just code for cutting social services without any plan to replace them with anything. If politicians actually had the ability to deliver jobs with good enough pay that people would get off benefits then there wouldn't be any need to cut services to begin with, since everyone would take the jobs over the welfare. Add to that the fact that actual welfare is already restrictive enough that further cuts aren't really on the table and you're left with a host of ancillary programs like food stamps, CHIP, subsidized housing, etc., and a good number of these beneficiaries already have jobs anyway, just not ones that pay enough to obviate the need for some forms of public assistance. "Jobs not welfare" is a good applause line for people who already have good enough jobs that public assistance isn't really part of the calculus (Except as a drain on their tax dollars), but it doesn't exactly inspire hope among poor people that electing you will improve their position.
Something similar goes for "End of anti-Latino racism". Well, okay, I have no doubt that the Republican establishment isn't opposed to ending anti-Latino racism in theory. But in practice... it's hard for me to think of a single new policy that the GOP would get behind to serve this end. First you have the rank and file Republicans who will tell you that anti-Latino discrimination isn't a problem and that they all benefit from affirmative action anyway. The most obvious way in which Latinos experience distinct challenges on account of their ethnicity is that many of them don't speak English, and bilingual support is absent in a lot of places. I don't know how one begins to address this through legislation but the GOP has been the party of "if you're in America you should speak English" for some time now, and I don't see that general sentiment going away any time soon.
And as for Latinx, that ship already sailed. A lot of Democrats jumped on that bandwagon in 2020 but the term has been in steady decline ever since. It was kind of big news when polls started being released that showed only a few percent of actual Latinos preferred the term, but contrary to conservative belief, this resulted in most Democrats curtailing their use of it. These days the only people who use it are dyed in the wool wokesters like AOC, who got into a spat with fellow Bronx Democrat Richard Torres this past summer after the latter lambasted the Yankees for using the term. Torres's comments were indicative of a growing trend among Democratic politicians to use "Latino" or "Hispanic" for the simple reason that most members of the community prefer it. In any event, just because a group may not prefer a term doesn't necessarily mean they actively oppose the use of it, much less that such a term would actually affect a voting decision. The fact that most black people prefer "black" over "African American" doesn't seem to have made too much of a political impact, even if the latter is just as much a piece of contrived political correctness as "Latinx". It's just not that big a deal.
Why? If one can get $X for merely being alive, one would have to be offered stricly more than $X to work, certainly not less than $X.
But what happens in reality is that due to a phemenon called "welfare trap" sometimes abstaining from work, brings in more bucks than working, as in the latter case one would no longer be eligible for some means-tested programme.
Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear but I'm well aware of the welfare trap, hence the language "good enough pay that people would get off benefits", which would be the amount where it wouldn't make sense to turn it down to preserve benefits.
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They do in fact have this ability! Politicians absolutely can deliver jobs that pay enough to get people off benefits.
The problem is that in practice politicians have a galaxy of confounding special interests, donors and misaligned personal incentives, and actually giving those jobs to people means not getting fat donations and cushy sinecures once they're out of office - which is why it rarely happens. They don't use that ability, but they absolutely do have it.
A few jobs, yeah. Not enough to make a meaningful impact, especially since the kind of jobs they can deliver tend to be ones that require a greater degree of skill, like political appointments or jobs in the politician's office. Civil service has eliminated most of the sinecures, and in any event the machine politics of the past didn't exactly eliminate poverty, it just provided enough positions that it gave the community the impression that the politicians were serious about eliminating poverty, at least compared to their opponents who sought to eliminate the sinecures.
No, I am talking about enough jobs to make a meaningful impact, not just the free handouts they give to their friends in office. There are real, serious policy changes that can be made which create new jobs on a larger scale in the community. But again, the problem is that doing so involves going against the interests of the donor class and so it doesn't really happen.
Like what? If you're the mayor of a city like Buffalo (or a rep from the district) with some 80,000 people in poverty, what kinds of policy changes, at either the local, state, or Federal level, do you implement to, say, halve that, or provide 40,000 well-paying jobs?
I don't have an answer to your specific question and have no idea what the situation in Buffalo is like, but the actual policies I was thinking of were along these lines:
10 years in prison for hiring illegal immigrant labour, with a policy that specifically pierces the corporate veil. If your company has any illegal immigrants getting paid or doing work, the people in charge go directly to prison and they're forced to pay a fine of triple the costs "saved" from hiring illegal immigrants. If your boss is hiring illegal immigrants and you report him, you (ideally) get his job, though this isn't always the case due to qualification requirements et al. I'm sure the left will love this policy - it directly attacks bosses and prevents exploitation of economically vulnerable populations!
Mandatory regulation equalisation tariffs on all imported finished goods. If a product is more expensive to manufacture in the USA due to government regulations, the cost of compliance with those regulations is multiplied by 1.2 and added onto imported products as a tariff. All proceeds from these tariffs are earmarked for government investment in local manufacture of the goods in question.
Supply-chain reinforcement - we can dip into the military budget here, but the goal would be to shore up supply chains in the USA and make sure that important and essential products can be manufactured with no reliance on external companies, countries or chip fabrication plants. In uncertain times and with the global economic/trade systems experiencing crisis after crisis, this would ideally be a top priority even without any additional jobs being created.
Major effort to repair US infrastructure. Modernise, repair, replace and maintain all major rail lines and roads, as well as water and power supply infrastructure.
And as a bonus I'd throw in marijuana and psychedelic legalisation - let the industries growing in some parts of the country expand and create a bunch of new jobs.
The first one would most likely create well over 40k jobs even without setting up an enforcement agency, but I'm sure you can appreciate why a politician would be unable to get an agenda like this passed - there are too many special interests making sure that these problems remain unfixed.
The first one only works if you buy into the idea that the only participation illegal immigrants have in the economy is through labor. Think of a city with 40,000 people and everything that has to exist to support those 40,000 people, not just locally but all the stuff that comes in from far away to ensure that there's actually, say, stuff that's on the shelves for the people to buy. Get rid of 40,000 illegals by whatever means you want and you've just shrunk the local economy by as much. Except your means is worse. I know you mean for this to be more of a deterrent than anything but a lot of deterrents don't work so if a company employing illegals gets busted now the entire company is probably finished since most companies that employ illegals aren't corporate but independently-owned restaurants and roofers and the like who now have to dip into the assets of the business to pay whatever fines are levied, which may pose a problem if they're on the hook for other debts (which most small businesses are), and then you get into issues of collateral and the like and before you know it they'er in Chapter 7.
As for the rest of them, they're all of the same "creates jobs" rhetoric that both parties have been spouting for decades now, and that the kind of people who are on public assistance aren't exactly inclined to believe. At least when Democrats do it, the presumption is that the jobs will enable them to get off welfare when they're making enough money to afford to. Contrast this with Republicans, where the implication is that people are too lazy to work and the first step is eliminating or greatly reducing assistance programs to force them back into the workplace.
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I know this is kind of beside the point, but has anyone ever won a political debate by “daring” their opponent? If so, I hope it’s on film, because it must be part of a larger smackdown.
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This has been the establishment right dream for a long time, not just in the US but in the UK and EU as well. The end result is an ever more 'left' leaning right wing. A secondary result is a more classical 'class' based political landscape.
The problem with that for the establishment right is that through the process of becoming more 'left' they alienate a part of their base. Which opens the door for, as we have seen: Nigel Farage and Brexit, Trump, and to a lesser extent the 'rise of populism' in Europe. Notably Le Pen, Swedish Democrats, AfD and so on. Some of these became a lot more notable than others. But regardless of anything else, giving these things space to operate poses a threat. In the case of Brexit and Trump, the entire right wing establishment had to reorganize itself. They still 'rule'. But it's a pitiable sight to see all of the Republican establishment career politicians mouth off about how much they love Trump when they very sincerely don't.
A more general question is what the point of the establishment right is in the first place. If it just exists for its own sake to maintain power, sure, make alliances, build bridges, co-opt the popular rhetoric of your opposition and steal their supporters. But what does that functionally entail? Becoming left wing? Does the right honestly have any power as a 'right wing' element in that form?
You can attribute the degeneration of right wing political ideals to a host of things. But at its core it is the same as when the left wing sees a degeneration in its political ideals. When reality meets ideals, reality wins and the political parties have to bend and contort their ideals so they can save face and continue to exist. The reality that faces the Republican party of the future is a white minority voter base. No more dog whistles about 'the boarder'. All you have left is class. And there's the final nail in the 'Republican' coffin.
America isn't going to be a majority 'middle/upper class' society anymore. It's instead moving towards ever greater stratification. With an ever growing underclass and an ever richer and diverse upper class. The 'jobs, not welfare' mantra is a middle/upper class ideal. The 'I'll give you money if you vote for me' mantra works much better on the underclass. This isn't a prophesy or anything. As I understand it, looking across the Atlantic, It's just California.
Agree. It's certainly not an enviable development. It's just my speculation on what needs to happen for a stable two party equilibrium to remain in place. Democrats now dominate all aspects of elite culture and business, so clearly the Republicans will need to find pivot leftward and add new coalition members find balance. Either that or we become a one-party country. Elite whites have completely abandoned the Republican party. Working class whites and evangelicals are not enough to sustain what remains.
The future of American politics probably looks a lot like Mexico or Brazil: a small, quite comfortable upper middle class elite and a large disaffected working class whose votes are effectively bought.
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The goal of a functional Republican Party is to ensure we indeed have a republic, wherein no sector of society, public or private, can easily run the lives or abuse the rights of any other sector. That takes the identification of power and the disarming of it.
Since Reagan left office, that has meant the centrist wing abusing the business community through tax subsidies and breaks and strategic regulation to mold it into the picture of bad-faith capitalism while the right wing focuses on trying to ensure good-faith government.
I don’t have much faith that the Republican Party ever represented that, nor that it claimed to do so.
That is because you are young.
Look, I'm sure I'd have been impressed by Reagan. Probably voted for him.
His campaign wasn't particularly concerned with the integrity of the republic, nor with "identifying" or "disarming" competing interests. There were bigger fish to fry. The Republican party used its 1980 advantage to implement economic policy first and foremost.
It was quite concerned with the integrity of the Republic. Of course it was set in the middle of the Cold War, the Iranian hostage crisis, and Carter's economic downturn, so there were a lot of other things intertwined.
Bigger fish indeed.
Campaigning on those was sensible. It also wasn’t framed as some sort of separation-of-powers realpolitik. What promises or slogans made you think Reagan campaigned on the latter?
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