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Coming to the end of our third week without a Speaker in the United States House of Representatives.
We started the day with something like nine Republican candidates in the running. Eventually this was narrowed down to one by internal Conference voting. Then a sufficient number of Reps said they would refuse to vote for the winner on the floor anyway so now we're back to... internal Conference voting! I seriously do not understand the point of these votes. If Reps won't honor the result in sufficient numbers such that the winner can't actually be elected what purpose is the internal vote serving? I thought it was a meme when I someone on Twitter say (paraphrasing): "There are only two results some GOP Reps accept: We win and try again." Apparently their may be some kind of discussion about a joint Speakership between McCarthy and Jordan? I'm pretty sure Speaker of the House is a constitutional position, it has to be one of them. Would each candidates opponents really trust whoever was actually the Speaker? I can feel Hakeem Jeffries odds rising in real time.
We're about 3 weeks out from the end of the current CR on 11/17. There's some dark comedy in Kevin McCarthy losing his Speakership to avoid a government shutdown and then we have a government shutdown anyway. At least it'll be after Virginia elections so maybe Republicans can do well there!
In a reversal of traditional stereotypes, the GOP is wracked by infighting while the Dems are maintaining party discipline.
The GOP is wedged. It does appear that the largest segment of the GOP is willing to go along with whoever, but there are more than enough intransigents to scuttle any candidate. The right-wing extremists have fully embraced the far left attitude of "burn it down, we'll sort out the details later" and are nearly as happy to have no speaker as to have one of their own. Anything done to appease them alienates the moderates (such as they are), and vice versa. The far right can't strike a deal with the Dems for obvious reasons; neither can the moderates, both because they're mostly not actually that moderate and because their own primary voters will eat them alive if they do (another leftist meme the right has embraced is purity spirals, see also: "Tom Emmer's not a conservative"). And the majority is so slim you have to satisfy everyone.
Meanwhile, the Dems are, at least for now, content to say "not my monkeys, not my circus". They've made noises about being willing to make a deal, but they don't have much reason to save a GOP speaker without major concessions. They believe, probably correctly, that the spectacle of the GOP being held hostage by its right wing and the looming threat of a shutdown will make them look good by comparison.
Not wanting a 9% of GDP deficit isn't extremism. Pretty much anywhere else in the world including the US up until a few years ago the current US fiscal policy would be called extremism. Not wanting 2 million illegal immigrants flowing into the country a year is apparently extremism.
The GOP promises its voters fiscal responsibility and reduced immigration. The voters get open borders, bailouts for wall street and billions for defence contractors and foreign wars. At some point the base has to demand that the GOP delivers on something for the non oligarchy. Continuing to vote for the GOP because the other side is scary and at some point they may throw you a bone goes against the experience of the last five decades. The GOP base needs to walk out until the GOP starts delivering.
Describing people like Jordan or Gaetz as merely being fiscally conservative is glossing over a few things.
The GOP promises its voters culture war, a fantasy where they're going to cut costs and cut taxes but not cut any of the services or subsidies they receive, and a muscular foreign policy. More or less in that order. And to their credit, they've done their best to deliver. It's just that there's no law you can pass that will make your kids stop calling you a bigot, cutting the deficit while cutting taxes without cutting services is harder than it looks, and muscular foreign policy sometimes leads to dodgy decisions that everyone swears up and down 20 years later that they didn't support it was those terrible no-good neocons.
Sure there is. Defund and deconstruct the institutions indoctrinating your kids into believing you're a bigot. Possibly destroy the industries that perform a similar function for profit; this means violating freedom of speech of course, but freedom of speech is a dead letter anyway.
Well-nigh impossible, in fact; similar to defunding the police while creating safer neighborhoods. On the other hand, it's entirely possible to get the reduction in spending via cutting services, which you then blame on the other side. This involves some amount of lying, of course, which politicians are naturally reluctant to do, but somehow I imagine they might find a way to get the job done.
And yet, Trump was the least warmongering president of my lifetime, and also simultaneously insanely popular within Red Tribe. This too, like most things involving politics, involves a considerable amount of dishonesty, as you note. Still, non-muscular foreign policy is a priority for me, and while I am not willing to lie to get it done, I don't care much if a few of the near-infinite number of lies others tell daily advance this cause as a byproduct.
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If you want a lower deficit the solution is to increase taxes. As a fraction of GDP primary government (i.e. non-interest) spending is actually lower in 2019 than it was in 2012. The reason the deficit is larger as a fraction of GDP is because the permanent Bush and Trump tax cuts decreased revenue even faster than spending has decreased. Between 2012 and 2019 primary government spending fell from 23.9% of GDP to 22.1% of GDP while revenues fell from 25.8% of GDP to 19.6% of GDP. If we repealed the Bush and Trump tax cuts our debt:GDP ratio would be on the way to 0.
Alternatively, cut spending, by any means necessary.
You might argue that grinding the government to a halt isn't the proper way to cut spending, and what they actually should do is go through the proper channels and propose specific cuts to specific spending, and then enact those cuts into law. Similarly, one might argue that the proper way to spend money would be to propose tax increases to pay for it and enact those taxes into law, not simply spend money on credit and then demand that taxes be raised to cover the bill. One might argue that the proper way to loosen immigration restrictions is to argue for a specific number of immigrants to be allowed in legally, and then enact that increase into law, rather than simply refusing for more than half a century to enforce the laws that have been duly passed. One might argue that the proper way to reform police and the justice system is to propose and then pass laws, not stoke riots nation-wide. And so on, and on, and on. Everyone is a big fan of the proper channels until those channels get in the way, and then it's time for bold Action. So it goes, no?
In this as in most things, it seems that the centrists want people to invest their efforts in the existing system, and can't understand why they don't. But the existing system is not handed down from divinity or an immutable physical fact of the universe, but rather an instrumental construction we built to achieve particular ends. If your moderate, reasonable centrism convinces a critical mass of people that the system is incapable of serving their values and interests, they will burn it to the ground and replace it with something else, and no appeal to the rulebooks will stop them. You can call this the actions of "sour grapes losers" if it makes you feel better, but that isn't going to help much if you can't actually stop them from doing it.
It is easier to extract value from Congress by destroying Congress than by using it as a tool, and so it is being destroyed. That this could quite plausibly result in short-term electoral defeat for Red Tribe is of less concern, when fewer and fewer Red Tribers over time believe that the current system is capable of serving their interests at all. In a population where trust in and respect for the democratic process and social institutions generally decline with every election, electoral loss is not an unalloyed detriment. Why worry about the laws passed, when the other side flouts them and you've concluded that you should as well?
I am all for taking effective action to achieve one's goals but have the actions of the more hard-right Members actually achieved any of their goals? What government spending has been reduced due to the current fight over Speaker? What spending is likely to be reduced? As best I can tell the current intransigence of some Members to get cuts even greater than were previously agreed to resulted in the current Continuing Resolution that does not implement those cuts. Members own actions sabotaged their goals! Over 100 Republicans voted for that Continuing Resolution. If we get close to another shut down do you think all those Republicans are gonna just throw up their hands and say "Welp, guess we're gonna have a shut down!" Or will five of them make some kind of power-sharing deal with Democrats and elect Jeffries as Speaker?
Okay, but nothing like that critical mass exists. The people currently in the House that seem to have the perspective are, like, 8/435. The portion of the electorate even smaller. If a similar number of Republicans decide the status quo with the Democrats is preferable to the present chaos that's enough to shut them out entirely. The more painful this group makes things on more moderate Republicans the more likely this is to occur and the less likely they are to achieve any of their goals.
The idea that Red Tribers don't believe control of the United States government could serve their interests seems obviously false? Both in terms of their beliefs and in terms of reality.
They are achieving more than compromise would, because compromise would significantly benefit their enemies with no appreciable benefit to them. No compromise under present conditions is ever going to deliver anything that Red Tribe actually values.
The first step to reducing government spending is to make securing that spending non-trivial. It seems to me that they are accomplishing that much at least. They are impeding business as usual, and making the members of their own party justify their cooperation with Democrats rather than allowing that cooperation to be a fiat accompli. You are watching a civil war within the Republican party; why be surprised that this civil war generates chaos and disruption?
Then you attempt to primary those Republicans, hammer them mercilessly, make their lives a living hell and drive them from office in disgrace, if possible. If you manage to replace them with an actual Red Tribe champion, that's a win. If the democrats win the seat instead, well, you've replaced someone who was willing to vote with the democrats when it counted with someone who votes with the democrats all the time, but on the other hand you've also shown that efforts to work within the system result in losing to the democrats, which encourages the Red Tribe public to reject the system.
The worst outcome, from a Red Tribe view, isn't the Democrats sweeping government. That's just the cue for another round of escalation. The worst outcome is a Republican party incapable of operating as anything other than controlled opposition, a party whose primary function is to waste the time, effort and resources of its base on the illusion of meaningful action while accomplishing nothing of value, ever.
Yet! Growth mindset!
Achieving that critical mass is the most straightforward method of advancing Red Tribe values. "Cooperation" of the familiar sort, where Blue tribe gets what it wants and Red Tribe gets fucked, moves us further from that critical mass, obstructionism and chaos moves us closer.
Then let them do so openly, and let them be seen doing so openly. Generate common knowledge that a large proportion of the Republican establishment would rather concede to the democratic platform rather than secure the interests of their base. The fact that the base's demands are often contradictory or impossible changes nothing, and is by no means unique to Red Tribe.
Red Tribe goals, at this point, are pretty clearly unachievable within the existing system. Intransigence reduces the likelihood of achieving things through the existing system from a nullity to a nullity, while increasing the likelihood of achieving solutions outside the existing system. That is a positive trade.
Complete control of the United States Government could perhaps serve our interests, but such control is not a political possibility under the current system. Control of the portions accountable to actual elections has delivered little of value after decades of effort. Examples abound of Republicans winning elections, winning majorities, winning court appointments, passing laws, securing court decisions, and then watching in stupefied amazement as those laws are simply nullified via malicious compliance or outright defiance by Blue Tribe. The game is rigged. There is no benefit to pretending otherwise, and there is no benefit to continue playing. The proper response is to play the actual game according to the actual rules: secure your values at any cost.
There's going to be a presidential election a year from now. It seems obvious to me that by the end of that election, trust in our political institutions will be significantly lower than it is now. Given the evident results delivered by our political institutions, this seems like a straightforwardly positive result to me. If you think you can change that by appealing to "moderate republicans", by all means do so.
What I'm going to say may sound a little rude. That's not intentional; seems inherent in what I'm asking.
My read of US and international politics says that the probable result of a giant fight over the 2024 US election looks basically like "PRC blockades or invades Taiwan anticipating the USA being too fucked up to intervene, WWIII, nuclear exchange occurs, SJ is torn out by the roots in the aftermath due to half of the Blue Tribe being dead and the other half discredited".
I am legitimately not sure whether you 1) disagree with that forecast, or 2) think that this outcome is worth it because Red wins the culture war. #2 is, after all, a coherent position, if one I disagree with.
I wouldn't rate that the most likely outcome, but it certainly seems a plausible one.
The question is, why is it plausible? Why would China taking Taiwan result in WWIII and a nuclear exchange? It seems to me that it shouldn't, given that Taiwan is not part of the US, and that any fight over it that I can see would be a conventional one over a limited context on the other side of the world. Why can't one side or the other simply lose, and then let it go, or even limit the escalation to a strictly conventional context? Why would the whole world need to pile in, and why would it need to go nuclear?
If China simply takes Taiwan, there's no need for WWIII or nukes. Likewise if we attempt to intervene, and it turns out their missiles are better and we lose the battle and a bunch of ships. In either of those scenarios, we could, and arguably should, accept the outcome and move on. Likewise if China fails to take Taiwan, or we successfully intervene and stop them. Whichever side loses, the correct move seems to be to accept the outcome, adjust to the reality, and move forward accordingly.
If either side can't do that, it seems to me that they're being some combination of crazy or evil. The plausible path to the scenario you describe would be for the losing side to double-down and escalate the conflict, and to keep right on doing it until the wheels come off. I don't think people should do that. To the extent that people are prone to doing stuff like that, I think they shouldn't be in charge of important things like defense, diplomacy, or government. Unfortunately, it sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing our current establishment would do... But that's just another reason to try and get rid of them as soon as possible.
It's certainly not the outcome I'm hoping for. The outcome I'm hoping for is a collapse in federal power and a retreat back to actual Federalism; the dream is that we all agree that this constitution thing isn't working so hot, and that we'd be better off simply letting individual states do as they will within their own borders, while maintaining some framework of common defense to handle the tanks and nukes. Bonus points if this involves securing the borders, pulling back from our commitments overseas, and attempting to mind our own business rather than attempting to police the entire globe.
To the extent that such an outcome is unpleasantly likely, I'm not sure what Reds are supposed to do about it, or why avoiding such an eventuality should be a consideration in their strategy for dealing with Blues. If the position is so precarious that our fight with blues threatens to destabilize everything, then perhaps Blues should not have pushed matters to such a point. If stability is their concern, they are free to secure such stability at the low, low cost of halting their present offensive, or perhaps even retreating from some of the ideological ground that they presently hold.
As things stand, I perceive Blues to be, effectively, a hostile foreign power. They are not my countrymen in any sense that matters. Their leaders have frequently mused about how it might be necessary to crush us militarily, just as we've mused the same about them. Such musings seem, to me, to be a reflection of the fundamentally incompatible values that lie at the heart of the Red/Blue divide, and give the Culture War its unique character. China, at least, is far away; it is not obvious why I should be more worried about their designs on Taiwan than about Blues designs on the power to control my life, and that of my children, and their children.
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