How the GOP’s Plutocracy Works With Its Authoritarianism / Chait

How the GOP’s Plutocracy Works With Its Authoritarianism

Nov. 5, 2022

By Jonathan Chait

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

There is a myth that the Trump-era Republican Party has grown hostile to business and accumulated wealth. Several things have contributed to this confusion. Educational polarization has driven more college-educated voters to the Democrats, and more non-college-educated voters to the Republicans, resulting in Democrats winning greater support from affluent voters. Trump ran in 2016 as a critic of Republican dogma on taxes and health care, though he reverted to partisan form once in office. And the left and right alike have emphasized the GOP’s “populist” cast, for different reasons. The left has used Trump’s alleged populism to indict Democrats for their neoliberalism and timidity, while the right has utilized the theme to depict Democrats as elitists.

More recently, Republicans like Ron DeSantis have openly threatened corporations, contributing to the idea that they represent some philosophical break with its tradition of business regulation and low taxes for the rich.

There has been a change in the relationship between business and the GOP. But the change has little to do with policy. Republicans have come to feel threatened by the (still occasional) impulses by corporate America to endorse socially liberal or small-d democratic ideas: condemning racism, shunning members of Congress who refused to accept Trump’s election defeat, opposing restrictions on voting rights, and so on. The party’s response is to demand political allegiance in exchange for policy support. The policies themselves have not been revised.

I’ve seen a few news stories over the last few days that illuminate this relationship. One is a report in Axios that Kevin McCarthy has told U.S. Chamber of Commerce board members that “the organization must undertake a complete leadership change and replace current president and CEO Suzanne Clark.” This is occurring even though the Chamber is working to put Republicans in control of the House. McCarthy’s demand is that the Chamber go beyond mere support for his party and actually let Republicans run the operation from the inside.

“I’m a pro-business guy. I thought y’all used to represent small businesses across America,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise said. “Unfortunately, they’ve kind of veered away from that. We’re trying to try to get them to come back to their roots.”

A second story is a Politico report on Ron DeSantis’s fundraising operation. The Florida governor has amassed a staggering $200 million war chest, Hoovering up cash from wealthy Republicans across the country. This is one reason why I take DeSantis’s chances of defeating Donald Trump in the 2024 primary more seriously than most: He has unified the party’s donor class behind him like no candidate has since George W. Bush in the 2000 cycle.

Political reporting, as per its custom, presents this story in glowing terms — raising money is a marker of success and momentum. But it is also a sign that DeSantis is thoroughly aligned with the policy priorities of the party’s wealthy donors. Those fundraisers are venues for the candidate to privately convey his worldview and policy commitments, and to give the donors a privileged opportunity to make their case to him. We can be pretty confident that DeSantis is not using these transactions to tell his patrons that he’s bringing down the elites.

A final story is a Washington Post profile of Art Laffer, one of the most influential policy entrepreneurs in world history. Laffer played a key role in inventing supply-side economics, the doctrine that posits that upper-bracket tax rates have fantastically large effects on economic growth, to the point where cutting rates under existing conditions can be expected to actually increase revenue. Laffer’s most remarkable achievement is creating a kind of theological rubric to promote this idea even as world events have disproven it for more than 40 decades.

The Republican Establishment greeted Donald Trump’s rise with varying degrees of discomfort. But Laffer and the supply-siders embraced him wholeheartedly from the beginning and have never wavered. The Post asked Laffer if even the January 6 insurrection gave him pause. “I really don’t have enough information to make any type of judgments on that,” Laffer replied. On what? asked the Post. “Whether he stole the election, all this controversy, this brouhaha going on. And I don’t really find it interesting enough for me to want to delve into it.”

It would be far too reductive to suggest that the Republican Party’s authoritarian turn is driven by its plutocratic economic policy. But its opposition to redistribution is certainly one of the motivating forces. The idea that the right’s authoritarianism is “populist,” and somehow anti-plutocratic, is the opposite of reality. The two strands work closely together.

The legal case against Harvard’s affirmative-action policies creates an embarrassing problem for progressives: The policies entail systemic discrimination against Asian American applicants, who are treated systematically worse than members of any other group, including whites. The policy exposes a deeply uncomfortable fissure between the political themes preferred by the left, which treat people of color as a bloc with common interests, and a reality of an educational system in which Asian Americans outperform every other group on the aggregate.

There is a fascinating effort to resolve this tension. Columbia sociologist Jennifer Lee argues in the New York Times that, contrary to research finding that Asian American students perform better than other groups because their parents require them to put in more effort, their success is actually the product of favorable treatment by teachers. “K-12 teachers and schools may actually give Asian Americans a boost based on assumptions about race,” she argues. It is only fair colleges discriminate against Asian Americans in order to correct for the discrimination in their favor: “Race-conscious policies provide a mechanism to address this and other biases, and help level the field of opportunity for a diverse student body.”

The mechanism of this pro–Asian American bias, according to Lee, is that the stereotype of Asian American success causes teachers to assume Asian American students are bright and therefore place them in honors and Advanced Placement courses. This favorable treatment putatively gives Asian American students an advantage over whites or other groups.

I am not a sociologist, and I am not in any position to assess the validity of this finding. But I am extremely skeptical that it comes anywhere close to explaining Asian American overachievement, and I would be very surprised if this finding holds up over time.

First, this analysis fails to explain where the positive stereotype came from. It’s not like white Americans always considered Asian people to be smarter than them. Leading up to and in the opening stages of World War II, the United States and Britain consistently underestimated Japan’s military because they held racist assumptions that the Japanese were too dumb and backward to carry out sophisticated military operations. The idea that white Americans suddenly decided Asian people were not dumber but smarter, and then created an unequal environment that permitted Asian Americans to thrive, seems highly fanciful.

Second, if it is true that positive stereotypes are causing Asian American students to thrive, this finding would seem to have extremely important ramifications for American education policy. After all, the claim is that schools can yield enormous achievement gains merely by raising the standards and expectations of their students. It suggests they have found the academic Holy Grail. If people took this seriously, they would be looking to replicate the magic for other groups. Instead, this research is being used primarily for the single purpose of justifying discrimination against Asian American college applicants.

Despite my qualms, I support affirmative action. I sympathize with the agonizing position faced by supporters grappling with its trade-offs, including making Asian Americans bear a disproportionate share of the burden. The left’s impulse has been to deny this facet of the program, insisting discrimination against Asian Americans is a myth. The Harvard lawsuit has exposed the plain truth.

The temptation now will be to retreat to the defense outline by Lee: Okay, discrimination against Asian Americans is real, but it’s fair because it only offsets discrimination in their favor. The only people who are going to accept this logic are people absolutely desperate to avoid acknowledging a fissure in the progressive line. Most are going to find it an insult to our intelligence. Whatever position liberals find ourselves retreating to after the Supreme Court likely deals a fatal blow to affirmative action in admissions, it can’t be this.

Russia is an issue where the ideological spectrum is not so much a horseshoe as a closed loop where the left and right extremes are completely indistinguishable. David Bromwich, a left-wing literature professor, writes about Russia in the Nation, long a clearinghouse for the most credulous strains of Russophilic commentary.

Bromwich repeats the familiar claims about the war — Russia was provoked by the west, Ukraine is nationalistic and corrupt — before launching into a qualified defense of Putin’s regime. Bromwich considers it offensively wrong to describe Russia as “totalitarian”:

Do the people who call “Putin’s Russia” a totalitarian state affix any answerable meaning to the word “totalitarian”? Russia indeed has a heavy-handed authoritarian government whose censorship and obstruction of dissent have greatly increased since the start of the war. Even so, there have been protests inside Russia; the crowds have not been fired on, and most of the persons involved have not been arrested.

“Most of the persons involved have not been arrested” is a phrase that invites certain obvious questions, though Bromwich does not explore them. I would agree that the regime is not “totalitarian.” Its combination of media control, fantastical nationalism, genocidal rhetoric, war crimes, and terrorizing of critics with violence seems at least arguably fascist.

But Bromwich implies that Russia cannot be fascist, because it fought the Nazis in World War II:

Some 21 million Soviet citizens were killed in World War II, and — though we find the fact hard to acknowledge — the Soviet Union itself was responsible, more than any other country, for the victory over fascism. The journalists and professors who have called Russia a fascist country are playing a poisonous game with words.

This is Putin’s own justification — fascism by definition excludes Russian nationalists and therefore describes anybody they oppose. Poisonous word games, indeed!