THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

Hi there, here’s what you need to know for the week of February 24, 2023, in 10 minutes.

THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

① It may not seem like it in the news lull, but Republicans keep galloping toward the extreme

② Given their poor performance in elections, it's tempting to interpret this as the last gasp of a dying authoritarianism, and thus nothing to fear

③ On the other hand, have you ever seen a horror movie?! the presidential election is still a coin flip, which makes complacency about authoritarianism very risky

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FLOP CULTURE

It’s been a bad week for right-wing culture warriors. Bad in that their aggression and bad faith have failed to pay political dividends recently. And (I’d guess relatedly) in that their toxic internal culture has trained them to push ever rightward no matter what, admit no error, even when that entails embracing terrible extremism.  

On its face it might seem like this places Democrats in a strong “don’t interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake” position. But I want to stress test that assumption a bit.

① FOX HUNTING

You could see how the GOP’s rightward ratchet works in real time over the past several days. Last week, the lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems filed a motion for summary judgment in their defamation case against Fox News. That is, they asked the judge to find in their favor based on the overwhelming evidence they’ve amassed that Fox executives and the network’s highest-profile personalities knew they were lying when they promoted Donald Trump’s slanderous election-theft claims. 

Their findings are irrefutable. They obtained internal communications showing that all the key decision makers and hosts knew Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories were insane, but chose to fan them anyhow for fear of angering him, alienating their audience, and harming their business. Tucker Carlson in particular left a lengthy trail of evidence that he knew the truth, but nevertheless believed the network should lie. He even advocated for firing a Fox News correspondent who had the audacity to fact check Trump. Lies rewarded with money, truth punished by professional death.

We’ve been behind the scenes at Fox before. We’ve seen over and over how blurry the line is between them and the Republicans they seek to influence and promote. But we’ve never been offered such a damning view of how intentional their propaganda is, of how conscious they are of what they're doing. Their imperatives to appease Trump, help Republicans, and pander to their audience are cardinal, and will never give way to whatever remnant guilt any of them feel about lying. If an exposé of a major mainstream or liberal news outlet revealed corruption anywhere near this extensive, that outlet would be ruined. 

The powers that be on the right, by contrast, show no indication that they care in the slightest, or fear that they’ll suffer any meaningful consequences for embracing this kind of mass deception. Days after the depths of Carlson’s depravity were revealed (or confirmed, if you prefer) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy granted him exclusive access, over the long-stated objections of the Capitol Police, to all January 6, 2021, security-camera footage. Some 40,000 hours. 

I can’t think of a clearer way for McCarthy to admit that the unaired video is a political nullity. If it contained even a moment of exculpatory footage, McCarthy would’ve given it to almost anyone else, anyone with even a shred of credibility outside the walled garden of Fox News primetime. But he gave it to Carlson, this week of all weeks. It’s his way of saying Carlson’s still a proud member of his team, that he’s thrilled Carlson misled millions of Americans about the 2020 election, and that he’s happy to work with Carlson to sanitize the insurrection or make yet more Fox viewers think the insurrection was justified. 

Meanwhile, McCarthy’s most important ally in the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), outlined her vision for a red-state secession from the union, Trump is at the vanguard of a right-wing effort to portray the train derailment in East Palestine, OH, as part of a liberal war on white working-class people, and most of the party decided to attack Joe Biden for while he was visiting the war zone in Ukraine. Rightward, march.

② YOU OOZE, YOU LOSE

There are two main ways to look at all this. 

One is to observe that Republicans keep trying to turn everything into culture war, in increasingly contrived, confusing, and off-putting ways, and it keeps not working very well. In that light, you might see the last gasps of a dying authoritarianism. You might interpret it, a la Josh Barro, as yet more evidence that we’re “turn[ing] back the political clock to a more normal time, before Donald Trump made everything weird.”

Democrats fared extremely well in a handful of off-cycle elections this past Tuesday. A new Lake Research Partners report concludes that in the swingiest parts of the country where presidential elections are decided, a fairly standard Democratic economic message holds up better against Republican culture-war attacks than against a more old-school Republican economic message attacking Democrats over gas prices, inflation, deficits etc. 

This is all consistent with the picture that emerged in November, when there was more or less an inverse relationship between how closely swing-state Republicans were associated with Donald Trump and the right-wing culture war apparatus and how well they fared in their elections. MAGA got wiped out.

With all that as a backdrop, why not just let Republican agitprop run wild, let them make Marjorie Taylor Greene the face of the party’s future? Why not proceed as if the clock has already been wound back to 1996, stick stubbornly to the Social Security script Biden used a couple weeks ago in his State of the Union address, and enjoy the spoils?

It might work, but…

③ TOO MANY CROOKS

The other way to look at it is that national elections are still essentially coin flips, so it's extremely dangerous that one party is in the midst of a fasc attack.

One thing I found kind of amusing about the Lake Research study is that it tests two Republican messages (one economic, one culture-based) against a monolithic Democratic message that is naturally economic in nature. I don’t know if that simply a reflection of the party’s clear predilections (i.e. why bother testing a Democratic culture-war message when the party doesn’t run on culture wars) or of a methodological fallacy (since economic messages are obviously the most effective, we won’t waste our time testing other kinds). Either way it means we’re still flying a bit blind about what Democratic messages best answer Republican attacks. 

Except…I’m not sure that’s true. We have at least some reason to believe that broadly-appealing Democratic “culture war” attacks—that is, efforts to seize cultural high grounds of patriotism, ethics, equal rights, decency, etc. rather than left-wing cultural avant-gardism—are the most effective ones in the party’s arsenal. (cf. 2022)

By contrast, the track record of Mediscare-style economic appeals is mixed. What worked well for Bill Clinton nearly 30 years ago, and for Barack Obama when he had the good fortune of running against the austere Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan ticket, didn’t work so great for Democrats in 2010 and 2014, and if the lesson of 2022 for Republicans is that creating distance from Trump is good, and bog-standard economic attacks work better than culture-war attacks, then Democrats ought to be prepared for a fight in which Republicans apply those lessons. 

Political professionals generally agree that Republicans settled into this mode of picking culture-war fights about everything, hoping some go viral, because their economic agenda is so rigidly regressive and solicitous of the wealthy, they want to talk about anything else. And that in turn suggests Democrats should work assiduously to wrest national discourse back to the GOP economic agenda. I think that captures a real dynamic, but it’s not an iron law. Expecting rigid economic appeals to normie voters to work in all circumstances creates a single point of failure, which Republicans can attack by adjusting their own tactics and stated policies, or which animal spirits and saboteurs can attack by darkening the economic outlook between now and 2024.

The GOP is an institution purpose-built to abuse power to generate propaganda, in order to accumulate more power to generate yet more propaganda, and then to repeat the cycle until Republicans have accumulated enough power to legally strip rights from their political enemies and cut rich-people’s taxes. Ron DeSantis has traduced the first amendment in Florida, jailed innocent people for voting, and kidnapped migrants in other states to dump them thousands of miles away, and (for whatever it's worth 20 months out) he leads Joe Biden in most head-to-head polls for the presidency.

As McCarthy demonstrated this week, Republicans are in the process of abusing power to generate a fog of disinformation about what happened on January 6. Perhaps they think they can fight that issue to a draw, and perhaps they’re wrong about it, but if Republicans want to resurrect the national dialogue about the failed Trump coup, Democrats have a choice. They could cede the stage to Republicans, let them remind America about the attack on the Capitol, assuming everyone's views are already fixed. Or they could welcome Republicans to relitigate January 6 and be ready to win that fight all over again. 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seems to understand that there’s some tension here, and may be feeling out ways for Democrats to fuse economic and culture-war appeals. 

I’d only add that whatever approach he and the party settle on, they should keep in mind that while GOP culture-war attacks don’t always knock 'em dead with voters in survey and focus-group settings (or even at the ballot-box this week) they also don’t operate on that one, dumb channel alone. Fulminating about spy balloons and gas stoves might not be the GOP’s golden ticket to winning elections, but it does leave an imprint on the Democratic Party, which has been unable to rebuild its reputation in the heartland despite flooding the middle of the country with money and jobs and a manufacturing revival. That may have something to do with the fact that Republicans saturate those same regions with poisonous lies about Democrats, which Democrats often leave unrebutted. 

“Our brand is pretty damaged in these places,” warns the Lake Research report. Well, how do we think that happened?

In Ohio, Republicans capitalized on an information and messaging void to lay blame for the derailment and toxic pollution at the feet of Democrats who, we’re meant to believe, have turned their backs on white working-class communities like East Palestine. We can all soothe ourselves by assuming that this line of attack goes to far, particularly when Republicans lapse into alienating and dangerous race-war rhetoric. That it will backfire automatically. But it's a mistake to assume voters will get there on their own, without the help of Democratic culture warriors reminding them that these are liars and crooks, the worst people to listen to in the midst of a disaster; the worst people to darken the door of U.S. politics in our lifetimes. We may not be able to trust them to oversee Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. But that’s not just a matter of their policies being unappealing—it’s that they’re untrustworthy all the way down.

My hero/guru Theda Skocpol and I spoke for over an hour about modern Republican culture warring, its roots in the Tea Party era, and how Democrats can best counter it. She’s brilliant, and the whole conversation is worth your time (even if you think you’re really special).

Greg Sargent has a couple ideas about how Democrats can kick the legs out from under the Kevin McCarthy/Tucker Carlson insurrection revisionism specifically.

Also, another caveat. Democrats may be doing very well in special elections, and even midterm elections on their current course, but those are lower-turnout elections than presidential elections, and Democrats have underperformed the last two presidential elections, catastrophically so in 2016.

Read Jim Fallows on his old boss Jimmy Carter, now reaching the end of his life.

New York Times politics desk, at it again.

After visiting Kiev, Biden counterprogrammed a speech by Vladimir Putin in Moscow with a speech of his own in Warsaw. It created a contrast between high democratic ideals and solidarity on the one hand and Putin’s hatred of LGBT people and drag queens on the other. Almost like a microcosm of American politics, if Putin led the GOP, which…well…

The person helping House Republicans draw up a list of ransoms they can demand in exchange for letting the debt-limit hostage go is Donald Trump’s former OMB guy, a rightwing maniac who got up to his ears in the Ukraine shakedown, and now cheerleads Republican culture wars.

Imagine a couple conservative media impresarios, vibin’...

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