What Joe Manchin's Senate can deliver. By Matthew Yglesias.

What Joe Manchin's Senate can deliver. By Matthew Yglesias. 

A bigger deal than you might think. 

Matthew Yglesias. 

January 6, 2021. 

Happy Thursday, folks!

As I predicted in my predictions post, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both won their races for United States Senate in Georgia. These races are interesting on their own terms, most superficially for the weird role Ossoff has played in Trump-era politics but I think more fundamentally because of Warnock. For a long time in American politics, the view was that African-American candidates faced really big obstacles to winning in majority-white constituencies. In the post-Obama era, it’s time for Democrats to change their thinking on this. Black Democrats like Warnock (but also Obama and Cory Booker before him) are more likely than white ones to be rooted in institutions like churches that give them a better chance than white Dems of breaking out of the BA Bubble.

Just look at the patriotic framing (“… because this is America…”) that Warnock gave to his family story in this speech.

For future statewide candidates, I think Democrats should be searching for more Warnocks — people of color with working-class roots who deliver unifying messages and don’t call themselves socialists. This is the way.

But in policy terms, the big deal here is that Chuck Schumer is going to be majority leader and Joe Manchin is now going to be the pivotal senator.

One should temper one’s expectations in terms of what this means. Joe Biden is no Bernie Sanders, and Biden himself is well to Manchin’s left. One should also note that Nancy Pelosi’s majority in the House is very slim, and — like Schumer’s majority in the Senate — dependent on the votes of members representing districts Trump won. But I also think it’s easy to underrate how big a deal this is. Even a slim Senate majority ensures that Biden can staff up the government, lead an economic recovery, and make the GOP feel real pain by appointing non-conservative judges. There’s also scope for meaningful policy change via the reconciliation process that could improve the lives of millions.

A functioning federal government

I think this was the most underrated stakes of the Senate races in Georgia. The United States has not had the inauguration of a newly elected president paired with a Senate controlled by the opposition since 1989. That was centuries ago in terms of the development of partisan polarization, and even then it was a partial transition from Ronald Reagan to the Reagan Administration’s VP.

Staffing up in the face of a McConnell-led Senate would have been agonizing.

Even if you assume he’d want to project reasonableness and not just block literally everybody Biden put forward, his ability to control the floor would have meant anyone with the vaguest whiff of controversy around them would be blocked. Worse, any kind of noteworthy ambition in the administrative arena would end up getting litigated during the confirmation process, greatly reducing the scope of practical action.

And in a practical sense, the nature of the federal government is that large swathes of it involve agencies whose basic functioning Republicans don’t care about. US Attorney and DOD subcabinet nominations would move through the Senate, but at a snail’s pace, and you’d just never get time on the calendar to address the regulatory agencies.

A 51-50 Senate is sure to have some confirmation battles and some Biden nominations that won’t go through. But that happens with any presidency. Manchin can and will deliver a basically “normal” presidency in which jobs get filled and executive orders begin to flow.

The judiciary

Happenstance gave Donald Trump three Supreme Court appointments in a single four-year term, which is probably his biggest legacy. A 51-50 Senate is not going to expand the Supreme Court unless some kind of really wild rulings start happening.

But Trump also had a large influence on the federal district and appellate courts. This, though, is the kind of thing that swings back and forth. Right now, the active judges on federal appeals courts look like this:

Ronald Reagan: 6

George H.W. Bush: 5

Bill Clinton: 31

George W. Bush: 32

Barack Obama: 50

Donald Trump: 53

With the Senate in Democratic hands, those Clinton judges can safely retire and some number of the Reagan/Bush judges will probably end up stepping down.

A McConnell-led Senate would have simply blockaded all appointments here — he’s done it before and it’s seen as a big success on his part — so this makes a huge difference. I think it’s particularly important because we know the judiciary is very important to Republicans. As long as it looked like it would be easy to stop Biden from appointing judges, Republicans could shrug off the 2020 election result as no big deal. Being able to appoint judges changes that calculus. It alters policy on its own terms, but it also forces Republicans to consider trying to actually do better in the future.

Budget reconciliation

The Senate majority can pass a budget reconciliation bill. The rules governing exactly what can and can’t go into these things are complicated, but to oversimplify it a bit, you can do tax stuff, and you can alter existing programs and funding flows.

You can do the $2,000 checks this way, for example.

Just looking at things that Biden ran on, all of this should be eligible for reconciliation treatment:

I’m not sure that Manchin and other moderate Democrats would vote for all of this, but none of it is stuff that he’s ruled out or ideas that are obviously toxic in West Virginia, Montana, Arizona, or Georgia. Relative to some of the big ideas that have been discussed in left-wing intellectual circles, this stuff is maybe not so thrilling. But it would cut child poverty in half (pretty good!) and be a fairly transformative change to American education. Again, it’s less clear what will happen here than on the executive or judicial appointment fronts. But there’s no obvious red flags — I would strongly make the case to Manchin, Sinema, Tester, and others that they should sign onto these ideas with perhaps a small tweak or two to show clear wins for their home states.

The future of the filibuster

Manchin is stridently pro-filibuster, and other moderate and cross-pressured Democrats more quietly also favor the filibuster. They see it as largely protecting them from needing to take votes on controversial issues relating to immigration, gun control, and the environment where they fear a “yes” vote would kill them with their constituents but a “no” vote would so inflame the base as to make trouble.

On the other hand, Joe Manchin wants to raise the minimum wage, which you can’t do in a budget reconciliation bill.

And the debt ceiling is expiring in August, which also can’t be lifted in a reconciliation bill.

It’s not obvious to me what will happen here. Obviously, the best-case scenario for Manchin is that something like a dozen Republican senators agree to raise the federal minimum wage to something like $12, and then he gets to be a bipartisan dealmaker. But it’s easy to imagine Republicans blocking all action on a super popular $15/hour minimum wage bill that even the most conservative Democrats support. It’s also easy to imagine Republicans returning to their Obama-era hostage tactics with the debt ceiling. In either case, that starts to change the calculus for Manchin and other moderate members.

I don’t have a strong prediction of which way that will break, just a caution against taking other people’s strong predictions too seriously. There was very little support in the Democratic caucus for using the nuclear option on nominations until suddenly there was. I will say that if you do want to see filibuster reform happen, the best way to make it happen is for Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi to promise the red state Democrats that the issues they’re not comfortable with will stay off the legislative agenda.

Two years of success

This is in some ways the biggest thing.

To an unusual extent, Biden is taking office at a time where he has the wind at his back. The country is living through a very difficult moment. But the simple reality that the weather will be more pleasant in April than in January gives us a big leg up in terms of maintaining living standards in the face of the virus. And people are getting vaccinated. An additional vaccine candidate from Johnson & Johnson will hopefully become available in February.

Congress just passed a new round of stimulus, and the Senate now seems set to do a third round. The bond market is projecting good things for the economy in 2021. And as Paul Krugman explains, there’s lots of reasons to be optimistic about the post-virus economy. This is different from 2009 when foreclosures and debt overhangs crippled growth for years to come. The personal savings rate is unusually high, and folks have been paying off their credit card debts.

None of this is to minimize the pain millions of people have been living through (though the new bonus UI should help); it’s simply to say that the economy is poised to bounce back like a spring rather than stumble forward. Stock prices are up, home values are up, consumer debt is down, savings are up, and if it’s safe to travel and eat out and throw huge parties, people are going to do that stuff.

All these headwinds would be in place even if Mitch McConnell were majority leader. But I would constantly worry about sabotage potentially derailing them. Now, I don’t. I’m not sure what Senate Democrats will do, but they won’t do that. If you pair a growing economy with an improving public health situation, some historic reductions in poverty, and a basically functional government that’s able to press forward with environmental, labor, and civil rights regulations, that’s a formula for a pretty successful presidency.

Then the question becomes how badly do you get punished in the midterms? I think Democrat should take history seriously here (incumbent parties usually do badly) but not be fatalistic about it. “We’re going to get wiped out in the midterms” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as parties ignore public opinion. The upside of a constrained legislative majority is that Democrats should be largely unable to repeat the 2010/2018 cycle of overreach and backlash. But there is the risk of simply doing nothing and frustrating people. Democrats shouldn’t walk off any political cliffs, but they do need to be consistently delivering some things for people. Nothing is easy in politics, but I definitely think this is possible.

The Trouble with ‘Q’. By Sarah Posner.

Opinion | The Trouble with ‘Q’. By Sarah Posner.

In QAnon, anti-Semitism is rebooted for the 21st century.

January 5, 2021, BY SARAH POSNER

In her victory speech in August, after winning the Republican primary runoff for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, Marjorie Taylor Greene was obstreperous and foul-mouthed. Speaking from behind a podium bearing the slogan “Save America, Stop Socialism!” Greene, a political newcomer, accused “the fake news media, the DC swamp, the political establishment” of having “tried to take me out.” She called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a “bitch,” celebrated having “kicked” her opponent’s “ass,” and declared, “I will not apologize for my belief in God and being a Christian.”

To shouts of “Amen,” Greene added, “I will not apologize for standing up against George Soros and being willing to speak out against him, even when they want to call me an anti-Semite.”

Greene, who went on to win that House seat in the heavily Republican 14th District in November, was one of roughly two dozen congressional candidates in 2020 who had publicly supported at least some elements of QAnon, the viral conspiracy that claimed that a “Deep State cabal” of Satan-worshipping, bloodthirsty pedophiles, in league with other “elites” in media, politics and entertainment, were plotting a coup against President Trump and “stealing” the election from him. The outlandish theory, first launched on a far-right message board in 2017, morphed and mutated in its details as it careened across social media—to Trump rallies, congressional campaigns and evangelical churches. It has continued to do so, with some contortions, since his defeat. But one feature remains constant: its dependence on centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes, including the blood libel, and the pliable, persistent falsehood that Jews secretly and nefariously control politics, finance and the media in a rapacious quest for world domination.

When “Q” increasingly drew headlines in 2019 and 2020, I wondered what was so new. To me, it felt as if every component was something I had seen in alt-right and Christian-right social media over the past several years of covering Trump’s 2016 campaign and presidency. I had often found that conspiracy theories made a jump, like a mutating virus, from alt-right to Christian-right social media, or that some tropes, like the demonization of Soros, were shared widely across these worlds.

At the height (up to that point) of the 2020 QAnon mania, I revisited a 2016 interview I had conducted with Nathanael Strickland, who identifies with the racist and anti-Semitic “Kinist” movement that roots its support for white supremacy in biblical texts. Discussing the election, Strickland brought up “the Jewish cabal holding the reins of the American political establishment” and said Trump’s victory had kept “a group of pedophile Satanists” out of the White House.

The anonymous “Q” did not post his or her or their first missive until nearly a year later. But Q is recycling deeply familiar tropes, long known to have resonance on the American right. It is not new—and that’s what makes it even more dangerous.

Soros, for instance, is often at the center of QAnon delusions. But he has also been perpetually demonized as a purveyor of socialism, a secret funder of Antifa and a promoter of “gender ideology,” a derogatory term used by Christian nationalists to claim that a powerful anti-Christian movement aims to impose feminism and LGBTQ equality on unwilling traditionalists. To defend their smearing of Soros, many on the right layer yet another conspiracy theory on top of these: that while a teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary, Soros collaborated with the Nazis. In reality, his family took great risks to help other Jews.

The contemporary conspiracists who would have their followers believe the preposterous idea that Soros was a Nazi collaborator are actually parroting conspiracy theories long perpetuated by Nazis and other anti-Semites. These theories conflate socialism, “cultural Marxism” and Judaism and depict them as a global plot to subvert tradition, corrupt the family and attack Christianity. That American conservatives target Soros for his work promoting human rights and civil society—and depict it as “socialism” from which America must be “saved”—lays bare their anti-democratic ambitions.

Despite Trump’s repeated endorsement of QAnon, including hailing its adherents as “people that love our country,” only two of those Q-supporting candidates, Greene and Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, won their 2020 congressional races. Yet any sigh of relief that the QAnon freshman class consists of two rather than dozens is premature. This 21st-century anti-Semitism reboot, packaged for the personality cult of Donald Trump, is not merely a symptom of Trump’s ruinous presidency that will fade once he is out of office. It is also a flashing red warning of how deeply ingrained anti-Semitic conspiracy theories remain, and how easily malicious actors can incite hate and even, in an alarmingly growing trend, terroristic violence. Just as anti-Semitism has been throughout the centuries, this latest reboot is a mortal danger to Jews and an existential threat to human rights and democracy.

Sarah Posner is the author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump.

Opening picture: The QAnon symbol and motto: “Where we go one, we go all.” (Photo credit: Wikimedia)

Moment Magazine participates in the Amazon Associates program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

 

This is a Big, Big, Big Deal. By Josh Marshall.

This is a Big, Big, Big Deal. By Josh Marshall.

TPM

January 6, 2021 1:23 a.m.

I probably don’t have to tell you to be excited about the results out of Georgia tonight where it seems highly likely that the the Democrats picked up both Senate seats and thus took control of the Senate. You don’t need me to tell you about the historic nature of Raphael Warnock’s victory. But the consequences of these victories is likely even greater than many realize.

This doesn’t change the legislative calculus. Major progressive legislation seems highly unlikely in the next two years. We’re not going to be able to expand the Court. But it accomplishes two critical things. First, it allows Joe Biden to assemble a government. I think people have been underestimating the likelihood that a Republican senate would simply refuse to confirm major Biden appointees, forcing the President to try to wing stuff together with recess and vacancies act appointments that would themselves become tied up in the courts. It now seems clear that Biden will be able to have his choice of any reasonable appointee for all the big positions. This is especially critical in places like the Justice Department but frankly everywhere else as well.

This is a huge, huge deal. We were looking at a situation in which it was quite likely that, in effect, Biden would need to barter with Mitch McConnell simply to be able to be President.

I hear a lot about Joe Manchin now calling the shots in the Senate. That may be true to a degree – though I think a more accurate balance of power will rest with 6-8 senators from both parties – Manchin, Romney, Collins, Murkowski, perhaps Sinema, et al. But again, this kind of misses the point. Mitch McConnell barely did anything legislatively during his six years at the helm. His mastery and control was simply in controlling the calendar. Republicans could hide from major issues because they were simply never allowed to come up.

Democrats won’t be able to dictate legislation. But they’ll be able to control the questions, the discussion. Want a vote on $2,000 checks? You can have the vote. In that case, I think they’ll get that. But even if it’s a case where you don’t win the vote, you get to have a vote. You get to force everyone on the record about where they stand. If you need to do some technical fix of some aspect of Obamacare because of Court meddling? No problem. You can hold that vote and you’ll probably win it. McConnell’s masterful control of the Senate calendar has allowed Republican senators to hide from taking positions on many of the critical issues of the day. Nothing even gets a vote unless Mitch McConnell decides it advantages the Republican party. Wielding this power McConnell could disable the government and then have members of his caucus run on its failures.

That stranglehold is over.

Quite simply, these victories allow Joe Biden to actually be President, as opposed to spending two years being Merick Garlanded by Mitch McConnell. It changes everything.

Which Side Are You On? By Josh Marshall

Which Side Are You On? By Josh Marshall

January 5, 2021 2:59 p.m.

We know from past experience that Republicans will try to repurpose their election fraud charade as the rationale for new voting restrictions. Many non-Republicans are looking at this ghastly carnival and simply being thankful that it will almost certainly fail in its goal of giving President Trump a second term in office. But this is a dangerous and misguided complacency. It’s one that will further endanger the country down the road, not only in additional voter suppression laws but in the danger of repeats and possibly successful repeats of what is happening now.

To put it simply, this will create a new reality in which this episode lives on not as a shameful, discrediting episode but as a grievance and rallying cry on the right with no counterforce opposing it. We absolutely have to avoid this.

How do you do that?

No one should see this as done because it doesn’t work now. And simply being mad about it doesn’t count. It will take funding and disciplined action over months and years, labeling everyone who has participated in this outrage as supporting a coup, attacking the constitution and the republic itself. There should be no context in which political leaders speak the name of a Ted Cruz or a Josh Hawley and not repeat that they were men who supported President Trump’s failed coup. They attacked the American republic and for self-serving reasons.

Some rich person or well-funded group should step forward to fund bar disciplinary actions against all the lawyers who have participated in this. In a democracy the highest law is that the people shall rule. These men and women have misled the public with what they know are lies. Again and again. In many cases they’ve brought knowingly fraudulent claims into courts or tried to stymie or overturn an election with frivolous claims. All of these actions merit disbarment.

Will people be disbarred? I have no idea and that doesn’t really matter. Spending years defending your right to practice law has a deterrent effect in itself. And if they should be disbarred it is wrong not to try to disbar them because not doing so undermines the premise that it should happen in the first place.

This is incredibly important.

Next, at the federal and state level Democrats and anyone who defends democracy should be working to pass laws that prevent something like this from ever happening again. It is admittedly challenging to devise new laws when the problem to be addressed is people ignoring the law in the first place. But again, this misses the point. Laws are norm-setting. They put the public on the record about what is right and wrong. Roll calls also make clear which side people are on.

This is incredibly important.

We are witnessing one of the greatest challenges and attacks on the American republic in the country’s history. Like antibodies swarming an invading pathogen we should all be acting on multiple fronts to beat back this threat. And that effort does not remotely end when Donald Trump leaves office in two weeks.

Everyone who has participated in this attempted coup should be written out of public life forever. Doing so will be difficult and not even possible as long as a big minority of the country supports these actions. But by not trying, by not doing the work on every front, you undermine the very premise that they did anything wrong. You become complicit in the offense.

Republicans' unhinged moderation. By Matthew Yglesias.

Republicans' unhinged moderation. By Matthew Yglesias. 

January 5, 2021. 

Slow Boring.com. 

A few self-promotional notes! You can see my Bloomberg column about how Secretary Mayor Pete can avert the looming mass transit crisis, read a brief plug for One Billion Americans in the NYT’s 74 favorite facts of 2020, or listen to me talk on the Strong Towns podcast. And, of course, you can spread the Slow Boring love by sharing this post.

But on to the main event: watching Donald Trump’s conduct in office and especially his conduct — and that of a substantial number of his co-partisans — since the election, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Republican Party has become a dangerous authoritarian movement.

And yet.

Sixteen years ago, when I was young and the blogosphere was in its heyday, the two biggest domestic issues in the country were same-sex marriage and privatization of Social Security.

Marriage equality was unpopular. So unpopular that nobody of consequence in Democratic Party politics would endorse it. But despite its unpopularity and the lack of practical political momentum behind it, Republicans were using it as a wedge issue by campaigning on the need to amend the US Constitution (and various state constitutions) to clarify that marriage is between a man and a woman. On Social Security, the recently re-elected George W. Bush was preparing a big push for privatization. At the time, moderate Democrats generally agreed on the need for Social Security cuts but mostly didn’t favor privatization, while liberals hoped moderates would pipe down for a few months to make space for the party to coalesce around criticism of privatization.

Mike Pence and Paul Ryan during this period were pitching a plan that was more right-wing than the Bush plan.

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Today’s Republicans seem much nuttier than the Republicans of that era. They are led by Donald Trump, for starters, a corrupt clown who’s abjectly unfit for office. More than a dozen GOP senators are lining up behind Trump’s effort to declare the election fraudulent and have the results somehow tossed out. A phone call released over the weekend shows Trump nakedly asking Georgia elected officials to help him steal the election. Strikingly, the group backing Trump is disproportionately composed of newer members of the GOP caucus suggesting that Trump-esque nuttery has the wind at its back. And people who embrace loonier stuff than Trump like out-and-out Q people are coming.

Republicans, in other words, have become much more unhinged. More conspiratorial, more unethical, more flagrantly dishonest (remember how much effort Bush would put into crafting slippery and misleading rhetoric that met the standard of technical accuracy?), and more potentially damaging to the basic foundations of the Republic.

At the same time, if you compare the current situation to the winter after Bush’s reelection — or even the winter after the 2010 GOP midterm sweep or the winter after Trump’s surprising win in 2016 — Republicans have clearly moved to the center on concrete policy issues.

The GOP has moved to the center

Chris Hayes did a couple of tweets a little while back that I think capture the weirdness of assessing the contemporary GOP.

His point is basically that they are intellectually bankrupt:

And I think that’s about right. Despite the various noises about creating a “pro-worker” or “populist” strain of conservative politics, it’s gotten nowhere in practice, just as the overhyped “reformocon” movement didn’t amount to anything.

But Republicans really have changed — they’ve dropped their policy ambitions.

You can see that in reactions to the election. Democrats felt crestfallen about capturing the White House and holding the House with a narrowed majority. That’s because even a moderate Democrat like Joe Biden actually has a pretty ambitious policy agenda that seems largely dead even if Democrats do manage to pull off wins in the Georgia Senate races. Conversely, Republicans have done almost no recriminations because there’s no policy agenda they’re particularly excited about. Gridlock is good enough for a party that’s given up.

Republicans dropped privatizing Social Security a while ago.

As recently as 10 years ago, the GOP was fighting against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal — today they’ve given up on marriage and are fighting about trans rights questions that weren’t on the policy agenda at all in the recent past.

As of the Obama/Trump lame-duck period, Paul Ryan was still trying to push his plan to privatize Medicare. Trump mostly let Congressional Republicans roll him on policy, but this got nowhere.

Republicans never officially admitted that they’d given up on repealing Obamacare, but during Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings, we all learned that conservatives regard it as a slander to accuse Republican lawyers of believing their own legal theory that was supposed to get it repealed. Now, nobody thinks the Court will toss the law even with a 6-3 GOP majority.

The CARES Act was much larger than the Obama-era stimulus bill, which you could chalk up to pure partisanship since Trump was president, but the lame duck stimulus bill that will mostly benefit Joe Biden was nearly as big as ARRA.

A pretty exciting bipartisan energy bill passed as part of the omnibus. This is perhaps the clearest sign of the “unhinged moderation” phenomenon, as Trump is an outright climate denier in a way that Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney never were, but the actual policy is more supportive of zero-carbon energy.

Republicans had these big plans to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, but it never got taken up in the Senate and, after 2017, never got mentioned again.

Ryan, again, had an ambitious policy vision that Dylan Matthews memorably dubbed a “war on the poor.” A somewhat watered-down version of this came up in the House as Welfare Reform 2.0, but like Dodd-Frank repeal, Mitch McConnell never took it up, and we haven’t heard anything about this in years.

I don’t want to overstate the case here. The Trump administration still did a million things with work requirements and other administrative burdens to make the welfare state stingier. Trump decided somewhat arbitrarily that SSDI isn’t really part of Social Security and did try to cut that. Republicans almost repealed the Affordable Care Act. Trump did a lot of terrible things on air pollution.

And last, but by no means least, it’s certainly possible that 98 percent of Congressional Republicans still agree with 98 percent of Paul Ryan’s ideas, and if they win power they will implement all that stuff. Certainly that’s the argument I would make if I were running a campaign against one of them, and I think an informed citizen should worry about that unless or until that agenda gets explicitly disavowed.

But Chris’ point in his tweet is right: if you go by publicly available information, there is no big conservative policy agenda.

Then, of course, there’s immigration.

The immigration exception

What’s true is that Trump and the whole Trump-era GOP are well to the right of Bush or John McCain on immigration.

But it’s worth having some perspective here; Bush and McCain were always Republican outliers on this. Indeed, the majority of Congressional Republicans felt so strongly about being tough on immigration that they bucked Bush on comprehensive immigration reform in 2007. We know that partisanship and presidential leadership are big forces in politics (look how Republicans lined up behind Trump), but anti-immigration sentiment was so deep in the GOP that Bush couldn’t override it.

And both parties were more divided on this topic in the past. Here’s Bernie Sanders going on Lou Dobbs’ show to complain about the immigration reform bill.

Three Senate Republicans voted for the DREAM Act in 2010, but it didn’t pass because Democrats Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Kay Hagan, and Mark Pryor all opposed it.

What you have today is a Republican Party that is uniformly hostile to immigration in a way that the GOP of 16 years ago was not, met by a Democratic Party that’s uniformly friendly to it. But Trump-style views were already the GOP mainstream at that time. Back in 1996, Bob Dole was pushing to ban the children of undocumented immigrants from attending public school — something that I believe was discussed in the Trump White House but dismissed as too extreme.

So I think the basic point holds. There’s a set of issues including immigration, abortion, and gun regulation where the 2020 GOP is uniformly conservative in a way that the 2005 GOP was not (and by the same token, the Democrats have gotten more uniformly liberal). But the party has not actually moved right on those topics; it’s just gotten more unified, while it has moved left on LGBT issues and considerably reduced its ambition on reducing the size and scope of the welfare state.

The big problem is that they’re totally nuts.

The rise of the Banana Republicans

Current conservative opinion on the “stop the theft” stuff contains a broad spectrum ranging from sincere enthusiasts to the people at National Review who are doing a good job of pushing back.

But you can see in Newsmax gaining market share relative to Fox by embracing more conspiracy theories that there is actually limited scope for any individual to make a difference here. And the Congressional Republicans backing Trump most loudly are clearly the ones with the future on their side. That’s been the case throughout Trump’s presidency, where criticism of him has normally come from people like Jeff Flake or Bob Corker who are on their way out the door or the current Reasonable Troika of Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, and Susan Collins, none of whom have any down-the-road political ambitions.

This is, I think, a secondary consequence of polarization along the lines of education, trust, and openness. Conspiratorial-minded people used to be more evenly distributed between the parties and so were high-minded proceduralists. But just as Democrats now do better in favored quarter suburbs and worse in rural areas, they do better with process enthusiasts and worse with conspiratorial people. So it’s now a bit of a self-propelling machine that could easily end up in a very scary place if the dice land in just the right way.

At the same time, I do want to keep in mind the considerations I offered in “How To Be Less Full of Shit.” I see a lot of people “predicting” future GOP election theft or a slip back into a Jim Crow-esque collapse of democracy primarily as a way of expressing the normative view that what Republicans are doing is bad.

I don’t think I have a strong view as to how likely a GOP election theft in the near future is. But consider these two possible scenarios for 2024:

Despite a clear Electoral College win for Joe Biden, GOP officials in Congress and state legislatures steal the election for Don Junior.

Instead of getting 47 percent of the vote, Don Junior gets 48 percent of the vote which lets him win Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania and therefore the election.

The banal scenario where Republicans once again gain power while Democrats win the most votes seems a lot more likely to me. And in 2024, Democrats will be defending Senate seats in West Virginia, Ohio, and Montana that they would all likely lose in that scenario, along with at least one or two of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada. And since Republicans will get to re-optimize their gerrymanders after the Census, instead of the current narrow Democratic majority, you’d get a GOP House on that vote, too.

This is the paradox of the moment. The GOP’s double movement would actually make sense for the Democratic Party: with the Senate map and various gerrymanders skewed so heavily against Democrats, it would make sense for the party to give up on some of its more controversial policy ideas, and it would also make sense for the party’s base to adopt some of the attributes of an insurrectionary, anti-institutional movement since it is consistently receiving more votes without gaining power. But instead, we’ve seen this sort of behavior from the party that’s advantaged by all the unfair aspects of the system.

Can this really last?

The big question about all of this: how real is it?

Conservatives don’t seem to enjoy hashing out big tactical and strategic arguments in the media the same way liberals do, and conservative media mostly focuses on owning the libs rather than internecine fighting. So has the right really given up on slashing Medicaid, privatizing Medicare, and strangling SNAP and other welfare state programs or have they just stopped talking about it?

Not talking about it turns out to be a really good political strategy. But what we saw in 2018 is that you can’t enact major legislation without people noticing and it getting talked about a lot, and even a distinctly watered-down version of the Ryan agenda led to a Democratic landslide in 2018. What we saw in 2020 is that the electorate has the memory of a slug, and if you want to suddenly stop talking about something and start saying you love pre-existing conditions protections, lots of people are happy to believe you.

If Republicans do win in 2024 and then manage to govern the way they talk — lots of culture war trolling and pro-cop stuff, minimal changes on the economy — that could really usher in a very new era of American politics, one the GOP will probably dominate, but in which economic policy might become much more interventionist over time. Alternatively, if it just turns into 2017 all over again but without John McCain to save them from themselves, then that would shake up the culture war dividing lines of American politics in a much bigger way than the 2018 midterms, likely leading to even larger Democratic victories. It’s really not clear to me which direction conservatives are thinking of heading in or even where the discussions are taking place. But either way, if you want to understand the current state of American politics, you can’t just focus on the loopy aspects of the rising trends in the GOP — you need to note the simultaneous backing away from the economic policy ideas that held sway in the aughts.

The truth about immigration and wages. By Matthew Yglesias

The truth about immigration and wages. By Matthew Yglesias

A pernicious distraction from the need for fiscal & monetary policy to generate full employment

Matthew Yglesias

Slow Boring.com

January 4, 2021.

Happy New Year!

Two issues that I am passionate about are the merits of immigration to building American prosperity and national power, and the importance of full employment to building worker power and driving economic progress. Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney aid who is perhaps the leading light of ongoing efforts to construct some kind of actual coherent policy framework around the vague impulses of Donald Trump, says that these two goals are in massive tension and you can’t have tight labor markets and loose borders at the same time.

When I saw his headline my first instinct was to reach for the truckload of academic research disputing this and showing that immigration has either zero or benign impacts on the wages of native workers.

If you read the article, though, you’ll see that Cass is aware this literature exists and just doesn’t care:

The empirical case for the “nothing to see here” approach to immigration economics is paper thin; one can typically guess where the hyperlinks will point before moving the cursor to them. Academics debate endlessly whether a sudden and massive influx of Cuban refugees in Miami in 1980 did or did not depress local wages, as if this deeply unnatural “natural experiment” answers for all times and places the question of how a national economy’s labor market might be affected by the rate at which a given class of workers flows into it.

Instead, he prefers to cite three journalistic accounts:

A Washington Post article arguing that Mexican-born workers returning to Mexico from the United States would likely lower wages in the Mexican automobile industry.

A Wall Street Journal article detailing that in Arizona “wages on farms and in construction jumped 10 percent to 15 percent in just four years” after a crackdown on undocumented workers.

An Economist article which observed that “average wages in occupations that rely heavily on immigrant labor rose especially fast during the Trump years.”

Preferring journalistic arguments to academic ones is a bit odd, and if you’re curious about the relevant academic literature, Noah Smith has produced a wonderful compendium of studies, the vast majority of which are not focused on the Mariel Boatlift (the “deeply unnatural ‘natural experiment’” that Cass mentions). I’d also say that some of these stories don’t seem to be specified correctly. In most cases, an undocumented worker is going to earn less than one with papers, so if you remove the undocumented workers from the labor force, you mechanically push up the average wages without anyone actually benefitting — it’s a pure compositional effect.

But setting that aside, everyone can be right here. The idea that immigration restrictions can increase relative wages in immigrant-heavy occupations is not the same as saying that they can increase overall wages and incomes — relative wages will go down elsewhere as the economy adjusts — and understanding the difference is critical.

Smith says he knows he’s not going to convince anyone about this because people who oppose immigration are going to oppose it anyway. I am not so pessimistic. I don’t think I will convince immigration skeptics to love immigrants, but I really do want to convince them to abandon this particular reason, because I think it’s important to understand that if you want to advance the specific goal of tight labor markets, then you need to look to macroeconomic policy.

If you want to reduce immigration for some other reason, then that’s fine. But don’t expect it to fix the national labor market.

The Trump wage boom is easy to explain

Both Cass and The Economist want to get rhetorical plausibility for their argument by noting that we elected an anti-immigration president and then wage growth went up, so wouldn’t it be weird to deny the existence of a relationship?

That seems to me to posit a mystery where none exists.

Back in 2014, 2015, and 2016, my view was that there was plenty of slack left in the American labor market and it was a mistake to be talking about tighter fiscal and monetary policy. Donald Trump got elected, and then starting right away he implemented the following policy framework:

Taxes went down thanks to TCJA.

He boosted military spending, and in order to get that done in Congress, he also agreed to Democratic calls for higher domestic spending.

Spending on Social Security and Medicare kept rising due to population aging.

He spent a lot of time leaning on the Fed for low interest rates.

There are only three things that could possibly have resulted from that combination of policies.

I was right all along and more stimulus would lead to higher incomes.

The people who thought we were at full employment in 2016 were right and more stimulus would lead to inflation.

Trump’s policies made the economy more efficient in a way that allowed for non-inflationary growth.

Two is simply refuted by the facts. Three seems absurd to me, but that hypothesis is contrary to the immigration answer. The obviously correct answer is one: wage growth accelerated under Trump because he took office with the labor market still depressed, and he delivered massive and welcome fiscal stimulus while minimizing the monetary policy offset.

That’s really my main interest in this. If future Republican presidents want to copy Trump’s immigration policy for whatever reason, then it is crucially important that conservative policy hands not delude them into believing that doing so will reproduce Trump’s macroeconomic results. If you want to replicate Trump’s macroeconomic results, you need to replicate his macroeconomic policies — stimulus, stimulus, stimulus.

So what about Cass’s examples?

Relative vs absolute wages

Christian Dustmann has a good, fairly technical paper explaining that the main reason empirical studies of immigration seem to reach different results is that they are actually measuring different things.

One of my favorite recent studies came when Giovanni Peri, Derek Rury, and Justin Wiltshire looked at a huge influx of Puerto Ricans to the Orlando area after Hurricane Maria. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants per se but the economic impacts are similar. They found that the overall impact on the wages of low-skill people in the Orlando area was positive, but the increased demand raised wages in the retail and hospitality sectors by more than the increased supply of labor lowered wages in the construction sector.

Note that if you sent a reporter to construction sites to ask what’s happening with migration and wages, you would have gotten Cass’s story — a large share of the migrants went to work in construction and it depressed wages.

So if our policy goal was to maximize the wages of Orlando-area construction workers we definitely should not have let the Puerto Ricans come. But if we wanted to maximize the overall prosperity of Orlando, the new arrivals were fine. It’s a relative shift between sectors.

Now shifting wages between sectors is a thing that one might want to do. Cass flags a story indicating that Arizona agricultural wages went up when they cracked down on unauthorized workers. The United States also has a large legal guest worker program for the agricultural sector. If we want to raise the relative wages of fruit and vegetable pickers, we could absolutely try to end that program and invest in enforcement to ensure that the guest workers aren’t replaced by unauthorized workers. But what would happen if we did that? Some combination of the following:

Michael Clemens found that when we tried this in the 1960s, we got less produce variety and lower produce quality as farmers shifted to crops that can be harvested by machines.

We could import more food from abroad, worsening America’s terms of trade and slightly depressing living standards.

We could have inflation, worsening America’s real wages and slightly depressing living standards.

The Fed could offset the inflationary implications with slightly tighter monetary policy, slightly slacker labor markets elsewhere in the economy — again, slightly depressing living standards.

The exact results are a little bit hard to predict because there are so many possible margins of adjustment. But none of them lead to an outcome where the United States employs a large number of people as well-paid fruit and vegetable pickers. If we really want that outcome, however, we could do the following:

Ban the use of immigrant labor in fruit and vegetable picking.

Place high tariffs on important fruit and vegetables to prevent the substitution of foreign produce.

Place regulatory constraints on mechanization.

Add in subsidies so that producers can afford to keep prices low despite high costs.

At that point, the question becomes: what’s the point? Why are we deliberately making it expensive to harvest produce, denying people cheaper foreign-grown produce, and then subsidizing consumption because we don’t want everyone to go hungry? Wouldn’t it be better to let immigrants take jobs they deem desirable, let people buy foreign fruit if they want, and invest our money in a universal welfare state to take care of people?

The goal for native-born workers should be to help everyone who wants one get a well-paying job in a high-productivity sector, not to create a crazy mishmash of subsidies and regulations with highly uncertain secondary impacts.

Labor market complementarities

I think it’s pretty uncontroversial to say that if you kicked out all the immigrant nannies and childcare workers, the average wages for nannies and childcare workers would rise.

If you’re in love with anecdotes about sector-specific wage shifts and wholly neglect the interest of immigrants themselves, that can sound good. But of course one person’s wage is another person’s price. And is there really anyone in America who thinks that child care is too affordable right now?

Patricia Cortés and José Tessada find that when more immigrant labor is available, child care is cheaper and college-educated women are able to do more market work.

Delia Furtado confirms the finding about market work but also finds that women have more children in the presence of more affordable child care.

Peri, Agnese Romiti, and Maria Christina Rossi have a parallel finding about immigrants relieving women of some of the burden of eldercare.

The point in all these cases is the same: cutting off the flow of immigrant workers to a given sector can raise pay in that sector, but that ends up raising costs in ways that ripple throughout the economy.

In general, the economic case against immigration involves forgetting that immigrants buy things that native-born people make while also forgetting that native-born people buy things that immigrants make. Preventing these transactions is a lose-lose proposition for both immigrants and natives.

Two important caveats

One thing to note here is that while the case that immigration imposes economic costs on natives is weak, the case that immigration imposes economic costs on other immigrants is strong. Curtailing immigration raises wages in immigrant-heavy sectors, which is bad for (most) natives because natives (mostly) do not work in immigrant-heavy sectors — it simply raises costs for natives.

But immigrants do work in immigrant-heavy sectors so you can benefit them by curtailing flows.

I think this is relevant to refugee policy in particular. More so than other immigrant groups, refugees tend to struggle economically in the United States since they are essentially selected for being hard-luck cases rather than for being go-getters who decide to travel vast distances in search of opportunity. Under the circumstances, I do think it makes sense to worry that having too many refugees — especially refugees from the same country — all living in the same place is going to create a problem for the refugees themselves. You want there to be enough people from Country X living in City Y to have a meaningful community, but it’s not in the interest of the Xs themselves for that community to grow without limit.

The other is that the situation which developed in the late-1990s and early-aughts in which you had a huge number of unauthorized workers permanently relocate to the United States did have a number of genuinely undesirable economic effects. Labor law is supposed to be largely self-enforcing; the idea is that workers themselves have a strong incentive to report violations of minimum wage or overtime rules. But if you have a bunch of workers who lack legal rights, that’s a problem.

To the extent that by “loose borders,” people mean a literal lack of border controls, I agree that loose borders undermine worker power. It is good that the Obama and Trump administrations managed to cut down on this considerably.

But a really good way to further reduce the number of illicit workers in the United States is to ensure that there are pathways for foreign-born people to come work here legally. That includes legal status and a path to citizenship for the long-settled undocumented population.

Whatever we do about immigrants, we need full employment

I don’t think that this will change anyone’s mind about immigration.

What’s more, since there is a segment of the electorate that has an objection to immigration that one could kindly characterize as aesthetic (or one could find a less kind word), there will always be politicians who want to cater to those voters and policy advisors who give them policy reasons to support the conclusion they favor.

All that I really ask is you pick a different reason.

Worry about the fiscal impact on states and cities. Worry about the long-term impact on crime. Worry about something vague like “social cohesion” or “trust.”

Just don’t convince yourself that immigration restrictions are an effective means of creating tight labor markets. It’s not true empirically, and it doesn’t make sense theoretically. Fiscal and monetary policy decide whether we have a robust drive for full employment. Trying to use immigration policy to trick central bankers into allowing a tighter labor market than they’d naturally be inclined to favor is ridiculous. You need to put central bankers in place who embrace tight labor markets. And you need to support them with fiscal policy.

The Trump administration’s greatest policy triumph is that they more or less accomplished this by the winter of 2019-2020, and we need to move aggressively in the spring and summer of 2021 to get that back. People are going to keep disagreeing about immigration policy for both good and bad reasons. But whatever you make of it, don’t delude yourself into thinking that it’s an alternative to good macroeconomic policy.

93

200

← Previous

Write a comment…

JW in GB10 hr ago

Pro-immigration (and pro-trade) lefties are overly fond of using counterfactuals to dismiss real economic pain for some lower-income people. Yes, if we had the Danish welfare state and rational macroeconomic policy aimed at full employment, much of the economic downside of immigration (or trade) for some low-wage native workers could be reduced. But we don't have those things, and we won't anytime soon. Fifty years ago, unionized white dudes slaughtered cows for a living in my Midwestern town for middle-class wages. Now the (largely) non-unionized workforces at those slaughterhouses make poverty wages and are largely Hispanic. If my dad were one of those dudes, I might have non-racist reasons to be upset with the change in the local political economy, although this change might also have made me more racist and more receptive to racist politicians. The argument that beef is now marginally cheaper probably wouldn't matter a lot to me, even if the economy is better off as a whole. Concentrated and visible pain and diffuse and invisible gain make for tough politics.

 5Reply

8 replies by Matthew Yglesias and others

Josh H8 hr ago

This is a good piece, but I think it leaves out one important piece: the medium (say, 2-3 generations down the road) and longer run. Focusing on the short-term effects of what happens when Puerto Rican’s come to Orlando is somewhat myopic imo. But... politically it’s not! The reality is after 50+ years or so these people and their children’s children assimilate into different types of careers and lifestyles. That’s relevant though a harder sell now.

 1Reply

1 reply by Matthew Yglesias

198 more comments…

© 2021 Matthew Yglesias. See privacy, terms and information collection notice

Publish on Substack

The year everything changed, and nothing did. By Julia Azari

The year everything changed, and nothing did. By Julia Azari

Mischiefs of Faction

January 2, 2021

In 2020, the year in review genre feels especially challenging and fraught, with high stakes for being either too depressing or too glib. And just as we’re only beginning to contend with the consequences of the year’s events for society, culture, education, commerce – it’s obviously very early to assess the impact its politics. Nevertheless, I want to return to a theme that I’ve observed throughout the past four years: the combination of deeply abnormal and unsettling politics alongside the stability, and even stagnation, of political institutions and behavior.

Historically minded scholars of institutions and policy have some words for this (here’s a nice primer). We have “drift” – in which a policy or institution stays the same, but changing context means that it has a different impact or function than initially intended. There’s also “conversion,” in which policies and institutions are “redirected” to new ends. Some of the examples I discuss here probably fit into one of those categories, others might not. But these ideas provide a useful framework for thinking about how much our institutions can change while the rules remain in place and the usual political forces hold the levers of power in place.

From federalism to fracturing

Federalism took on new meaning almost immediately in the Trump administration, becoming a source of progressive resistance. As the covid-19 pandemic engulfed the nation in the spring, its effects moved out of the realm of civics textbooks and into the mainstream of political conversations. Some of this was neither drift nor conversion but just new urgency and salience: we suddenly had a reason to think about the fact that public health policies are made and enacted at the state and local level. This revealed inequities, differences in priority and political philosophy, and institutional differences in things like which governors have more extensive emergency powers. The country’s urban-rural divisions were once again on display, with cities making their own rules about masking, business closures, and public and even private gatherings. I remember driving to work (teaching in person) one day this fall and try to recall the rules and guidelines issued by the state of Wisconsin, the city of Milwaukee (maybe also the county?) and which my university was adhering to that day. I missed that coherence across levels of government in the way you never pay much attention to an old building downtown, until one day it’s torn down and leaves a gap in the skyline.

But federalism has allowed for some degree of policy incoherence of this sort for years – for a long time in same-sex marriage rights, still in many forms of anti-discrimination law. It also manifests in drug policy as states and cities legalize and decriminalize marijuana and other drugs – but federal law remains unchanged. As 2020 increased our capacity to tolerate these contradictions, I wonder how much we will see, and whether that variation will lend itself to a diverse, if patchwork nation, or be one more factor that makes us ungovernable.

Black Lives Matter Changed the world… but not the Democratic Party

On this point, I think I’m broadly in agreement with what Seth Masket wrote about the impact of the movement – little on the election, probably more on policy once the Biden administration begins. But I want to think specifically about the relationship between movements for racial and economic justice and the Democratic Party.

Scholars of U.S. political parties should probably spend more time thinking about drift and conversion when we consider parties as institutions. The Democratic Party as we know it is really the product of periodic grafting of new ideas, purposes, and coalitions onto an old organizational form. Its status as a piecework coalition of groups that see themselves, broadly speaking, as minorities, provides an odd continuity. But the twenty-first century has seen a revival of movements to make the party into a more clearly ideological one. These movements are important and they’ve influenced the party – but not shaken its foundations.

As I’ve written before, parties are conservative, risk-averse institutions, and the Democratic Party has a complicated and fragmented electoral imperative. Over the summer, I predicted that the wave of protests against police violence and racial injustice, coupled with the pandemic and the struggling economy, would be a change election and that the Democratic Party would be the obvious, if somewhat ill-fitting, vehicle for that change.

The November election results carried a more ambiguous message. While Biden won a decisive victory, the Democrats lost House seats and failed to pick up Senate seats they had hoped to win. Turnout was up among Democrats, but also among Republicans. And fights over whether Democrats had tacked too far to the left – and whether slogans like “defund the police” had harmed the party despite not being part of the platform or the Biden policy program.

There are a lot of questions here – about messaging, about the electoral calculus of a party disadvantaged by political geography, compounded in some cases by redistricting efforts. But there are also questions about the tensions within the Democratic Party over increasing diversity, attending to economic inequality, and yet maintaining the status quo. It seems even clearer now than it did a year ago that this is Obama’s party, and that this delicate balancing act is an important part of his legacy.

Trump broke the presidency

I realize this probably seems a little stark compared to my usual overly complicated and ambivalent observations. But everything that has happened between the 2020 election and now really clarified my view on this. The essence of the American presidency is that its powers are in many ways unspecified, but their expansion and extension has nearly always been connected to the president’s duty to defend the Constitution, or to protect the security of the nation. Some of these expansions of power have been wrong-headed, some of have been outright bullshit. But someone in the White House has pretty consistently tried to make that linkage.

Trump has changed that. After the 2020 election, he transgressed the boundaries that keep the president out of the Electoral College process – a state process – and pressured state and local officials. He used his Twitter account to advocate for “overturning” the election. He spoke about a military coup. Under these conditions, the oath of office no longer has meaning. The take care clause no longer has meaning. This all came as a shock but not a surprise, nothing we have seen in 4 years has made us expect anything different, or demonstrated that Trump and those around him have any real understanding of the Constitution. Trump occupied the office, took up its powers and its symbolic influence. But he neglected its civically sacred obligation to direct those powers toward the Constitution and the nation, co-opting them instead for his personal and political ends.

Biden ran in part on restoring a more conventional approach to the office, and it seems likely that he will try to bring the powers of the office back into line with its Constitutional purpose. But we’ve seen once that these can be severed, and without complete rebuke. Both Trump and Biden, in very distinct ways, ran campaigns of preservation and restoration. And now Biden will inherit the altered political landscape that Trump will leave behind. The need to reconnect presidential power and national interest could go in a number of directions. It may provide opportunities for subsequent presidents to spell out civic purpose and Constitutional meaning. It may also be just the beginning, a dangerous precedent for a truly unhindered executive power.

As the year and the Trump presidency both come to a close, we’ve heard a lot of questions about whether American political institutions “held up.” But institutions are more complicated than that. Our institutions feel a bit like everything at the end of 2020 – fundamentally altered and yet also stalled. They have proven flexible in some ways, rigid and stagnant in others, and in other cases, highly susceptible to the will and ideas of those who hold power within them. Institutions that can’t adapt seem potentially more brittle than ever. The last four years – not just 2020 – have expanded the range of what we might see as politically possible. As we head into 2021 and a new administration, these possibilities stare us down, wonderful and terrifying all at once.