Wednesday, July 31, 2019

The Simple, Odious Reason Mitch McConnell Opposes Election Integrity The New Republic / by Alex Pareene

The Simple, Odious Reason Mitch McConnell Opposes Election Integrity
The New Republic / by Alex Pareene / now

July 30

Mitch McConnell is a victim of a “modern-day McCarthyism,” he claimed on Monday, after people on Twitter called him “Moscow Mitch” simply because he has spent a week blocking legislation intended to protect American elections from foreign interference. The Senate majority leader spent 30 minutes complaining on the Senate floor about the unfairness of it all, though it’s hard to judge the sincerity of his umbrage; he’s been called far worse, for doing far worse. But if McConnell really is hurt by Dana Milbank calling him a “Russian asset,” it does seem like one simple way to make Milbank stop would be to pass legislation designed to secure our elections.

The entire suite of Democratic proposals to improve election security are of course a non-starter in a Republican-run government, and not just because Republicans have chosen to strategically believe or disbelieve in Russian election interference depending on the president’s moods and ever-shifting statements. Many of the Democratic proposals involve barring candidates and people associated with campaigns and political committees from receiving contributions, monetary and otherwise, from foreign nationals, and Republicans principally oppose most attempts to interfere in any form of influence-peddling. Some of them basically conceded as much, whispering on background to The New York Times that McConnell, as reporter Carl Hulse wrote, “is leery of even entering into legislative negotiation that could touch on fund-raising and campaign spending.”

I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over these proposals being blocked, as I imagine they’d be enforced with as much vigor as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is to say not really enforced at all. But it is notable that most potentially helpful reform proposal the Democrats put forth, which has very little to do with the specter of “foreign interference,” was blocked along with all the rest. The main feature of the Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE) Act is a requirement that all federal elections use paper ballots.

Paper ballot requirements are one of those issues various Republicans and conservatives, even quite extreme ones, occasionally voice support for in order to sound Reasonable. Mark Meadows of the House Freedom Caucus introduced a bill requiring paper ballot receipts last year, which anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff approvingly mentioned in a Washington Post op-ed. The op-ed also mentioned another Senate bill requiring paper ballots, introduced by Democrats and Republicans (including Trump ally Lindsey Graham) in 2017 and 2018.

So far, McConnell and his allies have explained their opposition to the Democrats’ SAFE Act mainly by sidestepping the content of the legislation entirely. McConnell’s central opposition is that the bill is “partisan,” which is to say that Democrats want to pass it, which means, by definition, that McConnell cannot allow it to pass. (Or even be voted on: It might then attract some Republican support, which would make the bill less partisan, removing the basis of his opposition.)

This is enough for some conservatives. National Review, mostly applauding McConnell’s intransigence, offers only this in explanation of why the SAFE Bill should have been blocked: “The Democrats tried to push these bills by unanimous consent. One of them, a bill giving states hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade their voting systems and requiring the use of paper ballots, had already passed the House—and won only a single Republican vote, meaning its support is far from unanimous.”

In general, though, when Republicans oppose election reform proposals that would make our elections easier to efficiently and fairly administer—and require that they be efficiently and fairly administered—they appeal to Federalism and the tradition of local control of elections. (National Review, again: “This is an area traditionally handled by the states, and on those grounds McConnell has held up several efforts, some with bipartisan support, in recent months.”)

McConnell has supported sweeping, top-down federal election reforms in the past. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, a largely useless set of reforms that had the side effect of rewarding the manufacturers of easily hackable electronic voting machines. (That bill’s only opponents in the Senate were, of all people, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who opposed HAVA’s voter ID requirements.) But we are a long way from 2002, and the invocation of tradition and local control should make it clear what Republican opposition to electoral reform is about: Not doing Putin’s bidding, but Brian Kemp’s.

Kemp is currently the governor of Georgia, having won an election he was also then administering as secretary of state. Georgia’s paperless touchscreen voting machines have been in use since Georgia signed a $54 million contract with Diebold to purchase them days after HAVA became law. Since 2002, they’ve been insecure, and made proper election audits impossible. Advocates and voters are currently suing to force Georgia to immediately adopt paper ballots. Just last week they filed a brief accusing Kemp and his current secretary of state of destroying evidence by wiping servers and overwriting data on voting machines themselves.

America’s elections are a patchwork of fiefdoms, many run by secretaries of state (many of whom are Republicans), some directly run by state parties themselves. Republicans oppose federal reform of the system because it could deny them the ability to create chaos—chaos that sends the other side’s votes to the wrong polling places, purges thousands or hundreds of thousands from the rolls, and strands urban voters in long lines. Chaos that could create opportunities for—and plausible deniability about—more serious fraud and criminality. Chaos that makes it hard to believe this Senate will ever allow truly secure paper ballot regulations, with strict regular audits, to become a national requirement.

If anything, the Democrats’ (extremely in-character) insistence on painting this as a National Security Issue downplays the political salience of pointing out that electoral chaos simply serves partisan Republican ends. McConnell is not acting out of secret allegiance to a foreign despot, but out of the much more traditional, and traditionally American, allegiance to making it difficult for certain classes and communities to vote. If he doesn’t like “Moscow Mitch” (and I don’t, either), might I suggest Mitch Crow.

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This Is the Soul of the Democratic Party The New Republic by Matt Ford

This Is the Soul of the Democratic Party
The New Republic
by Matt Ford / 23min
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July 30, 2019 

Halfway through the Democratic presidential debate in Detroit on Tuesday night, there was an illuminating exchange between Senator Elizabeth Warren, who consistently polls in the double digits, and former Representative John Delaney, who does not. “I think Democrats win when we run on real solutions, not impossible promises, when we run on things that are workable, not fairy tale economics,” he said, implicitly taking aim at Warren’s bold platform.

The Massachusetts senator often says on the campaign trail that she has “got a plan.” In Detroit, she also had a response to those, like Delaney, who knock her plans. “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for,” she fired back. It was the line of the night. The audience cheered; Twitter pundits declared a TKO. Delaney eked out a rebuttal about Social Security and private pensions, but was unable to get up off the mat for the rest of the night.

This back-and-forth epitomized the debate as a whole, which, with a few exceptions, broke down into two camps. On one side were centrists like Delaney, John Hickenlooper, Tim Ryan, and Steve Bullock, who tried to cast themselves as pragmatic progressives in a party that has shifted dramatically leftward. On the other were the two Democrats most responsible for that shift, Warren and Bernie Sanders, who spent the evening batting away moderate critiques of their wide-ranging plans.

The debate thus reflected a fundamental divide within the Democratic Party as a whole. Some describe it as a war for the soul of the party, one that began with Hillary Clinton’s defeat of Sanders in the 2016 party and only intensified with her loss to Donald Trump. If Tuesday night is any indication, it’s clear which side has the ideas, energy, and political mettle to win.

Warren set the tone for the night in stark terms. “We’re not going to solve the problems we face with small ideas and spinelessness,” she said in her opening statement. “We need to be the party of big, structural change. I understand what’s broken, I know how to fix it, and I’m willing to fight to make it happen.” Sanders, who played the bad cop to her good cop, reiterated that his goal was to “not only defeat Trump but to transform our economy and our government.”

Bullock, who only joined the race in mid-May and didn’t qualify for the previous debate, instead made a pseudo-populist appeal to Middle America. “I come from a state where a lot of people voted for Donald Trump,” the Montana governor said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. He will be hard to beat. Yet watching that last debate, folks seemed more concerned about scoring points or outdoing each other with wish-list economics, than making sure Americans know we hear their voices and will help their lives.”

The aforementioned moderates, all of whom are polling well below Warren and Sanders, received a helpful boost from CNN’s moderators, who questions often seemed designed to tee up familiar centrist criticisms of the party’s ascendant left wing. “Are you saying that Senator Sanders is too extreme to be president?” Jake Tapper asked Hickenlooper at one point. Hickenlooper happily took the bait, responding that proposals like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal would be “a disaster at the ballot box” and that their proponents “might as well FedEx the election to Donald Trump.”

These moment gave some lower-profile contenders a chance to attack their top-tier rivals, though to little avail. “On Medicare For All, the hospitals will save substantial sums of money because they’re not going to be spending a fortune doing billing and the other bureaucratic things that they have to do today,” Sanders said. “I’ve done the math, it doesn’t add up,” Delaney chimed in. “Maybe you did that and made money off of healthcare,” Sanders fired back, referencing Delaney’s past work in the industry, “but our job is to run a nonprofit health care system.”

Ryan, an Ohio congressman known for mounting a challenge to Nancy Pelosi for House speaker, tried to outflank Sanders by raising questions about Medicare for All’s effect on organized labor. “Can you guarantee those union members that the benefits under Medicare for All will be as good as the benefits that their union reps fought hard to negotiate?” he asked Sanders. When Sanders began to assert that they would be, Ryan tried to contradict him. “But you don’t know that, Bernie,” he said. “I do know it, I wrote the damn bill,” Sanders replied.

Part of the moderates’ attacks were driven by clear ideological divisions. Criticizing Medicare for All, Delaney said “we don’t have to go around and be the party of subtraction, and telling half the country, who has private health insurance, that their health insurance is illegal.” Hickenlooper said the Green New Deal would “make sure that every American’s guaranteed a government job if they want,” and that it’s “a disaster at the ballot box. You might as well FedEx the election to Donald Trump.” And Bullock criticized his rivals who advocated for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. “We’ve got 100,000 people showing up at the border right now,” he said. “If we decriminalize entry, if we give health care to everyone, we’ll have multiples of that.”

But there was also a whiff of desperation in all this scare-mongering, as the moderates tried to land blows against their more popular, and more poised, rivals. That strategy is forgivable, since this week’s debates may be their last chance to break through. Under the Democratic National Committee’s rules, candidates must have 130,000 unique donors spread across at least 20 states and poll above 2 percent in four reputable national surveys. According to NPR, only seven candidates currently qualify for the September debates.

Not everyone joined the fray on Tuesday night. Pete Buttigieg, who has already qualified for September’s debates, sparred with Sanders over student-debt relief at one point, but generally refrained from making sweeping ideological jabs as his Midwestern counterparts. Beto O’Rourke, who has also qualified, made familiar stabs at soaring rhetoric, but left no impression. Amy Klobuchar, who is expected to qualify for September, played up her Midwestern bona fides but never landed a punch (or took one, for that matter).

And then there was Marianne Williamson, who proved to be an unusual but effective presence on the debate stage at times. “I almost wonder why you’re Democrats,” she said while Sanders and Buttigieg sparred over the merits of cancelling student loan debt versus more centrist alternatives. “You seem to think there’s something wrong about using the instruments of government to help people. That is what governments should do.” Williamson also went further than other candidates by fixing a $500 billion figure to her reparations proposal, and delivered a searing indictment of racial inequality and bigotry in America.

But it was Warren and Sanders who delivered the most convincing visions for the future of the Democratic Party—and indeed for the country. Sanders did so by remaining relentlessly on message, as he has been for years, about dismantling the American oligarchy. Warren, meanwhile, appealed to Democrats who may want to dismantle the oligarchy, but who also live in fear of four more years of Trump—the voters, in other words, who are susceptible to the moderate candidates’ unfounded claims of electability.

“I get it,” she said. “There is a lot at stake, and people are scared. But we can’t choose a candidate we don’t believe in just because we’re too scared to do anything else. And we can’t ask other people to vote for a candidate we don’t believe in. Democrats win when we figure out what is right and we get out there and fight for it. I am not afraid. And for Democrats to win, you can’t be afraid, either.”

Trump’s Cynical War on American Citizenship / The New Republic by Matt Ford

Trump’s Cynical War on American Citizenship
500+The New Republicby Matt Ford / 12h
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July 30, 2019


Last week, a nine-year-old girl was walking to school with her brother and two friends in San Ysidro, San Diego, when she was stopped by immigration officials, according to reports. The girl was an American citizen; she even had a U.S. passport card with her. The officials detained her nonetheless—for around 32 hours, no less. U.S. Customs and Border Protection claimed in a statement that the frightened girl “provided inconsistent information during her inspection.”

Under a previous president, such an incident might have been written off as a mistake, or at least a rare case of immigration officials gone rogue. But this was no fluke. Since President Donald Trump took office more than two years ago, the president and his allies have tried to alter the potency of citizenship itself—diluting it for some, strengthening it for others. They want nothing less than to redefine what it means to be an American citizen.

To many Americans, citizenship is the most valuable thing they possess. It permanently affixes its bearer within the American body politic, guaranteeing them all the rights and liberties protected by the Constitution. To the president, though, it’s just another asset to devalue for short-term political gain, the long-term consequences be damned.

In the closing weeks of last year’s midterm elections, Trump openly toyed with the idea of revoking birthright citizenship by executive order—an unconstitutional act that sought to hand him the power to determine who is and isn’t an American citizen. But that is the closest he’s come to pushing a policy that would change the terms of American citizenship. His actual efforts are more subtle than that.

Trump’s most visible attack on American citizenship is how he denigrates it in public remarks, especially when it comes to his political opponents. Earlier this month, he wrote on Twitter that four women lawmakers of color should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Three of the women were born in the United States; the fourth, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, is a naturalized citizen who left Somalia as a refugee decades ago.

The racist schoolyard taunt carried a disturbing message: that Omar, the other lawmakers in question, and non-white American citizens by extension are only conditional members of the American political community. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the president’s top congressional defenders, tried to absolve Trump’s racism by doubling down on it. “A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back,” he said. This was delivered as a proof that Trump isn’t racist, but merely confirmed that his understanding of whether or not a person of color “belongs” in the United States is conditioned by their personal political allegiance to him.

Though Trump claims to love legal immigrants, his policies often aim to restrict their path to naturalization. Last year, he endorsed the RAISE Act, a bill drafted by the Senate’s top immigration hawks. If signed into law, it would reduce the number of new green cards available each year by roughly 500,000, effectively cutting legal immigration into the U.S. by half. The bill proved unpopular, even though Republicans controlled both chambers, and it died without a vote. Trump’s most recent budget, which serves as more of a White House wish list than a blueprint for lawmakers, also proposed hiking citizenship application fees.

Trump’s vision is faring better within the executive branch. Hardliners and loyalists now run the parts of the Department of Homeland Security that deal with immigration and naturalization. Last month, Trump bypassed the Senate to install Ken Cuccinelli as the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those appointments help shape policy and priorities in subtle but important ways. In recent years, for example, naturalizations of new citizens have slowed to a crawl. More than 700,000 permanent residents are currently backlogged, with some expected to wait for more than two years, according to 2017 data.

USCIS also received widespread attention last year when it announced it would assemble a task force to pursue more denaturalizations. The agency faces an uphill battle, to say the least. It is constitutionally impossible for a natural-born citizen to be denaturalized against their will; naturalized Americans can only lose their citizenship if the government proves they lied during the application process. The Supreme Court recently raised the threshold for denaturalization by ruling that the government couldn’t use small errors or minor lies to strip one’s citizenship. Even if few cases are prosecuted, however, the denaturalization campaign sends a message that citizenship may be more ephemeral that many naturalized Americans thought it would be.

Under Trump’s watch, other DHS agencies are sending that message more directly. Earlier this year, immigration officials held 18-year-old U.S. citizen Francisco Galicia for almost a month in an overcrowded detention facility in Texas. The Dallas-born teenager reportedly slept on the floors of cells packed with dozens of other men without regular access to legal counsel or family members. He lost almost 20 pounds while in custody from malnutrition. Galicia, who had his birth certificate with him when he was apprehended, told his lawyer that he considered signing the paperwork for deportation just to get out of the facility.

Galicia’s case, and that of the nine-year-old detained in San Diego, are not extraordinary. The Los Angeles Times reported last year that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained at least 1,488 U.S. citizens between 2012 and 2018. Some of them were held for months at a time. Proving one’s citizenship is harder than it sounds. After all, the average American does not carry their birth certificate around with them. Even those like Galicia who did carry it found their documents questioned and challenged by suspicious ICE officials. The Trump administration’s recent push to expand fast-track deportations into the nation’s interior will put fewer targets in front of immigration judges before they’re removed. That, in turn, raises the likelihood that Trump will deport U.S. citizens.

Trump’s war on citizenship is also part of a broader effort to limit who may participate in American democracy. For more than a year, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross tried to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census even as Census Bureau experts warned it would drive down non-citizen participation. The Supreme Court narrowly squelched those efforts in June; Trump ultimately conceded defeat earlier this month.

Republicans know that a more inaccurate census would benefit them electorally. In recent years, GOP officials and conservative legal groups laid the legal groundwork for states to redraw legislative maps after the 2020 census by using a state’s citizen voting-age population instead of its total population. Republican gerrymandering strategist Edward Hofeller wrote in a 2015 memo that using CVAP data for legislative maps would be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” because it would yield fewer congressional representatives in heavily Latino and Democratic areas, and more in heavily white and conservative areas. Hofeller memo, which came to light in early June, likely torpedoed the citizenship question’s chances before the high court.

Trump vowed after that Supreme Court defeat to gather the data anyways. In case there was any doubt about its purpose, Attorney General Bill Barr laid it to rest that day. “For example, there is a current dispute over whether illegal aliens can be included for apportionment purposes,” he said in a statement in the Rose Garden alongside the president. “Depending on the resolution of that dispute, this data may possibly prove relevant. We will be studying the issue.” Citizenship isn’t just something to be devalued among those whom Trump disfavors; it’s also a resource that can be used to shore up white Republican hegemony.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent argued on Monday that the president’s recent surge in racist remarks is likely aimed at rallying fervent supporters ahead of the 2020 election and obscuring his economic policies’ failure to help working-class Americans. The Republican Party itself is largely stomaching the president’s bigotry so it can stay in power. Not running afoul of Trump’s supporters fulfills that goal in the short term; tilting the nation’s political structures toward white rural voters achieves it in the long term.

The power of American citizenship rests in its permanence. The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, drafted during the fires of Reconstruction, aimed to place disputes about the boundaries of civic participation forever beyond the scope of day-to-day politics. By treating membership in the American political community as negotiable instead of fixed, Trump is undermining the very foundations of multiracial democracy.


Do We Really Know the 2016 Results Weren’t Altered? by Josh Marshall

 
Do We Really Know the 2016 Results Weren’t Altered?
100+Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo

by Josh Marshall / 6h
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[Seminole County, Fla., Elections Supervisor Michael Ertel grabs a box of ballots during the count of 600 provisional ballots, in Sanford, Florida, Thursday, November 8, 2012. In background, Richard Siwica, counsel for Mike Clelland, the challenger that is currently leading incumbent Chris Dorworth, looks on. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/MCT)]

I wanted to go back to the Senate report on Russian hacking during the 2016 national election, specifically scans and intrusions into voting computer networks in perhaps as many as 50 states. My of us have operated on the strong assumption if not the certainty that Russian military and intelligence operatives did not actually change votes or manipulate the voting process itself in 2016. (In the latter case I refer to things like taking people off the rolls – things that are precisely changing vote totals but could affect the outcome.) I still largely hold to this view. But the report, which did not find evidence that such things happened, gave me a great deal of pause on that front.

The first point is simply this. At each stage over the last two and a half years we’ve learned that there was substantially more activity than we had been led to believe earlier. First nothing. Then a few states. Then more states. Then probably all the states and at least some where the penetration was deep enough that actual vote total changes could have been made if they wanted to. We also learn that at least some of the intrusions were successful and Russian agents could have tampered with election databases if they wanted to. This continued expansion of the verdict on what happened does not, to put it mildly, inspire a lot of confidence. Generally speaking it’s a very bad sign when the story keeps changing like this over time.

Are we really getting the full story even now? That is not at all clear to me. To be clear, I don’t mean that we’re being deceived. It’s that I have less confidence that they really know.

The report also makes clear that in many cases investigators simply don’t know what happened because they are relying on the states’ own investigations. In some cases those investigations didn’t happen or didn’t happen until long after the fact. In others it’s not clear the state authorities had the wherewithal or confidence to make a clear determination. Cyber-intrusions at this level are complex and difficult to detect. In many or most cases we’re relying on state authorities own investigations to tell the DHS and FBI whether tampering happening. It’s worth stopping for a moment and absorbing what that means. We don’t really have the US intelligence community’s take on this. We have their review of state authorities’ analysis of their own server logs and networks. It’s hard for me to look at that verdict with much confidence.

So the verdict is more we haven’t found any clear evidence of tampering rather than we investigating and determined there was no tampering.

One of the core questions in the report was why, if the Russians had done all this legwork and probing to make it possible to tamper, they didn’t actually do it. One answer of course – though there’s really no positive evidence of this – at least according to the report – is that they did tamper but we just don’t know it. But there’s another possible answer we should note.

President Obama first warned President Putin to back off his interference efforts in September of 2016. But the efforts continued – both manipulation efforts and hacking. So on October 31st Obama employed the so-called “red phone” to issue a warning to Putin that the United States would consider any efforts to interfere on election day or in the actual election itself an “act of war”.

Obama advisors and Obama himself took some credit for this after the fact, noting that such interference actually didn’t happen. Make of that what you will. Obviously quite a lot had happened by that point. But it seems at least plausible to me that this is the answer. They had laid the groundwork but didn’t do it because of those fairly dire warnings.

One other possibility is the decentralized nature of Russian operations. This isn’t a separate explanation. It’s more a fact or prism through which to understand these other theories. From the rest of Russia’s operations in 2016 we know that the whole effort was fairly decentralized and in some cases far less than coordinated. You had different arms of the Russian intelligence apparatus hacking into the same places or in some cases operations being mounted by quasi-governmental entities. A better way of looking at the whole enterprise might be to think rather than an organized plot a more general directive to make trouble, with a fair amount of initiative and freelancing being triggered by it. It seems clear that at least some of the oligarch outreach was of that sort. So possibly these were not altogether coordinated efforts and when it came to actually pulling the trigger they were reined in.

My own take on this is that it remains unlikely that any tampering with actual election results took place. Given the oddity and the extremely tight margins in critical states it is impossible not to wonder. But on balance the shifts that happened seem explainable to me in terms of real political factors and just a lot of luck. And at least for now there appears to be no evidence of actual tampering. Still, even if not, what we have found out makes me even more concerned about 2020

Is Donald Trump the next Jimmy Carter? by Scott Lemieux / The New Republic


newrepublic.com
Is Donald Trump the Next Jimmy Carter?
By Scott Lemieux
9-11 minutes

January 31, 2017





Donald Trump was the first Republican to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin since 1988. Combined with Republican victories in Congress and a large majority of statehouses, it is tempting to see his victory as a transformation of the political order. Some political scientists, however, are skeptical. Julia Azari of Marquette University makes a compelling case in Vox that Trump is more likely to represent the last gasp of a dying regime, much as Jimmy Carter did before him. In Azari’s interpretation, Trump and Carter might be polar opposites as human beings, but their presidencies are in a similar place politically, defined by outsiders trying to keep a fraying political coalition together.

There is some truth to this analysis. I certainly don’t think Trump’s win means a new period of national dominance by the Republican Party. But a Trump loss in 2020 should not be seen as evidence of a new Democratic era either. Rather, what we may be seeing is a suspension of the kind of regime politics Azari is describing. Instead of one dominant party setting the terms and a minority party governing within its paradigm, we’re in the midst of a new period of competition between increasingly polarized parties.

Azari’s analysis applies the concept of “political time” from Stephen Skowronek’s masterful The Politics Presidents Make. Skowronek argues that while the powers and resources available to the president tend to evolve chronologically, the political challenges faced by presidents show recurring patterns. As Azari puts it, “The president’s relationship to the dominant party and the health of that party’s ideology and coalition influence the success and legacy of the administration.” Some presidents, like Andrew Jackson, FDR, and Ronald Reagan, are “reconstructive” presidents, establishing new political regimes. Some presidents attempt to articulate and extend the achievements of the new regime, like James Polk for Jackson, LBJ for FDR, and George W. Bush for Reagan. “Preemptive” presidents from the minority party, like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, try to carve out their own political legacy but govern fundamentally within the constraints of the dominant regime.

A fourth category of president is the “disjunctive” president—the president that takes office as a political regime is beginning to crumble. Presidents like James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover and Carter are remembered as failures partly because of their individual failings. But another factor was the collapse of their political regimes, which produced tensions that were impossible to resolve.

Is Trump a disjunctive president? The comparison with Carter is a powerful one. Carter was able to eke out a victory in 1976 in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s decision to pardon him, but he couldn’t survive the decline of the Great Society coalition and was beaten easily by Reagan. Trump’s win was an even bigger fluke. Going up against another candidate with negative approval ratings, he was beaten decisively in the popular vote but had a run of luck in three marginal states that allowed him to be selected by an undemocratic electoral system. And even the Electoral College wouldn’t have helped him had the director of the FBI not decided to baselessly imply that Hillary Clinton was a crook less than two weeks before the election, generating a wave of anti-Clinton coverage that almost certainly changed its outcome. This isn’t exactly a robust formula going forward.

Trump is remarkably unpopular for a president-elect, and unless he can turn that around he’s in danger of being a one-and-done president. And with an unpopular president and an unpopular Republican Congress in power, Democrats are very likely to start winning back some of the ground they’ve lost at the federal, state, and local levels. Trump could certainly be a Carter-like figure in this respect.

But there are two major limitations to the analogy. First, the Republican Congress is likely to accomplish a lot more under Trump than the Democrats did under Carter. Second, it obscures the fact that the Democratic Party emerged from Reagan’s shadow long ago.

The relationship between Carter and Congress was famously dysfunctional. Four years of unified Democratic control of the federal government yielded very little legislative accomplishment, certainly nothing comparable to the pillars of the Obama administration. Showing that presidents make politics but that politics also make presidents, arguably the most notable domestic legacy of the Carter administration was the beginning of the deregulation and defense build-up that would fully bloom under Reagan.

Unfortunately, the current Republican Congress is far more cohesive than the Democratic caucus of the late 1970s. Far from checking the corrupt president-elect, the Republican Congress has signaled that it will be happy to let Trump and his family loot the Treasury and staff the executive branch with almost comically unqualified plutocrats. The reason for this is simple: House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell see the opportunity to enact a radical policy agenda. There will definitely be huge upper-class tax cuts, fire sales of federal land, draconian cuts to discretionary spending, and other upward distributions of wealth.

This is not to say that it will be all smooth sailing. Having a buffoon in the Oval Office without any expertise or long-standing policy commitments will make it harder to prevail in the most important battle of the next year, over the future of the Affordable Care Act. There will be times when Republicans overreach and fail. But unlike the Democratic Congress under Carter, they know what they want to do and will do a lot of it. A lot more of an ideological agenda will be accomplished by this Congress than under a typical disjunctive presidency, which tends to entail broadly popular compromises or stasis.

Another flaw in slotting Trump as a disjunctive president is that it implies that we’re still in the Reagan regime and that Barack Obama was a preemptive president. Azari doesn’t directly address the issue at much length. But the political scientist Corey Robin, in his intriguing piece in n+1 making the Carter-Trump connection, argues that “we are now reaching the end of the fourth decade of the Reagan regime,” asserting that Obama is a preemptive president, like Bill Clinton.

The problem here is that the “preemptive” label just doesn’t fit the facts. Obama’s signature domestic achievements—increasing taxes on the wealthy to pay for benefits for the poor and middle class, substantially expanding both regulation and public expenditure through the Affordable Care Act, enacting wide-ranging stimulus through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and tightening regulation of the financial industry through the Dodd-Frank Act—are all ambitious statutes, squarely within the New Deal/Great Society tradition.

There are strong arguments that all of these laws were compromised by the need to win support of unsavory vested interests and/or Republican senators, and didn’t go far enough. But, of course, the same was true of the New Deal. Particularly when you also consider Obama’s aggressive use of the regulatory state on issues such as the environment, labor rights, and immigration, his governing posture was very different from Clinton’s embrace of the dictum that the “era of big government is over.”

Typically, the minority party facing a dominant regime moves towards this regime. But if this is still Reagan’s regime, the opposite has been happening with the Democratic Party. Obama campaigned to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2008. Clinton campaigned to the left of Obama in 2016 (and far to the left of her husband’s actually preemptive 1992 and 1996 campaigns). While 20 years ago Democrats would have reacted to electoral defeat by moving to the right, most signs indicate that the party will continue to move left.

Obama was neither a preemptive president nor a reconstructive one. Instead, we are in a political space in which there is no dominant regime. Two ideologically coherent parties—one increasingly committed to expanding the New Deal and the Great Society, one to inflict the crushing blows to it Reagan and Bush couldn’t—are becoming increasingly polarized. The same factors that are almost certain to cause the Supreme Court to lurch dramatically to the left or right when the median vote changes hands will also mean that narrowly decided elections will carry increasingly large consequences if there is unified government and hopeless gridlock when there isn’t.

And it’s likely that this post-regime politics will persist for a while. The Democrats, having won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections, have a viable electoral coalition. Despite nominating an unpopular candidate facing unique headwinds, the party won three million more votes for its most progressive program in decades. Meanwhile, while it’s a minority coalition nationally, Republicans will remain competitive because of the federal system and skewed apportionment in both houses of Congress. The Democratic Party may well be able to defeat Trump after one term and even stop important parts of the Ryan-McConnell agenda—but even if they do, their opponents aren’t going anywhere. The 21st century figures to be characterized by intense polarization, not by the rise and fall of dominant regimes.


Sunday, July 28, 2019

Would Trump’s Re-election Doom the Planet? The New Republic / by Dave Levitan

Would Trump’s Re-election Doom the Planet?


The New Republic / by Dave Levitan / 2d

The urgency of climate change is finally dawning on the public. Two-thirds of Democrats now say they view global warming as a “critical threat,” and most call it the most important issue to discuss in presidential debates. The Democratic presidential candidates are paying attention, too. Many have released detailed climate plans; most have promised to refuse campaign contributions from fossil fuel industry executives; and nearly all support having a climate-only debate.


This sudden interest is understandable. The climate crisis is playing out before our eyes in ways it never has before, with unprecedented heat wavesflooding, and storms around the globe. Scientists’ warnings have also become more dire in recent years, their worst-case scenarios reading more like dystopian fiction than reality.

But the most potent reason for voters to be concerned about climate change this year is that we’re running out of time to prevent some of its worst effects. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that the world could hit 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming—the point at which irreversible damage begins—as soon as 2030. This time crunch has led some to say the 2020 election represents humanity’s last hope. “This is a climate crisis. An emergency,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said last month during the first Democratic debate. “And it is our last chance in an administration—the next one—to do something about it.”

But how important is this election, really? Scientists and policy experts agree that 2020 isn’t literally the last chance to save humanity, but four more years of Trump undoubtedly shrinks our chances to ensure a future safe from catastrophe. U.S. emissions likely wouldn’t reduce at the necessary pace, and the lack of leadership on the international stage could cause countries to decelerate their own energy transitions. The planet wouldn’t be doomed quite yet, but it would be closer to doom than ever before.

Climate change is a global problem that must be addressed on a global scale, but the United States has an outsized role in whether that global effort succeeds or fails.

Historically, the U.S. has emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country, making it the leading contributor to global warming. Today, it’s the second-largest emitter, after China. In order to maintain a stable climate, according to the IPCC, net global emissions must reach zero by 2050. To achieve that, emissions must start rapidly declining in or around 2020.

If Trump is re-elected, that “would probably mean a stalling of U.S. emissions,” said Corrine Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia. That’s already happening under Trump. While most developed countries—including the U.S.—have averaged between one and two percent emissions reductions per year over the last decade, emissions in the U.S. rose by 3.4 percent in 2018, in part due to Trump’s campaign to dismantle climate regulations. “At this stage, to limit climate change anywhere below two degrees [of] warming, the decreases in emissions in developed countries should be accelerating,” Le Quéré said.

Necessary carbon reductions in the U.S. are unlikely to happen if Trump is re-elected—and not just because of his deregulatory campaign on behalf of polluters. “I’d say one of the worst things about another four years would be that it would allow the Trump Administration to continue packing the courts with conservative judges,” said Drew Shindell, a professor of earth science at Duke University.

Many of the administration’s attempts at regulatory rollbacks—of which there are 83 related to the environment, at last count—end up in the courts. So far, judges have delayed or stopped many of those policy moves, from vehicle emissions standards to efforts at promoting fossil fuel extraction on public lands. But four more years of Trump means four more years of lifetime judicial appointments for conservative judges who might be more inclined to allow the rollbacks. Each individual policy may leave a small mark on the country’s overall emissions picture, but the sum of them would doom reductions in the near term.

A Trump win in 2020 could discourage other countries from rapidly reducing their emissions, too. Historically, American political leadership has been hugely influential in international climate negotiations, said Andrew Light, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement during the Obama administration. “The United States was absolutely instrumental in getting the strong agreement out of Paris,” he said.

The Paris agreement, as currently drafted, is not enough to stave off the worst of global warming, but it was intended to be strengthened periodically—and since Trump announced his intention to pull the U.S. out of the agreement in June 2017, the leadership that was so crucial to the initial negotiations has been absent. The next deadline for more aggressive climate targets arrives at the end of 2020. Thus, Light said, “2020 has got to be an inflection point for the world.”

Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, feels likewise. “Another four years of Trump would probably render futile any efforts to limit planetary warming to 1.5 [degrees Celsius], which is necessary to avert ever-more catastrophic climate change impacts,” he said in an email. Others think the effort to limit warming to 1.5 degrees is futile no matter the outcome of the election. “[It’s] hard to say four more years of Trump makes impossible something that seems unlikely either way,” Shindell said.

Experts like Le Quéré, however, hope that the target could still be met even if Trump wins, because U.S. emissions are not tethered irrevocably to the occupant of the White House. “The U.S. president alone would probably not completely remove the chance that the [1.5-degree] target is met, but cities and states in the U.S. would need to redouble their actions and other countries would need to work harder,” she said. That means efforts like the U.S. Climate Alliance—a group of governors representing half the states and more than half the population, committed to reaching Paris agreement goals with or without federal government help—would have to ramp up significantly during Trump’s second term. “Those particular four years are extremely important to keep the 1.5-degree limit in sight,” Le Quéré said.

No one disputes that. Waiting another four years to take aggressive action on climate change will have real consequences, which may include whether the world, led by the U.S., can keep warming below that limit. But even if warming exceeds that target, each additional fraction of a degree represents more destruction, more death. So in that sense, it will never be too late—not in 2024, not even in 2028—to prevent an even greater toll.

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The Man Behind National Conservatism The New Republic / by Daniel Luban

The Man Behind National Conservatism


The New Republic / by Daniel Luban / 2d

Last week, the Ritz-Carlton in Washington played host to a much-hyped conferencedevoted to “national conservatism.” Hosted by the newly-formed Edmund Burke Foundation, the conference sought to sketch the blueprint of a right-wing nationalism shorn of its uglier elements (the mission statement cast itself “in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race”). The keynote speakers were Tucker Carlson, John Bolton, Josh Hawley, and Peter Thiel, but the impresario behind it was the Edmund Burke Foundation’s chairman, Yoram Hazony, whose speech announced that “today is our independence day” from neoconservatism and neoliberalism and called for a return to “Anglo-American traditions.” 


While Steve Bannon has won the headlines, Hazony has emerged in the last year as the leading proponent of a more high-toned conservative nationalism. His current prominence is linked to his 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism, which has quickly become the closest thing the movement has to an intellectual manifesto. The book has received rapturous reviews across the right-wing press and won the 2019 Conservative Book of the Year award. While it gained plaudits from the more intellectually respectable precincts of the right (it carries blurbs from leading conservative Trump critics Yuval Levin and Reihan Salam), it has also been acclaimed by the MAGA crowd. In April, former Trump official Michael Anton (another participant in last week’s conference, better known as the pseudonymous author of the 2016 screed “The Flight 93 Election”) invoked Hazony’s book as the intellectual basis for a supposed “Trump Doctrine” in foreign policy—a hard-nosed yet non-crusading creed rooted in the recognition that “there will always be nations, and trying to suppress nationalist sentiment is like trying to suppress nature.” 

Media coverage of Hazony in the United States has tended to refer to him simply as an “Israeli political philosopher,” but the label doesn’t really do justice to his interesting and highly illustrative career. Born in Israel in 1964, but raised and educated in the United States, he described being “mesmerized” by an encounter as a Princeton undergraduate with the ultranationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane, a few years before Kahane’s party was banned in Israel for anti-Arab racism. Going on to earn a doctorate in political theory, Hazony chose not to pursue an academic career, instead moving to Israel with Princeton friends to found the Shalem Center, an American-style think tank based in Jerusalem. Hazony was an early member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle, and Shalem would remain closely aligned with the Likud Party. It would also serve as a nexus for the Israeli and American right; funding came from American billionaires like Ronald Lauder and Sheldon Adelson, while the roster of fellows tended to feature Israeli political figures who played well inside the Beltway. Hazony and others in the Shalem leadership spent the 1990s living in Eli, an Israeli settlement deep in the West Bank, until security concerns following the Second Intifada convinced them to relocate to East Jerusalem.

Equally at ease in Washington or the West Bank, Hazony’s career checks every box for the current nationalist international.

In 2007, an entertaining exposé of the center in Haaretz documented financial irregularities, power struggles, and Hazony’s own “peculiar habits,” but he emerged relatively undented. (The center’s admittedly winning statement in defense of its chief protested that “every person, certainly a social or business leader, has his own human distinctiveness.”) He is currently head of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem; the Edmund Burke Foundation—which he founded alongside David Brog, former executive director of the Texas televangelist John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel—gives him an institutional footprint in Washington. Increasingly, Hazony’s appeal extends to Europe (a recent photo-op portrayed him in conversation with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán) and Europe-for-now (an avowed disciple of early English constitutionalists like John Fortescue and Edward Coke, he is highly simpatico to the Little England vision of the Brexiteers).

Equally at ease in Washington or the West Bank, extolling the glories of England’s ancient constitution or schmoozing with the scourge of rootless cosmopolitanism on the continent, Hazony’s career checks every box for the current nationalist international. Whatever one thinks of him as a philosopher, he has undoubtedly proven himself a gifted ideological entrepreneur. For that reason his book deserves our attention. What is its vision of nationalism, and why has it found such a receptive audience?

A set of tacit assumptions underpins the current discussion of nationalism in the media. Nationalism is simple, and internationalism is complicated; nationalism is primal, and internationalism is artificial; nationalism is the default, and internationalism the exception. This is the theory of a nationalist like Michael Anton, for whom nationalism is “an integral part of human nature,” common to “all human beings in all times and places.” But it is equally the theory of many liberal critics, for whom the apparent revival of nationalism (but did it ever really go away?) indicates a reversion to a more primitive form of political consciousness.

The modern study of nationalism begins from the realization that it is not so self-evident a phenomenon at all. No doubt humans are always embedded in communities of various kinds, and no doubt our loyalties are always unevenly distributed. But it took a great deal of historical development before the boundaries of nation-states could appear the most natural mapping of human loyalties, replacing families, religions, clans, or castes. 

THE VIRTUE OF NATIONALISM by Yoram Hazony Basic Books, 304 pp., $30.00

With over 300 million people, today’s United States is larger than any premodern empire, larger indeed than the entire world population for most of human history. To our ancestors, it would have seemed absurd to imagine that these 300 million could ever really be an “us,” a community evoking real loyalty; anyone who’s begun each school day standing for the Pledge of Allegiance can appreciate the amount of work that goes into maintaining it. For many of the most famous scholars of nationalism, from Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner to Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, it must therefore be understood as an essentially modern phenomenon, one that revolves around creating nations rather than simply liberating them.

The Virtue of Nationalism has little interest in such questions. The whole “modernist” interpretation of nationalism, the axis around which scholarly debate has revolved for decades, is dismissed in a single footnote. Instead, Hazony frames his theory around a conflict (“as old as the West itself”) between two principles of international order: “an order of free and independent nations,” and a universal empire striving to unite all nations under a single legal regime. The former ideal, he suggests, originates in the Hebrew Bible, with the biblical kingdom of Israel serving as the first national state, but reached its apotheosis in early modern Europe under the “Protestant construction of the West.” The golden age of nation-states stretched from roughly the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 until the end of World War II. But after Hitler discredited nationalism (wrongly, for he was actually an imperialist rather than a nationalist) the imperial principle made a comeback, at least among “educated elites who have, to one degree or another, become committed to a future under an imperial order.”             

Hazony criticizes the neoconservative dream of global American hegemony, which he depicts as one manifestation of this imperial mindset. But the main target of his ire is the European Union, “a universal state … whose reach will be limited only by the power that this empire can bring to bear”—the most insidious of empires because it looks least like one. The slowly spreading power of the EU and other international bodies has, he warns, dire consequences: “When a nation wakes up from its sleep and discovers that it has been slowly, inexorably conquered, at that time no options will remain to it other than to acquiesce in eternal enslavement or go to war.” Fortunately, national populations are beginning to sound the alarm and stand up for their freedom.

The age-old conflict between nation and empire is a clash of particularity and universality. To be a nationalist is to be attached to one’s own particular traditions and way of life, while respecting the similar attachments of others; hence nationalists have an “aversion to the conquest of foreign nations” and a “tolerance of diverse ways of life.” The most fundamental mark of imperialism, on the other hand, is universalism—a belief that “the entire earth should be subjected to a single regime,” and “an ideology of universal salvation and peace.” At bottom, Immanuel Kant’s vision of a global federation of states ensuring perpetual peace is generically similar to Nazi Germany’s dream of becoming “lord of the earth.” Hazony thinks both should be seen as “transformations of a single ideal and passion, that of emperors and imperialists.” 

“Imperialism and nationalism,” Hazony tells us, “represent irreconcilable positions in political thought.” And yet the historical record indicates that they have proven eminently reconcilable. Indeed, on even a little reflection, his historical narrative comes to seem extremely odd. He casts the three centuries from Westphalia to World War II as the high point of the order of self-determining nation-states. Yet these three centuries were, on the contrary, the zenith of the great European empires. It was only the postwar period that brought decolonization and the creation of scores of new self-determining states. Hazony notes in passing the “duality” of the old European state system—nationalist at home, imperialist abroad—but makes no real effort to explain it.

Nations do not always see the value of each others’ cultures, or recognize each other as having cultures at all.

His vision of a world of peaceful nations, content with their lot and respectful of each other’s individuality, is in many ways an attractive one. And if nations were neatly bounded entities, each settled in an uncontested territory with ample resources and cultural consensus, perhaps such a world might have come into being. Yet in practice, nations intermingle, and nationalists are often most enthusiastic about protecting co-nationals abroad and suppressing minority groups at home. Nations find themselves discontented with their territory and resources, marked by the legacy of historical defeats, and nationalists tend to fixate on remedying these apparent injustices. Nations do not always see the value of each others’ cultures, or recognize each other as having cultures at all, and nationalists are sometimes not the most broadminded in this respect. (Hazony stresses that nationalism is about shared language, religion, and history, not race, which is in some sense a well-intentioned gesture to distance himself from uglier racial theories. But it’s undeniable that many nationalists do define their nations racially, and it’s unclear why such versions wouldn’t count as nationalism.)

In such circumstances it is unsurprising that the boundary between nationalism and imperialism can be so blurry. It’s grimly appropriate that just as Hazony’s book was being cast as the foundation of a non-crusading “Trump Doctrine,” the Trump administration itself was stepping up its efforts at regime change in Iran and Venezuela, spearheaded by the unimpeachably nationalist John Bolton. It turns out that misplaced Kantian idealism is not the only or even the major source of global conflict: Paranoia about threats to the nation, exaltation of military force, and obsession with national glory are more frequent triggers.  

Hazony suggests that nations, as opposed to empires, disdain “wars of indefinite expansion,” and the “indefinite” has to bear a lot of weight—but even the most ambitious expansionist programs tend to be finite in their goals. The United States in the era of Manifest Destiny didn’t aim to rule the entire world; it simply had ideas about the territory to which it was entitled that were markedly different from its established borders. (The same could be said of contemporary Israel, as Hazony may know from his years in the West Bank.) Even Nazi Germany’s war aims never seriously set out to control the entire globe. Hazony’s strained attempt to cast the Nazis as simply more-ruthless Kantians—which involves taking their rhetoric about the eventual peace that would follow their victory more seriously than it deserves—stems from the need to show that they were imperialists rather than nationalists; the simpler conclusion is that they were both.

There is another sense in which the line between nations and empires is a blurry one. Anyone who considers what the principle of national self-determination would entail in practice must conclude that it has never come close to being realized. There are thousands of ethnic groups around the world, and only about two hundred states; in that sense, the vast majority of peoples lack a state of their own. One might adopt a more minimal understanding of a “nation,” so that it refers simply to whoever lives within a particular set of national borders. But right-wing nationalists tend to be the least satisfied with this solution, and Hazony is no exception. He is scornful about Jürgen Habermas’s call for a minimal “constitutional patriotism,” and suggests that nations must have a deeper (linguistic, religious, historical) unity.

The point of the new nationalism is to justify the self-assertion of the nations of the global North.

This means there is a tension between the existing system of national states and the principle of national self-determination. Hazony is not unduly troubled by the tension: “most peoples on earth,” he flatly states, will have to settle for the status of a “protectorate” under the power of a stronger nation. How such protectorates differ from empires, which likewise consist of a stronger nation claiming to rule in the interests of weaker ones, is not specified; Hazony allows that this situation is “perhaps not what everyone would wish for,” but here nationalist principles must take a back seat to the dictates of prudence. The point of the new nationalism is to justify the self-assertion of the nations of the global North, not to hinder the interests of stronger nations out of a misplaced concern for weaker ones.

Although Hazony treats the universal empire as the main alternative to the nation, he also frames his argument against the errors of modern individualism: Just as we could never be citizens of the whole human race, neither are we isolated and rootless individuals. He mocks the “fairy tale” offered by early modern thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who allegedly thought that political community actually originated from a contract of isolated individuals. 

He notes that states in our modern sense haven’t always existed, being preceded by smaller groups of families, tribes, and clans. In explaining where these states comes from, he allows that some of them originate in violence or conquest; these are “despotic” states, corresponding to empires, which rule through fear rather than loyalty. But he also offers a second and sunnier origin story: of “free states,” corresponding to nations (examples include biblical Israel, ancient Athens, medieval England, and the United States), which are formed through the voluntary unification of smaller tribes that share a common culture. 

While the free state is much larger than any family, it is nonetheless “a collective of the same kind as the family,” one brought together and held together “only due to the bonds of mutual loyalty among its members.” And although such a state might expand, it does so through a process of consensual “adoption” rather than subjugation. (For instance, Hazony writes, “the English adopted the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish”—this I suppose is one way to describe British policy in Northern Ireland.)  

The result is a communitarian version of the old individualist fairy tale: the nation as a pristine and consensual community, unsullied by coercion or conquest, which might have a history but doesn’t really have a politics. The moment of subordination comes only at the international level, where “empires” of various stripes attempt to impose their will on these cohesive national communities; it stands to reason that nations are now struggling to free themselves.

It has been said ad nauseam that we are witnessing a crisis of international institutions. But it could equally be said that we’re witnessing a crisis of nation-states, precisely because they have never really lived up to this communitarian fairy tale. Far from being primordial units knit together by a pre-political culture, modern nation-states are agglomerations still displaying the fault-lines of the political struggles that produced them. Their rise rested on external expansion, which helps explain why the line between national assertion and imperial expansion is often so tenuous. It equally rested on internal subordination, which helps explain why today’s nationalists can’t simply seal up the borders, but must also confront enemies who are always already inside the gates. (In these respects Brexit has been exemplary: officially targeted at the unaccountable bureaucrats of the EU, but deriving much of its energy from anger at immigration from the former colonies, a legacy of the British empire to the British nation.)  

Today’s nationalists make savvy use of populist and anti-imperialist rhetoric. But the unfractured nations they aim to return to have never really existed, and it’s unlikely that they’ll ever run out of enemies.

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Saturday, July 27, 2019

Is Josh Hawley For Real? The New Republic / by Alexander Zaitchik

Is Josh Hawley For Real?


The New Republic / by Alexander Zaitchik / 2d

Hawley’s speech, condemned by some Jewish leaders for trading in anti-Semitic tropes and by liberals for sending coded messages about the dangers of racial diversity, did little to counter the perception that post-liberalism is just high-concept lipstick applied to the Trumpian pig. Neither did anything else on the conference agenda, billed by its conveners as “the kick-off for a protracted effort to recover and reconsolidate the rich tradition of conservative thought as an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.” 


The question shadowing this effort is why its “stark opposition” to racism looks and sounds more like a slippery and morally bankrupt triangulation. As a political ally and potential heir to Trump, this question shadows Josh Hawley most of all.

In his campaign ads and speeches, Hawley gives the impression that he grew up hard on a struggling family farm. But he’s the small-town son of a banker who prepped at Rockhurst, an elite Jesuit boys school on the Kansas City state line. In high school, Hawley wrote a column for his  local paper, The Lexington News, that demonstrated a precocious interest in the culture war. “It will take great insight, understanding, and courage to successfully lead this nation through the rough waters ahead,” wrote a 14-year old Hawley in 1994. “Maybe we should be carefully listening for the leader who starts by saying something VERY unpopular because he believes in it and lives it, a man who takes the ridicule but doesn’t back off. Perhaps that person is ... Dan Quayle.”

“It’s almost like he’s attacking modernity itself.”

At Stanford, Hawley studied history and wrote columns for the Stanford Review, a conservative student rag founded in 1987 by Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel (now an unlikely patron of Hawley’s political career). Under Bancroft-winning historian David M. Kennedy, Hawley wrote an honor’s thesis on Teddy Roosevelt that he expanded into a book, Preacher of Righteousness, published by Yale University Press in 2008. Hawley presents Roosevelt as a flawed but heroic figure whose greatness lay in rejecting the idea that liberty is synonymous with freedom. Hawley’s Roosevelt understood liberty as “a fundamentally social undertaking” based on civic, moral, and economic conditions, the maintenance of which required a strong-handed approach “toward government regulation and social melioration.” Unlike the Republican presidents who followed him, Roosevelt

knew that politics is a profoundly moral enterprise. [And that] the laws a people adopt shape the type of citizens they become. ... His career ... demonstrates that the statecraft of economic growth need not be the sum and substance of democratic life.


It is hard to imagine that Hawley was not already fantasizing about becoming the twenty-first-century Bull Moose when he moved east in 2002. He quickly collected the shiniest gold rings available to a young conservative lawyer on a certain path: President of the Yale Law Federalist Society, a Blackstone fellowship, clerkships with federal appellate Judge Michael W. McConnell and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

In 2011, after a stint with a D.C. law firm, Hawley returned to Missouri and joined the faculty at the University of Missouri Law School. What little writing he did during this period hit the intersection of religion and politics. A 2010 essay for National Affairsrestated the “virtue politics” thesis of his Roosevelt book, and proposed its revival as a cure for “America’s Epicurean Liberalism.” A 2012 meditation on “Kingdom Politics” finds a resigned-sounding Hawley telling activist Christians to stop trying to convert the country and instead “call the state to its true purpose—to serve justice, and by extension, the Kingdom of God.” He defines this as supporting policies that help “the poor and marginalized,” including better access to public education and vocational training. “The kingdom life is the common good,” concludes Hawley, using language often found in religious-left magazines like Commonweal.

This rejection of the minimalist market state may not have landed Hawley a job with the Romney campaign that year, but it fits within a post-liberal camp that draws on a number of conservative leveling and communitarian traditions, from Midwestern agrarianism to the neo-Marxism of the English Distributists.

To hold the line against the second Obama administration—what he called “the most hostile administration to religious liberty in our nation’s history”—Professor Hawley began moonlighting for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, writing briefs and advising on cases. It was his luck that two of these cases ended up before the Supreme Court. The second, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, resulted in a landmark decision establishing the right of closely held corporations to reject federal anti-discrimination regulations on religious grounds.

Hawley’s relatively modest role in the Hobby Lobby case propelled him to celebrity status on the local religious liberty circuit. With a handful of practiced (and perhaps exaggerated) Supreme Court war stories, he crisscrossed the state. In 2016, he announced an “outsider” campaign for attorney general backed by the old guard Missouri Republican establishment, including its patriarch, the former Senator Jack Danforth. In November, he received more votes than any other Republican on the ticket, including Donald Trump, who won the state by 19 points. 

A few months into Trump’s term, there appeared the first flickers of a new traditionalist project that had one eye on the future and the other deep into the past. In the pages of American Affairs and First Things, articles explained eruptions of right-wing populism around the world as breaking-point insurgencies—against pluralism, against globalism, against a world premised on the rational Lockean individual for whom the social contract is just a ticket for the pursuit of narrow, selfish, anti-social ends. Writing in the Spring 2017 issue of American Affairs, Yoram Hazony and his fellow Israeli scholar Ofir Haivry delivered a stern history lecture to “political figures, journalists, and academics,” and particularly the conservative ones, publicly wringing their hands over the president’s “illiberalism.” Trump isn’t some ominous departure from conservatism, they suggested, but a tantalizing glimpse of the real thing—a reminder that “our nationalist and religious traditions ... are not liberal.” (Hazony and Haivry’s article singled out, among others, the New York Post’s Ahmari as an exemplar of confusion on this issue, which might explain Ahmari’s recent diatribes against mainline conservatives, delivered with the zeal of a recent convert.)

Hawley was likely too busy during his rookie year in office to follow any of this. He began his political career on a conventional note by attending the Kochs’ semiannual donor event in Palm Springs. There is no record of him giving any Teddy Roosevelt–style speeches about using state power to pursue the common good, but he did join former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on a panel about how attorneys general could best help the Trump administration “move quickly on deregulation.” The first flash of Hawley’s self-styled populist streak came in June 2017, when he joined the ranks of state attorneys general who had sued large pharmaceutical companies, filing a suit against Purdue Pharma and two other major companies for misleading Missourians about the addictiveness of opioids. He later continued to investigate other drug makers and distributors.

Hawley announced his candidacy for Democrat Claire McCaskill’s Senate seat in October of 2017, and promptly flew to New York for another pow-wow with the Kochs. There was never any doubt he’d be luxuriously funded—the Club for Growth pledged $10 million to the campaign before it formally existed—but the bottomless backing of the Kochs’ dark money network, together with a bevy of Trump administration PACs, guaranteed Hawley’s leisurely steamroll in a crowded primary. The only holdout of note was a briefly suspicious Steve Bannon, calmed during a reassuring phone call from the candidate.

Nothing in Hawley’s record comes close to making up for trying to take away the health insurance of millions of sick Americans. 

As a Senate candidate and state attorney general, Hawley opened an antitrust probe against Google and sought to keep the idiosyncrasies of his traditionalist conservatism out of public view, if not quite chained to the basement. His one scare came in January of 2018, when audio emerged of the candidate saying that the loosening of sexual mores during the 1960s and ‘70s was responsible for the existence of today’s human trafficking crisis. Just as troubling was the venue where he made the comment: a “Pastors and Pews” event sponsored by the Missouri branch of the rabidly anti-gay American Renewal Project. As detailed at the time by New York’s Ed Kilgore, the event featured a roster of speakers making up a Who’s Who of Christian nationalism, including the extremist evangelical pastor and alternative-history writer David Barton. Hawley was stung by the reaction. When news broke weeks before the election that he was scheduled to share another stage with Barton, his campaign promptly canceled the appearance, citing scheduling issues.

Hawley was more forthright about his position on health care. In February of 2018 he joined 19 Republican state attorneys in a lawsuit to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s protections of people with pre-existing conditions. McCaskill pounded Hawley over the callousness of the effort throughout the campaign, forcing him to respond weeks before the election with a TV ad that used his young son’s unnamed chronic condition as a prop for his professed compassion. But without a credible alternative to replace the ACA protection for preexisting conditions, the ad amounted to manipulative treacle. Indeed, nothing in Hawley’s record before or since—not his support for vocational training, not his drug pricing bill, not his pretty words about the great, forgotten Middle—comes close to making up for trying to take away the health insurance of millions of sick Americans. 

Hawley’s campaign had other unpopular features that likely tightened the race. His stump speech often attacked McCaskill’s support for a state university system that Hawley dismissed as a pipeline for leftist ideological indoctrination. Among other things, this culture war plaint was a brazen gambit for a rich kid whose start-to-finish private education cost $500,000. The attacks on McCaskill—who waitressed her way through two degrees at Mizzou—failed to generate much grassroots excitement, but then Hawley never needed it. “He won with a very negative campaign that was mostly supported by the unlimited spending of anonymous mega-donors,” said Gepford, of the Missouri Democrats. “He isn’t very well known in the state.” 

Voters did know he was Trump’s candidate. The president held three rallies in Missouri down the stretch, and Hawley won McCaskill’s seat by six points.

Hawley moved into his Senate office this past winter just as post-liberalism was filling out its skin as an identifiable movement. It now had a name—coined and carried over from the world of academic theology by First Things editor R.R. “Rusty” Reno—and a spectrum. At one end were traditionalists who proclaimed they no longer had any fight left in them for a culture war that was lost long ago. The classic statement of this view is Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option, which urges Christian soldiers to follow the example of the book’s titular monk, who retreated from a corrupt and decrepit Rome to conserve the flame of Christ within the walls of a rural monastery. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen offers a spirited safari through the rubble of the systemic collapse, predicted by Tocqueville and others, of a monad-like rights-based liberalism. At the end of the tour he admits he can’t imagine a viable traditionalist project of national renewal, and concedes the value of building intentional communities to serve as “lighthouses” and “field hospitals” for refugees in flight from high-entropy liberalism. 

On the other end of the spectrum are the fighting post-liberals energized by Trump’s shock victory and its echoes around the world, from Brexit to Bolsonaro.

The fighting post-libs deny that they are merely “reverse-engineering an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s basic instincts,” as Jacob Heilbrunn described the shared assessment of the left and conventional right. But there doesn’t appear to be a basis for any other conclusion. As men of morals who define themselves against liberalism’s crassness, materialism, and lack of self-restraint, they either support or show sympathy for a presidential caricature of the Seven Deadly Sins. As professed walkers of a high road that ostensibly never intersects with racism or ethno-nationalism, they have nothing to say about the racism and nativism that now disfigures American life under Trump. The post-liberals instead offer assurances, abstractions and, most of all, excursions into history. Their writings are quiet on birtherism, but loud with stories about Biblical characters, medieval monks, Roman generals, and seventeenth-century English legal scholars. This spring, Hawley raised some eyebrows when C-SPAN broadcast a graduation speech he gave to King’s College centered around a fourth-century heretic who beefed with St. Augustine over original sin. 

The post-liberals are energized by Trump’s shock victory and its echoes around the world, from Brexit to Bolsonaro.

The same suspicions and denials dogged the anti-liberals who came together in the margins of the Reagan years. In the mid-1980s, the heyday of fusionism, the GOP was unified behind a popular president who spoke in sweeping liberal language about personal freedom, global crusades, and universal progress. But there were some who dissented from the politics and premises that defined the party. Huddled around the journal Chronicles, they went by many names, most of them coined in disparagement: theocons, trads, paleoconservatives. Among their prominent critics was the theologian Richard Neuhaus, who founded First Things in 1990 as a rebuke and counterweight to Chronicles’ anti-modernity politics, which was, in Neuhaus’s estimation, “insensitive to the classic language of anti-Semitism.” (One can only imagine what Neuhaus might make of the post-liberal tenor of today’s First Things; he died in 2009.) 

Chronicles anticipated everything that welled up in support for Trump, including a lot of anger at the conventional social right that talks a good game, but puts families and faith groups second to the needs of Wall Street,” said Allan Carlson, the publisher of Chronicles between 1986 and 1997. “We did battle with Cold War liberals and neoconservatives. We looked to older, non-Lockean traditions, because there are stronger conceptions of freedom, like the Christian idea of the freedom to do what is right.”

To get a sense of what this new conception of freedom would look like in practice, just read the post-liberals’ blueprints. In Hazony and Haivry’s essay “What is Conservatism?”,  they explain how the ideal post-liberal state is “neither authoritarian nor liberal,” but a middle way that avoids the excesses of both. In other essays, they have written that this is the only way to stanch an accelerating “internal disintegration” that will drive Americans “into the hands of genuinely authoritarian movements.”

Hazony’s own middle-way program does not permit a proliferation of rights based on the autonomous individual’s pursuit of happiness or abstract conceptions of universal justice. Preserving a social order rooted in tradition requires that some freak flags not be allowed to fly. In his essay “Conservative Democracy,” Hazony limits toleration for religious and social views to those who “do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole.” Some rights established under liberalism will remain; others taken away. Quoting Burke in “What is Conservatism?”, Hazony and Haivry explain that all rights will be decided by traditions and heritage passed down like a “recorded hereditary title,” rather than subject to revision by “every wild litigious spirit.” At the center of this heritage is the Judeo-Christian Bible, which imparts “a certain dignity and sanctity to each human being,” as Harzony writes in “Conservative Democracy,” but says “nothing about our being by nature perfectly free and perfectly equal.” Membership in the post-liberal state will be reserved for those who declare, like Ruth of the Old Testament, “Your people is my people, and your God is my God.” 

Hazony’s case for a post-liberal nationalism is not all Burke and the Bible. There are also references foreboding darker directions for post-liberalism. As Gabriel Schoenfeld notes in a piece at The Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative website, Hazony quotes Johann Gottfried Herder, the eighteenth-century German poet and theorist of Volk nationalism, on the dangers of “the wild mixing of races and nationalities under one scepter.” But Hazony denies that Hitler’s Reich has any place in a discussion of post-liberal nationalism, because Hitler was not a nationalist, but an imperialist, which makes him a universalist—and hence a permutation of liberalism.

Nobody is accusing the post-liberals of being Hitler-style fascists. It’s enough that they often sound like the people who prepped the ground for later authoritarian or fascist movements. Much of the language, sensibility, and obsessions of the post-liberals—the modern university, cosmopolitan elites, social cohesion and order—echoes the anti-modern rumblings in Fritz Stern’s study of post-liberalism in Wilhelmine Germany, The Politics of Cultural Despair. One of Stern’s subjects, the nineteenth-century German biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde, liked to imagine the literat and the liberal political system that he believed inseparable from it as a “poisonous weed” that “must be extirpated from our streams and seas” before the “ancient gods [could] reemerge from the depths.” The idea of avenging gods is echoed in the title of R.R. Reno’s forthcoming post-liberal treatise, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West.  

Nobody knows how the gosh-golly, Ivy League–educated senator from Missouri will figure into all this in five or ten years. But if Josh Hawley seems too smooth, too educated, and too thoughtful to worry about, well, that is precisely what makes him worth worrying about. He was the only elected official to address the Burke Foundation last week for a reason. And he didn’t launch a PAC after one month in the Senate to teach Sunday School on a commune with Rod Dreher. He aspires to be a transformational figure, in more ways than one, and has the support of both the post-liberals and the billionaires. If it’s premature to say what, exactly, this portends, it’s not too early to know it isn’t anything good. 

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The Electoral Buzzsaw of ‘Medicare for All’ Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall 

The Electoral Buzzsaw of ‘Medicare for All’


Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 5h



In Democratic policy debates since 2016 there’s been a widespread and sometimes near dominant narrative that Medicare for All is the way forward and actually surprisingly popular. You do away with all the rickety Tinker Toys complexity of Obamacare, SCHIP, Medicare, Medicaid, subsidies and exchanges and build out a single payer national health care plan out of the already popular Medicare program. It’s simpler and more coherent. It’s more efficient and thus cheaper. Critically, it’s actually quite popular: polls show that Medicare for All enjoys anything from substantial public support to overwhelming public support, with numbers usually hovering around 70% of the public backing the idea. This led most of the Senate Democrats with any interest in running for President to endorse the plan in 2017. Today all but one of the top tier of candidates are on record supporting the idea.

This also led to a corollary judgment: Democrats who didn’t support such a plan with strong and even bipartisan support must either be hopelessly ossified in old style incrementalist thinking or, more likely, in bed with the health insurance companies.

The problem is, the whole premise is false. A raft of public surveys show that Medicare for All has anything ranging from public support in the low 40s to dismal support down into the 20s. How is that reconcilable with all the polls showing that clear majorities support it? Like most political labels it’s not clear, beyond in an aspirational sense, what “Medicare for All” actually means. Survey after survey shows that when most people hear “Medicare for All” they assume something like a right for anyone who wanted it, regardless of age, to be able to get or buy into Medicare. Critically, most believe they and others would be able to keep their current private coverage if they chose to.

new Marist poll illustrates the point, but it’s far from the only example. The poll asked Americans whether they supported “Medicare for all that want it, that is allow all Americans to choose between a national health insurance program or their own private health insurance.” 70% of adults thought that was a “good idea”.

When asked about “Medicare for all, that is a national health insurance program for all Americans that replaces private health insurance” the number fell to 41%. This isn’t an outlier. Numerous polls have shown roughly the same thing. A 2018 Reuters/Ipsos poll found 70.1% support and 51.9% support among self-identified Republicans. The numbers are actually remarkable consistent across many polls. Roughly 70% say they support Medicare for All, assuming that it means people can keep private policies. The numbers hover around 40% if they’re told that’s not true.

But just as consistently polls show that people assume Medicare for All means the option to opt into Medicare or keep their own private insurance. Much like the new Marist poll a January 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation pollfound that 55% of adults believed Medicare for All would allow people to retain their private coverage if they chose. When told it would “eliminate private health insurance companies” that support collapses, going from slightly more than 70% to just 37%.

There is an obvious logic to Medicare for All, not only substantively but politically. Democrats made herculean efforts and suffered massive political blowback for Obamacare, which was a framework first devised by Republicans as a way to oppose and counter a single payer type national plan. It was engineered specifically to preserve not only the existence but profitability of private carriers. But for all this, health insurance companies did no more than tolerate the effort at best and often actively worked against it, as did most of the rest of the health care industry, the entirety of the GOP and much of the federal judiciary.

Critically, the very complexity required to operate within the structure of the private health care system forced an often byzantine and regulation heavy approach that often frustrated the public and became a ready target for industry and political opponents. In other words, precisely the workarounds that were included to protect private insurers and make the plan more “market-friendly” ended up providing the cudgels those companies and their Republican allies used to make the argument against it. If industry will be at permanent war with any effort to provide universal coverage and fight plans designed to ensure their viability why not just go all the way, simplify the whole thing like most other countries do and gain the efficiencies which Medicare already provides to generations of seniors?

Why not indeed? The United States is burdened with a deep lock-in to private health insurance provision that most Americans don’t want to give up or at least don’t want to be forced to give up. This is the challenge universal coverage advocates have faced for decades. Indeed, it’s what got us to Obamacare in the first place.

The reaction to these stark numbers from Medicare for All advocates has been telling and instructive. Of course, if you focus on perceived negatives or scare tactics, support falls! But this makes no sense. You can’t understand the popularity or political viability of a policy without figuring in counter-arguments that will certainly be used in the political arena. This is especially the case with counter-arguments which are actually true!

The secondary response has settled down to daring people to find anyone who likes their insurance company. Nobody likes their insurance company ergo these numbers can’t be true or don’t mean anything or don’t matter. It’s a pretty effective dare. Who raises their hand at a town hall meeting to give a big thumbs up to their health insurance company? Unfortunately that doesn’t really prove anything or at least what advocates what it to prove.

Here we have the kernel of magical thinking inspiring this whole debate: advocates belief that if something doesn’t make sense, it actually can’t be true. It’s certainly true that more or less everyone has complaints about their insurance company. And it’s hard to find people who affirmatively like or have some devotion to their insurance company since the whole system is a mess. But it simply doesn’t flow from that that people support doing away with private insurance or being forced to give up their current insurance. To pretend otherwise ignores basically everything we know about public risk aversion, especially tied to health care, and people’s perception that while what they currently may not be ideal something else might be worse. Call it relative privilege or advantage and people’s resistance to losing it.

Don’t believe me? Simply look at every survey of public opinion to see what people support once they hear people who currently have private health care insurance would be forced to give that up in favor of the new system. The fact that that doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t matter. The fact that many countries have systems like single payer (Canada) or public/private hybrid systems (Germany) that ensure universal coverage and it works well and those publics wouldn’t think of switching to our system doesn’t matter either. Fundamentally changing our system of national health care provision requires first accepting the massive resistance to the most logical paths to doing so. And that is popular resistance, what people actually think and their basic attitudes toward change. We’re not even talking about the avalanche of scare tactics and lies that would certainly rush forth like a tsunami from all the corporations (health care insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and more) which would fight such plans as an existential threat.

One of the advantages of the Medicare brand is that everyone knows relatives who are on it, know that people can’t wait to get on it and that it’s both metaphorically and literally a lifesaver. Retirees know it’s not some dystopian hellscape because they have it and know it’s awesome. But actually seniors are the demographic most opposed to Medicare for All. Some of this is due to the fact that in our current politics, seniors trend to the right. But it’s also because liking what they have a lot they fear that Medicare for All would take something away from what they currently have.

Medicare for All advocates have responded to these dismal surveys by citing a small number of polls that suggest that losing access to private care is acceptable if people are promised they can keep their doctor. But the difference is limited and it assumes the ability to shape the political question without counterclaims.

It’s worth noting that there are other aspects of Medicare for All that are less clear cut, more intermingled with scare tactics, but also drive down support sharply. Private carriers reimburse at higher rates than Medicare. (That’s the cost savings we want from Medicare!) But a significant amount of our health care system is financed by those more generous reimbursements. Take away those rates and some significant numbers of hospitals really would have to retrench or close. It wouldn’t be the dystopian nightmare the lobbyists and 30 second commercials will portray. But it won’t all be propaganda.

The more realistic approaches to implementation would have Medicare for All reimbursements pushed up closer to current private insurance rates at the outsets and then gain the Medicare cost savings over time with Medicare’s bargaining power. That would work. But it means that a lot of the savings from Medicare for All don’t show up at the outset. They come from Medicare’s assumed and probably real ability to bend the cost curve over time.

Taxes are of course the other big cudgels for industry opponents. Medicare for All would involve a huge amount of new taxes. And simply presented as big new taxes that makes public support drop markedly too. But as advocates rightly explain you can’t really capture what that means without also noting that no one would pay health insurance premiums any more. If I pay $800 a month in new taxes who cares if I’m no longer paying $800 a month to my insurance company? Even more so if the new system has no copays or deductibles and exclusions. If it’s better, more reliable care with the same amount of money going to taxes as went to Aetna. This is a solid and good and perhaps viable political response. My own concern, both political and substantive is that it won’t be this simple.

New taxes will be to individuals. But most private health care premiums (for most of the population) are paid by employers. (Roughly 2/3s of Americans have private coverage; just over half of Americans get that through an employer.) It’s textbook economics that costs paid in benefits are de facto income to the employee, even though they don’t show up in the bottom line of your paycheck. Economists will tell you that workers pay roughly 15% in payroll taxes on the first $125,000 or so of income, for instance, even though technically you pay half and your employer pays half. But it doesn’t necessarily work this way in the wild.

If in 2022, we switch to a Medicare for All system and private insurance disappears do you really think that most or all employers will give their employees a raise on a dollar for dollar basis to what the company had been paying in health care premiums? Over time something like that probably (maybe?) will happen. Certainly some employers will do just that either to maintain employee morale or retention. But the baseline reality of our economy is limited power for workers vis a vis employers in most sectors of the economy. So it’s not clear to me why most or at least a substantial percentage of employers won’t pocket some or all of that windfall and leave employees with a very real and pretty big tax increase.

I don’t argue that any of these issues are insurmountable. The point of advocacy is to advocate and change minds. My point is that beyond the abolition of private insurance for all but supplemental policies (which is the real achilles heel politically) there are a number of political and substantive road blocks which most polls don’t get into until the secondary or tertiary questions which lead advocates and many Democrats to greatly overstate the popularity of this approach underestimate the steep political peril for any candidate – like a presidential candidate running nationally – not running in a pretty liberal district or state.

Of course, none of this means that people shouldn’t support Medicare for All or other comparable single player plans on the merits. A substantial minority of Americans do support it. Indeed, more practically, without a vibrant left supporting such a model the public debate is inevitably skewed to the right. A decade ago the legislative debate on Capitol Hill largely focused on whether or not what we now call Obamacare would include a “public option.” It failed because of stiff opposition from insurers and opposition from centrist Senate Democrats. Now that’s basically the centrist fallback position and Republicans running for office, as opposed to working the courts, have basically given up on gutting Obamacare. Indeed, ‘Medicare for America’, one of the major Medicare buy-in style plans proposed by wonks at the Center for American Progress, is as the name implies in large measure a reaction to the Medicare for All push. But that’s not what the proposal entitled “Medicare for All” actually does. It’s a single payer plan in which private health care plans would be prohibited except for supplemental plans which covers services or deductibles not covered by the standard plan.

There is every reason to believe that Medicare for All would be a major electoral liability for a Democratic presidential candidate in a general election – just on the basis of what the plan actually does, let alone the way the GOP and the health care industry writ large would pile on to that with a campaign of lies, horror stories and propaganda. It could well mean the difference between Trump’s defeat or reelection by effectively nullifying the Democrats big advantage on health care and giving the GOP a cudgel to sour a significant amount of the electorate on the Democratic candidate.

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