Tag Archives: GOP

Birthday Wishes…

Today is our nation’s birthday, and birthdays are a time to take stock.

If the 4th is a day to focus on America and its government “of the people,” it may also be a day for considering the sources of our various dysfunctions.

Like gerrymandering. (Yes, I know I talk about that a lot. But it’s more important than most of us realize.)

While I was on vacation, I read a book with a title that cannot be fully shared: “Ratf***cked” tells how operatives of the Republican party raised money, gathered experts and manipulated the redistricting process across the nation after the last census–totally outsmarting Democrats. (Democrats emerge from this story as disorganized and feckless, at best.)

The book is worth reading; it was written by a political reporter who interviewed most of the central “players” and followed the process in the most gerrymandered states (including Indiana). The obvious moral of the story is that in politics, attention to process matters hugely–and that the disinterest of most citizens in our democratic processes enables the sorts of chicanery that the book documents.

But there is a rosier side to this story, at least for those of us who are into irony, and it falls under the heading of be careful what you wish for.

The Congressional representatives elected from the large numbers of “safe forever” seats have made it impossible for their enablers to govern. They have no party loyalty; they are not team players in the appropriate sense of that term. They know that the only threat to their continued electoral success comes from their right flank back home–not from the party, not from the Speaker, not even from the party’s big donors.

If you don’t believe me, ask John Boehner. Or Paul Ryan. Or closer to home, Brian Bosma. Those oh-so-safe districts created by mapmaking whiz kids have given each of them a group of wholly intransigent lunatics to deal with, officeholders accountable to no one but the most rabid members of the party base in their home districts. Those zealots have made it nearly impossible to pursue the party’s legislative goals.

The success of the GOP’s “ratf**cking” (otherwise known as redistricting) is why most political observers do not think the Democrats can retake the House in 2016, even if they win the Presidency resoundingly. As one of the effort’s technicians put it, it would take a Democratic sweep of 5 or 6 points to reclaim the House, and victories of that scope are highly unlikely.

Of course, the party operative making that observation didn’t anticipate Donald Trump…

Happy birthday, America! Maybe your citizens can get you a reformed redistricting system for your next one…

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Who Are We?

It’s bad enough that after the tragedy in Orlando, despite a Senate filibuster and a House sit-in, lawmakers remained in thrall to the NRA, refusing to pass even the most tepid gun control measures.

Less publicized was the fact that– even as they were offering their “prayers” for the victims–House Republicans once again refused to allow a vote that would have extended equal civil rights to LGBT citizens.

After a Democratic congressman offered an LGBT measure as an amendment to the Defense Department spending bill, the House Rules Committee would not let the measure come up for a vote on Tuesday night, The Hill reported.

This is the third time that Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) has introduced the measure that would affirm anti-discrimination protections for LGBT employees of federal contractors as an amendment to a spending bill. On Tuesday, he said he hoped a vote on the amendment would send a positive message to the LGBT community in the wake of the deadly shooting in Orlando, Florida….

Maloney  had first introduced the measure as an amendment to a Veterans Affairs spending bill in May. At first, it looked likely to pass, but a handful of Republicans switched their votes from “yes” to “no” and defeated it. Maloney then tried to make it an amendment to an energy and water bill; the House GOP killed the whole bill rather than pass a pro-LGBT amendment.

It isn’t just the gay community arousing Republican hostility. The unrelenting attacks on immigrants and Muslims (among others) by the party’s Presidential nominee is contributing significantly to social division and expressions of bigotry.

A recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center traced what it called “the Trump effect” on the nation’s schools, and the conclusions were chilling.

Every four years, teachers in the United States use the presidential election to impart valuable lessons to students about the electoral process, democracy, government and the responsibilities of citizenship.

But, for students and teachers alike, this year’s primary season is starkly different from any in recent memory. The results of an online survey conducted by Teaching Tolerance suggest that the campaign is having a profoundly negative effect on children and classrooms.

It’s producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported.

Other students have been emboldened by the divisive, often juvenile rhetoric in the campaign. Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail.

Other reports show anti-Semitism on the rise, anti-Muslim prejudice growing…and you’d have to live under a rock to ignore the level of racist bile directed at President Obama.

We really are at a turning point in America. The 2016 elections have not created the tensions that threaten to tear us apart, but they are certainly bringing those tensions to a head. When Americans go to the polls in November, we will be confronted with a stark choice, not just between political parties and candidates, but between vastly different ideas about the real America, our fellow-citizens and the nature of our republic.

We will be deciding what sort of country we want to be.

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The Crux of the Problem: The Party’s Over

I’ve never been a particular fan of Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist. Not that I’ve necessarily disagreed with his opinion pieces, I’ve simply found them a bit too self-consciously measured (and occasionally pompous). Among Times columnists, I tend to prefer the wit of Gail Collins or the red meat of Paul Krugman. If I want thoughtful and measured, I choose David Brooks.

But this time, Friedman has hit a home run.

If a party could declare moral bankruptcy, today’s Republican Party would be in Chapter 11.

This party needs to just shut itself down and start over — now. Seriously, someone please start a New Republican Party!

America needs a healthy two-party system. America needs a healthy center-right party to ensure that the Democrats remain a healthy center-left party. America needs a center-right party ready to offer market-based solutions to issues like climate change. America needs a center-right party that will support common-sense gun laws. America needs a center-right party that will support common-sense fiscal policy. America needs a center-right party to support both free trade and aid to workers impacted by it. America needs a center-right party that appreciates how much more complicated foreign policy is today, when you have to manage weak and collapsing nations, not just muscle strong ones.

But this Republican Party is none of those things. Today’s G.O.P. is to governing what Trump University is to education — an ethically challenged enterprise that enriches and perpetuates itself by shedding all pretense of standing for real principles, or a truly relevant value proposition, and instead plays on the ignorance and fears of the public.

I completely agree that America needs a healthy two-party system.

I leave it to political scientists more informed than I am to debate the relative merits of a parliamentary system and our two-party system. Whatever the conclusion, however, we have what we have. Our two-party system is institutionalized, our civic culture is accustomed to and embedded within it.

Because that is so, the intellectual and moral maturity of the two parties is supremely important. The ability of those parties to conduct adult, responsible arguments about the issues of the day is what allows the American enterprise to advance, to adapt to changing realities and to avoid the excesses that have taken down other dominant regimes. When either party becomes corrupt, or childish, or co-opted by special interests, our system doesn’t work.

I’m not Pollyanna; even when the system is working, both parties provide citizens plenty to criticize. Disfunction is a matter of degrees.

I was an active Republican for 35 years. The party I worked for, the party I belonged to and supported, no longer exists. I left in 2000, and I’ve subsequently watched the deterioration of a once-responsible political party from the sidelines. I’ve watched as the Republican friends I worked with “back in the day” have become discouraged, and then appalled, as a party that had usually nominated thoughtful and substantive candidates devolved into a circus, a party in which Sarah Palin and Donald Trump and their like are embraced by an angry and bigoted base.

The GOP’s devolution may be good for Democrats’ immediate electoral prospects, but in the long run, it isn’t good for either the Democratic party or the country.

Friedman concludes that the existing GOP cannot be salvaged–that America needs a new center-Right party.

This is such a pivotal moment; the world we shaped after W.W. II is going wobbly. This is a time for America to be at its best, defending its best values, which are now under assault in so many places — pluralism, immigration, democracy, trade, the rule of law and the virtue of open societies. Trump will never be a credible messenger, or a messenger at all, for those values. A New Republican Party can be.

Friedman says: if you build it, they will come.

But who will build it, and who are the “they” who will come?

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It Really is All or None….

At its most basic, government is a mechanism for living together. Politics, as the old saying goes, is war without the weapons–the process of mediating the demands of various interest groups and constituencies. Some governments are expressly established to privilege members of certain groups over others; America’s legal system, in contrast, is based upon a belief that people should be treated as individuals–that government should treat its citizens based upon their behavior, rather than their identity.

Being true to that ideal has always been a struggle; there have always been Americans who want to single out others as “less” not because those individuals have behaved badly, but simply by virtue of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. That–as Paul Ryan recently noted–is the textbook definition of bigotry.

In the Age of Trump, those voices of bigotry are in danger of being legitimized. They are certainly being amplified.

From Talking Points Memo, we learn that

The same Republicans who have argued that gay couples should not be allowed to marry, that LGBT Americans don’t need federal anti-discrimination protections and that trans people should not use the bathroom that matches their identity are now claiming that they — not Democrats — are the party on the LGBT community’s side.

Their reasoning? That somehow, in the wake of the Orlando shooting at a gay night club that left 49 people dead, there’s now a mutually exclusive choice between supporting Muslims and protecting gay people, and Democrats have chosen the former.

The unlovely premise of that rationale is that all Muslims are terrorists, as one Republican congressman has baldly stated.

It is hard to think of anything more un-American–or more dangerous– than treating any group of people as a monolithic whole. The truth of the matter is that–idealism and fundamental fairness aside–no one in any group is safe in a society that allows government to pick and choose which identities are to be privileged and which marginalized and demeaned.

The effort to set one marginalized group against another is particularly despicable, although politically understandable. (You guys go fight each other and don’t pay any attention to the fact that we “real Americans” are running the show.)

Fortunately, the LGBT community understands–and rejects–the tactic.  An essay titled “We Are Strong, but We Are Not Okay” posted in the wake of the Orlando massacre, included this paragraph:

We are not okay when you criminalize the Muslim community because of the actions of one evil man. We have been the Muslim community: hated, feared, misunderstood. Questioned, berated, threatened, afraid to show our faces. Why would we condone treating an entire community as poorly as ours has been treated in the past, and in many scenarios, still is? When you come for one minority, you come for us all.

Treating citizens as individuals, refusing to discriminate on the basis of group identity, is a central premise of this nation’s approach to government. An attack on that premise is an attack on America.

Unfortunately, that’s a lesson we keep having to learn.

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When Frank Luntz is Worried…..

Frank Luntz is one of the people who gave us today’s GOP–a party that has steadily become more fixated on strategies for winning elections than on fidelity to a governing philosophy. He was the guru who coached candidates for office in “framing”–how to use language to describe policies in ways that would seem acceptable to people who probably wouldn’t find those policies very congenial otherwise.

For most of his (lucrative) career as a political strategist, you wouldn’t find Luntz among the legions of concerned party faithful warning  that the party’s longterm electoral prospects are dim. But now, even he is sounding the alarm. And that alarm is not connected to the harm being done to the GOP “brand” by The Donald.

In a March article about young voters, he recited the Grand Old Party’s daunting prospects, noting that

Americans ages 18 to 29 made up 19% of the vote in 2012, and President Obama pulled about 60% of their support. This year, they’re even more engaged: Nearly six in 10 (57%) say they are following the election “extremely” or “very” closely. And it’s just the primaries! What’s more, 87% respond that they are “extremely” or “very” likely to vote in the general election.

And what does this newly engaged cohort think about the GOP?

The Republican Party doesn’t have a problem with younger voters. Younger voters have a problem with the Republican Party, and it is rapidly becoming a long-term electoral crisis.

In our recent national survey of 1,000 first- and second-time voters ages 18 to 26, Republicans weren’t just off on the wrong track. They were barely on the radar with this Snapchat generation, as it is sometimes called….

The problem, or “crisis” if you’re an active Republican, is in their political identification. Fully 44% identify themselves as Democrats, higher in my polling than any age cohort in America. By comparison, about 15% call themselves Republican, lower than any age cohort. The remaining 42% say they’re independent, but on issue after issue they lean toward the Democrats. It’s not that young people love the Democratic Party — they don’t. But they reject the Republican Party and the corporate interests it appears to represent. Democrats can live with this dynamic. Republicans might die by it.

Luntz recognizes the problem, but seems oblivious to the reasons for it. For him, it’s still just strategy–the form of the message, rather than the substance. For example, he blames rejection of the GOP by young Americans in part  on the Democrats’ better use of social media, and says the GOP should follow the example of former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who endorsed a presidential candidate via Snapchat.

What Luntz and much of the Republican establishment fail to recognize is that young voters are rejecting what the GOP has become post-Reagan.

My students look at the Republican party and see theocrats. They see stupid bathroom laws and other efforts to marginalize their LGBT friends. They see corporate fat cats prospering at the expense of the hard-working poor. They see efforts to disenfranchise minority voters and cut back on school lunch programs. They see the Congressional “Party of No” rejecting and obstructing a President they admire–and they recognize that the primary motivation for that obstruction is racism and a stubborn refusal to come to terms with the fact that a black man won the White House.

Research confirms that this generation is considerably more inclusive than those that preceded it, concerned about their communities, and critical of entrenched privilege. When they look at today’s GOP, they don’t see principled defenders of liberty and markets and a level playing field–they see oligarchs fielding armies of lobbyists to protect their tax loopholes and subsidies at the expense of the Walmart greeter and the McDonald’s server.

There is no doubt in my mind that this generation will change America’s mean-spirited political culture for the better. I’m less sanguine about what it will take to uproot the entrenched systems–from gerrymandering, to provisions in the tax code, to intimidation of the judiciary, to the growth of “propaganda media”– that make political change much more difficult.

One thing I do know: mastering Snapchat will not bring young voters into the GOP.

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