New York Times | Republicans Hold On to a Myth to Hold On to Power New York Times Given the increased political power Republicans won in the last elections, from Washington to red-state legislatures, voters might expect the party to feel that the nation's voting procedures are working quite well. Yet this is far from the case, as ... |
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Republicans Hold On to a Myth to Hold On to Power - New York Times
The Hill | Republicans dismiss growing protests at home The Hill wrote in a letter to Republicans this week that they should not fear the vocal minority he says is grasping for relevance in communities across the nation. Some, like Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), are blaming the protests on a group called Indivisible ... |
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Republicans dismiss growing protests at home - The Hill
One of the less understood criticisms of progressivism is that it is totalitarian, not in the sense that kale-eating Brooklynites want to build prison camps for political nonconformists (except for the ones who want to lock up global-warming skeptics) but in the sense that it assumes that there is no life outside of politics, that there is no separate sphere of private life, and that church, family, art, and much else properly resides within that sphere.
Earlier this week, I expressed what seemed to me an unobjectionable opinion: that politics has a place, that politics should be kept in its place, and that happy and healthy people and societies have lives that are separate from politics. The response was dispiriting but also illuminating.
Among those who directed tut-tuts in my direction was Patti Bacchus, who writes about education for the Vancouver Observer. Thats one of the most privileged things Ive ever heard, she sniffed. Patti Bacchus is the daughter of Charles Balfour, a Vancouver real-estate entrepreneur, and attended school at Crofton House, a private girls school whose alumni include Pat (Mrs. William F.) Buckley. It is one of the most expensive private schools in Canada. I do enjoy disquisitions on privilege from such people. But of course her criticism is upside-down: It is exactly we privileged people with education, comfortable lives, and spare time who expend the most energy on politics. But there are other pressing priorities, like paying the rent, for poor people. If Ms. Bacchus would like to pay a visit to West Texas, Ill introduce her to some.
Another objection came from a correspondent who demanded: What if politics greatly impacts every facet of your life? That would be an excellent question if it came from some poor serf living in one of the states our American progressives so admire, such as Cuba or Venezuela, where almost every aspect of life is under political discipline, where government controls whether you eat and, indeed, whether you breathe. But if you live in the United States and politics greatly impacts every facet of your life, you have mental problems, or you are a politician.
(But I repeat myself.)
Esars Comic Dictionary (1943) contains two definitions of the word fanatic, often wrongly attributed (by me, among others) to Winston Churchill: First, A person who redoubles his efforts after having forgotten his aims. Second (my favorite), One who cant change his opinion and wont change the subject.
If you want to see fanaticism at work, try looking for a roommate in Washington or New York City.
From the New York Times we learn of the emergence of the no-Trump clause in housing ads in our liberal (which is to say, illiberal) metropolitan areas. The idea is nothing new I saw similar No Republicans Need Apply ads years ago when looking for apartments in Washington and New York but the intensity seems to have been turned up a measure or two: In 2017, the hysteria knob goes up to eleven. Katie Rogers of the Times offers an amusingly deadpan report:
In one recent ad, a couple in the area who identified themselves as open-minded and liberal advertised a $500 room in their home: If youre racist, sexist, homophobic or a Trump supporter please dont respond. We wont get along.
Thats a funny kind of open-mindedness it is in fact literal prejudice. It is also illiterate: Whatever Donald Trumps defects, to associate him with homophobia is a stretch to the point of dishonesty, inasmuch as Trump in 2017 is well to the liberal side of Barack Obama in 2008 on gay marriage. Trumps personal style is abrasive and confrontational, but he also is on the actual policy issues arguably the most moderate Republican president of the modern era, one who often has boasted of taking a more progressive view of such issues as abortion, gay rights, gun control, raising taxes on Wall Street, and what we used to call industrial policy. Given his history in and with the Democratic party, this is unsurprising.
But, as Robin Hanson put it, politics isnt about policy.
What it is about is tribe, which is what makes all that conflation of racism and bigotry with political difference so amusing. Political prejudice is not the moral equivalent of racial prejudice, but they operate in very similar ways, as anybody who ever has spent much time around a genuine racist or anti-Semite knows. Taxes too high? Blame the blacks. Not making enough money? Blame the Mexicans. Foreign policy seem overwhelmingly complex? Blame the Jews. Whataburger gave you a full-on corn-syrup Coke instead of a Diet Coke? Blame the blacks, Mexicans, Jews, subcontinental immigrants...somebody. Racism and anti-Semitism are metaphysical creeds, and those who adhere to these creeds see the work of the agents of evil everywhere. For them, there is no world outside race and racism.
In this, they are very similar to the Hillary Clintonvoting Manhattan balletomanes who seethe that they must endure being seated in the David Koch theater. David Kochs brand of libertarianism is mild and constructive, and it has about as much to do with ballet as Keith Olbermann has to do with astrophysics. But for the fanatic, even to hear the name spoken is unbearable.
Imagine being so mentally poisoned and so spiritually sick that you feel the need to organize a protest at New YorkPresbyterian Hospital because the institution accepted $100 million the largest gift in its history, being put to purely philanthropic health-care purposes from someone whose political views are at odds with your own. Imagine what it must be like to feel that doing that is a moral imperative. Imagine sitting down to listen to a Beethoven string quartet and being filled with paralyzing anxiety that the cellist might not share your views on the ArabIsraeli conflict.
(Ill bet Beethoven had really regressive views about gay marriage. And who knows what Bach or Bernini thought about tax policy?)
Imagine being willing to take a stranger into your home only on the condition that he did not vote for the man who won the 2016 presidential election. One of those Trump-excluding roommates mentioned in the Times insisted that this discrimination was in the interest of the Trump voters, too, who would be unhappy in a household full of raging liberals.
Meditate, for a moment, upon the word raging.
The people who believe that there can be no art, literature, culture, or life apart from politics are people who do not understand art, literature, culture, or politics, and whose lives are sad and sadly deficient.
A Buddhist writer once described two kinds of material unhappiness: the absence of what one desires and the presence of what one despises. But the Buddha was known to associate with worldly men and their unclean enthusiasms in much the same way that Jesus slummed around with prostitutes and tax collectors, instructing us by example to seek after lives that are as large as our love and not as small as our hatred. The people who close their doors against those who simply see the world in a different way, who scream profanities atBetsy DeVos or chant You should die! at Jewish musicians, are people who cannot rise far enough above their own pettiness to understand that the thing they fear is the thing they are.
Kevin D. Williamson is the roving correspondent for National Review.
Washington Republicans this weekend faced more protests at public events -- backlash that appears to be growing against President Trump and the GOP-led Congress for trying to dismantle ObamaCare and against other parts of their agenda.
On Saturday, for the second week in a row, Florida GOP Rep. Gus Bilirakis reportedly faced about a hundred people at a town hall meeting upset about Republican plans to repeal and replace the 2010 health care law, without a solid alternative.
The episodes -- like those faced by other House Republicans and by recently confirmed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos -- appear similar to those staged by the Tea Party movement in 2009. Members grassroots opposition to the increasing size of government under then-President Obama led to the 2010 wave election in which Republicans seized control of the House.
DeVos, a supporter of vouchers and other alternatives to pubic education, was temporarily blocked Friday when trying to enter a District of Columbia public school.
Go home, shouted a man holding a Black Lives Matters" sign. Shame, shame, shame.
The concerns raised Saturday in Bilirakis conservative Gulf Coast district were similar to those Utah GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz faced a day earlier.
Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight committee, was met by frequent, deafening boos at a town hall event in which constituents asked a range of questions including ones on environmental and energy policies and whether he would hold Trump, a fellow Republican accountable.
Hold on, Chaffetz, repeatedly said. Give me a second.
My job is not to be a cheerleader for the president, he also said.
House Democrats earlier this week made clear their plans this year to attack Republicans on vows to end ObamaCare, which could leave a project 22 million Americans without insurance.
"We're going to keep stoking the fires," New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone told Fox News on Wednesday in Baltimore, at the caucuss annual retreat.
He made clear that Democrats, in the GOP-controlled Congress, are not encouraging voters to disrupt Republican town halls, saying that is "not actually allowed."
However, others appear ready to continue to disrupt GOP events, while distancing themselves from the Tea Party movement led by fiscal conservatives.
One such group, or movement, is Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Stopping the Trump Agenda, started by former congressional staffers who say they are revealing the best practices for making Congress listen.
The group says its guide started as a tweeted Google document that has now been downloaded more than a million times.
Group organizers also say their funding comes from crowd sourcing and that they are still developing a long-term strategy.
Co-founder Ezra Levin acknowledge Saturday on CNN that the group is indeed similar to the Tea Party movement because it uses the same basic, Civics 101 tactics of going to town hall-style events and making phone calls.
However, he said his group doesnt espouse the Tea Partys 19th Century ideology.
Last weekend, California GOP Rep. Tom McClintock had to be escorted by police from a town hall event as protesters upset about potentially losing their insurance if ObamaCare is dismantled shouted, "Shame on you!"
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Reverse Tea Party? Republican officials facing more protests across country - Fox News
Republicans were once married to balanced budgets and conservative money management, but now they have run off with something new: the seduction of tax cuts and budget deficits. They try to cover up the truth about their new relationship by cooking the books. Kansas own Dwight D. Eisenhower would be appalled.
Eisenhower presided over the last period when the U.S. ran budget surpluses for several years in a row. To fund this, the top tax rate for some high-earning Americans exceeded 90 percent. When President John F. Kennedy backed legislation to drop that rate to around 70 percent, Eisenhower spoke against it, arguing that it would explode the deficit.
A few decades later, President Ronald Reagan commissioned the W.R. Grace Commission Report, the first of a long series of warnings, reminding Americans to prepare for the impending (now current) retirement of the Baby Boomer generation, which would create (is creating) a demographic bulge straining Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid particularly long-term care and the nations overall health care system.
Then, Republicans ditched predictable old deficit-reduction policies for the sexy appeal of tax cuts and deficits: the real priority of Reagan, the second President Bush, and many Congressional Republicans from the 1980s onward.
Since Sam Brownback was elected governor in 2010, they have brought their new love to Kansas. Once, moderate Republicans like Robert Bennett, Mike Hayden and Bill Graves proudly presided over conservatively managed, balanced budgets. Today, Kansas budget is balanced in name only: trust funds have been drained, future payments leveraged and highway bonds misused to create the illusion of a balanced budget that may technically pass legal muster, but will spell disaster down the road. Honestly, the thrill is gone.
Now President Donald Trump proposes massive public works projects (including the border wall), plus cuts to top-tax rates. Trumps signature phrase perfectly describes the accompanying deficit increase: it is going to be huge.
Some economists like Arthur Laffer argue that tax cuts stimulate enough economic growth to pay for themselves: lower rates on a broadening base produce more revenue than higher rates on a small base. Alas, this only works when taxes are particularly high beforehand, as with the Kennedy-era cut. When they are not, disaster ensues, as we have learned in Kansas.
Critics counter by stating, We have a spending problem, not a taxing problem. Granted, dollar-for-dollar, government spending keeps rising, but this is misleading. Most federal dollars are already committed to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare or to interest on the national debt. At the state level resides another pernicious problem: the costs of providing government services increase each year.
Teachers and other government employees are not receiving more generous benefits. Rather, the cost of providing the same benefits goes up substantially each year, mainly due to those increasing health care and retirement costs. This has not been a problem until recently budget estimates factoring in these rising costs are readily available from the Legislatures own nonpartisan staff (but legislators may ignore them).
The anti-Brownback Republicans elected in 2016 are sounding some rather Eisenhower-like talk about a return to responsible budgeting. But, can they give up their partys love affair with deficit spending?
Michael A. Smith is a professor of political science at Emporia State University.
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Will anti-Brownback republicans end their party's love affair with deficits? - Hastings Tribune