Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

What The Right Really Wants

Vox recently published an interesting postmortem of the midterm elections, looking to see how right-wing intellectuals (a term which I consider an oxymoron) are responding to the lack of that promised “red wave.”

This New Right “intellectual” movement arose after the 2016 election; its approach to Republican politics is a commitment to relentless, aggressive culture war. (Fortunately–at least in the recent elections–voters have seemed unreceptive.)

The article describes three distinct, albeit overlapping, reactions. One is a call to display what the article calls “some tactical moderation” (most notably by bracketing abortion, which was clearly not a winner for the GOP); another “centers on whether Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis represents the movement’s future, and what reasons there are to prefer one over the other.” The third centers on democracy itself.

A minority of New Right thinkers responded to defeat by suggesting the electorate is too far gone for conservatives to ever triumph — and even questioning the value of democracy itself.

“Democracy did not end slavery, and democracy will not end abortion,” declared Chad Pecknold, a self-described “postliberal” theologian at Catholic University.

The “thinkers” pursuing all-out culture war want to discard the conservative commitment to limited government; they argue that limiting the power of the state “stands in the way of waging an effective counterrevolution.”  They believe that their culture war can only be won “by jettisoning libertarianism and using the levers of policy to roll back the left’s cultural victories. Out with tax cuts, in with bans on critical race theory in schools.”

Abandoning the culture war, on this perspective, is not mere folly but national suicide. For some on the New Right, the idea that their approach to these issues might be unpopular is unthinkable. 

One star of the New Right argues for switching allegiance from Trump to  DeSantis –saying that he “backstops his culture-war agenda with capable governance.” (Granted, no one in his right mind could argue that Trump can even spell governance,  let alone provide it.) This DeSantis partisan believes DeSantis will be more able to deliver on the New Right’s shared goals: “to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn the school boards.”  In other words,  eradicate “woke-ness.”

If the DeSantis contingent doesn’t terrify you sufficiently, there are the New Right “integralists.” These are “Catholic arch-conservatives who believe that the United States government should be replaced with a religious Catholic state.”

Integralists are a part of a broader “postliberal” trend among right-wing intellectuals that traces the cultural decay of American society back to its ruling liberal political philosophy: the doctrine that government should liberate people to pursue their own visions of the good life. Liberalism, they argue, promotes licentiousness and a corrosive individualism…

Postliberals believe that instead of protecting individual freedom, government should aim to promote the “common good” or “highest good”: to create a citizenry where people live good lives as defined by scripture and religious doctrine. This leads them to support an even more active role for the state than even the national conservatives, endorsing not only aggressive efforts to legislate morality but also expansions of the welfare state.

And here we come to the crux of the anti-democratic argument. It isn’t new.

Liberalism–properly defined–rests on a belief that humans are endowed–born with– certain “inalienable” rights that government must protect. The liberal conception of the common good is a society in which government respects those individual liberties to the extent that their expression does not infringe on the rights of others.

A liberal polity will argue–often vigorously–about where that line should be drawn. As I used to tell my students, freedom of religion cannot excuse the ritual sacrifice of your newborn.Figuring out what it can excuse is harder. Every liberty protected by the Bill of Rights has sparked philosophical and legal debate over the extent to which government must respect it–does your freedom of religion allow you to discriminate against people your church considers sinners? Does your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches prevent government from going through the garbage bag you’ve left on the curb for pickup?

What the New Right wants is statism.  

These “thinkers” assume that they will be the ones who decide what the common good looks like–and they want government, under their control, to enforce their vision. (They’re not so different from the Tech moguls who want to impose their beliefs  by remaking society in their own image.) That approach to governance is incompatible with the cultural assumptions of most American citizens–not to mention the U.S. Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights.

You can call this philosophy a lot of things, but it sure isn’t American. 

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Hunter Biden And His Laptop…

One of the most interesting aspects of America’s current political environment has been the defection from the GOP of formerly high-ranking Republicans. These strategists and elected officials have recognized that today’s GOP is a very different animal than the party that once existed, and have been intellectually honest enough to say so.

One of those “refugees” from MAGA land is David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Frum is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic and an MSNBC contributor. (He was also the author of Bush’s “axis of evil” description–a framing I personnally found unfortunate, but hey…)

Frum has an article in the most recent Atlantic in which he predicts the behavior of the slim GOP House majority over the next two years. He began by comparing the actions of Democrats under Nancy Pelosi with the behavior of  the chamber under Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay. Pelosi focused the Democrats on legislation–notably, the Affordable Care Act.

By contrast, the Republican majority elected in 1994 and 2010 lunged immediately into total war. In 1994, the leaders, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, wanted and led the total war. In 2010, Speaker John Boehner opposed the lunge and tried, largely in vain, to control it. In both cases, the result was the same: a government shutdown in 1995, a near default on U.S. debt obligations in 2011, and a conspiratorial extremism that frightened mainstream voters back to the party of the president.

Frum says the signs all point to the likelihood that the just-elected Republican House majority “will follow the pattern of its predecessors.” It isn’t difficult to pinpoint one of those “signs”–intemperate MAGA warrior Jim Jordan will evidently head up the Judiciary Committee. Jordan has all but licked his chops when announcing the GOP’s highest priority: investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and tying whatever is found to Joe Biden.

As he says,

Why Republicans would want to believe this holds little mystery. From 2017 to 2021, Republicans supported and defended a strikingly corrupt president whose children disregarded nepotism rules to enrich themselves and their businesses. The administration opened with a special favor from the government of Japan to Donald Trump’s daughter and closed with a $2 billion investment by the government of Saudi Arabia for the president’s son-in-law—despite written warnings from the Saudi government’s outside advisers about excessive fees, inexperienced management, and operations that were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”

How do partisans try to neutralize four years of nonstop genuine scandals? By ginning up an equal and opposite scandal against the other team. The Trump family may have been the most crooked ever to occupy the White House, and on a scale impossible to deny or ignore. During Trump’s administration, his hotel business exacted payments on Pennsylvania Avenue from corporations, individuals, and foreign governments as a condition of presidential favor and charged the Secret Service fees simply so that it could do its job of protecting the president. Trump himself elevated his son-in-law to de facto positions as a chief of staff and a national security adviser. Meanwhile, the president’s other children headed family businesses that profited from the presidency.

If that record cannot be denied, then maybe it can be diminished or rendered somehow acceptable by alleging that Trump’s successor is doing the same thing.

Frum proceeds to explain why the GOP’s “whataboutism” is unlikely to work, harking back to comparisons with Bill Clinton’s impeachment. But here’s the thing: if indeed Hunter Biden turns out to have been guilty of legal misconduct, most Democrats I know would agree that he should be appropriately sanctioned for that misconduct. No one’s above the law.

My own guess is that the worst thing an investigation will be able to pin on President Biden is that he has been a loving and forgiving father to a disturbed son. As Frum writes the upcoming script:

Republicans: Do you know that Hunter Biden is a financial and emotional mess?

Voters: Now we do.

Republicans: Don’t you care?

Voters: No.

Republicans: Do you know that Joe Biden wrote notes telling his son he loved him despite his troubles, and also let his son stay in his house when his son was down on his luck?

Voters: That sounds like a good thing.

Republicans: What if we told you that Joe and Hunter Biden ran a massive international-crime syndicate and that they are implicated in sex trafficking and cover-ups?

You can foresee where this dialogue is heading.

The GOP is gearing up for a re-run of “Pizzagate.” Deep in their conspiratorial bubbles, many of them actually believe the QAnon-inspired stories. As Frum writes, they are so deeply embedded in those fantasies, they forget that they were the ones who first concocted them.

And really– sex trafficking is so much more interesting than governing…

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Food For Thought…

Ezra Klein’s columns and podcasts are always thought-provoking, and a post-election essay he published in the New York Times was no exception.

He began with a disclaimer of sorts–noting that post-election narratives tend to be like that “flashy jacket that looks just right when you try it on at the store, only to prove all wrong once you wear it out on the town.” Nevertheless, he proceeded to present three reasons for America’s current, stubborn dysfunctions.: calcification, parity and cultural backlash.

The first and arguably most intractable obstacle to functioning governance is  political calcification. Klein cites findings from recent research:

Because politics is so calcified, virtually nothing matters, but because elections are so close, virtually everything matters.

The researchers looked into the effects of Covid, the economy, impeachment, and the George Floyd protests.(The study evidently preceded the effect of Dobbs; that would have been interesting…)

Convulsions that reshaped the country — that filled morgues and burned buildings — were barely visible in the vote. Counties with higher rates of Covid deaths didn’t turn on Trump. Counties where Black Lives Matter protests turned violent went, if anything, slightly toward Joe Biden. So much happened, and so few minds changed. They call this calcification, writing, “As it does in the body, calcification produces hardening and rigidity: people are more firmly in place and harder to move away from their predispositions.”

The cause of this calcification is no mystery. As the national parties diverge, voters cease switching between them. That the Republican and Democratic Parties have kept the same names for so long obscures how much they’ve changed. I find this statistic shocking, and perhaps you will, too: In 1952, only 50 percent of voters said they saw a big difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties. By 1984, it was 62 percent. In 2004, it was 76 percent. By 2020, it was 90 percent.

The yawning differences between the parties have made swing voters not just an endangered species, but a bizarre one. How muddled must your beliefs about politics be to shift regularly between Republican and Democratic Parties that agree on so little?

As Dan Mullindore commented here on an earlier post, calcification helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable election results in Indiana. Along with gerrymandering, it has led to a politics described by Klein as “effective one-party rule leading to a politics devoid of true accountability or competition.”

The second theory–persistent parity– explains why, nationally, political control has teetered, “election after election, on a knife’s edge.”

We live in an era of unusual political competitiveness. Presidential elections are decided by a few points, in a few states. The House and Senate are up for grabs in nearly every contest. In both 2016 and 2020, fewer than 100,000 votes could’ve flipped the presidential election. So even as calcification means fewer minds change in any given election, parity means those small, marginal changes can completely alter American politics.

The third explanatory theory is the one Americans can hardly avoid seeing: cultural backlash.

Starting around the 1970s, generations raised in relative affluence began to care less about traditional economic issues and more about questions of personal autonomy and social values. The core fights of politics turned away from the distribution of money to the preservation of the environment and women’s bodily autonomy and marriage equality.

These changes were generational, and they’ve moved steadily from the margins of politics to the center. That’s led to a backlash among those opposed to, or simply disoriented by, the speed at which social mores are shifting, and the rise, in countries all over the world, of a post-materialist right. That’s led to a slew of right-wing parties that care more about culture and identity than tax cuts and deregulation.

Klein quotes Ron Inglehart’s observation that today’s GOP is obsessed with critical race theory and whether Dr. Seuss is being canceled. It is not obsessed with economic growth or health care policy.

Klein offers considerable data in his discussion of these three narratives, and I encourage you to click through and read the full analysis, but it’s hard to debate the accuracy of his concluding paragraph:

The parties are so different that even seismic events don’t change many Americans’ minds. The parties are so closely matched that even minuscule shifts in the electoral winds can blow the country onto a wildly different course. And even in a time of profound economic dislocation, American politics has become less about which party is good for your wallet and more about whether the cultural changes of the past 50 years delight or dismay you.

I’m pinning my hopes on that “generational change”…

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When–And Why–Facts Don’t Matter

One of the abiding frustrations of contemporary life is the widespread resistance to facts–people’s rejection of probative evidence that X is true and Y (no matter how desirable) is not.

Perhaps I’ve just been paying closer attention as I’ve aged, but it certainly seems to me that the prevalence of disinformation and outright lies characterizing American political life has become a bigger problem ever since the appearance of Fox News and MAGA Republicanism.

We’re about to enter a two-year period where GOP whack jobs like Jim Jordan conduct fact-free (or at least, fact-distorted) Congressional “investigations” into everything from Hunter Biden’s laptop to Anthony Fauci.  Reports from this year’s Climate Summit remind us that we have yet to make many of the changes necessary to combat climate change–a delay attributable in part to the climate deniers who for years refused to accept what science (and the evidence of their eyes) was telling them. Anti-vaccine lunacy has been responsible for thousands of deaths.

Other examples are too numerous to list.

The problem is, our form of government owes its philosophical basis to the Enlightenment–and if the Enlightenment prioritized anything, it was empiricism–the search for and analysis of falsifiable evidence–as a critical method to understand the world we inhabit.

When public officials occupy different realities, governance becomes impossible.For that matter, if people resist believing what their senses  and investigations are telling them, the entire edifice of civilization crumbles.

In 2017, a New Yorker article titled “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” explored both the importance of separating fact from fiction, and the reasons contemporary humans seem to be incapable of doing so. The article began by describing studies conducted at Stanford that attempted to understand the stubborn staying power of people’s initial impressions. In the experiments, even total refutation of the subjects’ initial beliefs was insufficient to make them change their minds.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

How indeed?

In a book titled “The Enigma of Reason, ” a couple of cognitive scientists tried to answer that question. They pointed out that “reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.”

The basic argument is that human beings’ biggest advantage is our ability to coöperate.  Reason, they posit, “developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.”

Think about it. If the capacity for reason developed to allow humans to generate sound judgments, it would be hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. After all, an inaccurate view of reality is a significant threat to survival. But here we are, and here–still–is confirmation bias. The authors concluded that it must have some adaptive function related to our “hypersociability,” and that it may actually have evolved to prevent us from getting screwed by other members of our group.

Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments…

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us… the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

The article goes on to describe two other books dealing with the ways we contemporary humans encounter–and dismiss– facts. (For one thing, we all believe we understand far more than we actually do–a deficit that becomes clear when we are asked for detailed information.) It’s a fascinating, albeit somewhat depressing, read.

Bottom line: For those of us who want public policies to be based on sound evidence and facts, the literature is not reassuring.

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Women Will Save America

The “chattering classes” are still churning out their reactions to the mysterious non-appearance of a Red wave in the midterms, and several of those analyses echo that of conservative-but-not-crazy Bret Stephens. In his weekly back and forth with liberal Gail Collins in the New York Times, Stephens summed up Democrats’ surprising performance by concluding that– however American voters might feel about inflation or crime or the overall direction of the country — they weren’t ready to give up reproductive rights, endorse election denialism or cast ballots for “Republican candidates who have the intelligence of turnips and the personalities of tapeworms.”

A politically-savvy friend says voters had crazy fatigue…

Whatever else was in play, the enormous importance of reproductive rights to those election results has become increasingly obvious. All five states with abortion measures on the ballot voted for women’s bodily autonomy, including deep-Red Kentucky. More importantly, in virtually every state, turnout by women–many of whom had only recently registered to vote–increased.

That increase was consistent with longer-term trends; as The Center for American Women and Politics reports

Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, with the turnout gap between women and men growing slightly larger with each successive presidential election. Women, who constitute more than half the population, have cast almost 10 million more votes than men in recent elections.

Once again, more women voted, and the message they sent was unmistakable: women are not going backward, not handing their reproductive choices to state legislators.

In a VoteCast exit survey, pro-choice voters (those who said abortion should be legal in all or most cases) were far more likely than pro-life voters (those who said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases) to say that the Dobbs decision had a “major impact” on which candidates they voted for. The partisan gap was more than 30 points– 65 percent of Democrats said Dobbs was a major factor, compared to 32 percent of Republicans.

It isn’t just through voting.  Women are protecting America in other forums, too.  A recent column by Jennifer Rubin detailed the current status of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election being conducted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. 

A voluminous new report from the Brookings Institution provides a legal road map for the potential prosecution of Trump. The report debunks defenses that Trump will likely deploy and underscores the real possibility that his closest associates might flip in the case, given how many might face criminal liability.

The Brookings Report to which she cites enumerates the multiple efforts made by Trump and his associates to subvert the election results in Georgia, and concludes that those efforts violated several relevant criminal statutes, including: 1) solicitation to commit election fraud, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-604(a); 2) intentional interference with performance of election duties, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-597; 3) interference with primaries and elections, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-566; and 4) conspiracy to commit election fraud, Ga. Code Ann. § 21-2-603.

Meanwhile, in New York, another female Attorney General, Letitia James, has sued the Trump organization for fraud.

That lawsuit is currently being tried, but James already won an important interim victory: a New York court granted James’ motion for a preliminary injunction, finding that the claims in her lawsuit are likely to succeed at trial. The Court ruled that Trump and the Trump Organization “cannot transfer any material assets to another entity without court approval, are required to include all supporting and relevant material in any new financial disclosures to banks and insurers, and ordered to appoint an independent monitor to oversee compliance with these measures.”

Going into the midterms, there was considerable debate about whether American democracy would prove robust enough to withstand the obvious and significant challenges it is facing from White Christian Nationalists and MAGA Republicans. Democratic governance requires adherence to one of the most important elements of the rule of law: the principle that no one is above the law–not rich people, not celebrities, not elected officials, and not Presidents.

That essential principle–accountability– is one of the (multiple) aspects of American governance that Donald Trump and his corrupt cohorts utterly fail to understand. If there is any one thing Donald Trump clearly believes, it is that rules are for other people–that the rules don’t apply to him.

Thus far, one of the very few Republicans who has had the cojones to tell him otherwise–forcefully and publicly– has been another female: Liz Cheney. 

As Rubin noted in her column, it takes courageous women to do “what hordes of sniveling Republican politicians, donors and insiders cannot: hold Trump accountable.”

Don’t mess with us….

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