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An Opening for a Party of Reality
Here they come, the newly resurgent Democrats, ready to take on “the man” (Rep. Rashida Tlaib); protect America’s middle class from “attack” by big corporations and billionaires (Sen. Elizabeth Warren); provide Medicare for all (Sen. Kamala Harris); offer universal pre-K (Julian Castro); and fight capitalism in general without any idea of how it works (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). The Democratic Party is lurching to the left like a confused American driver on a British highway.
As the New York Times’ Thomas Edsall notes, it isn’t just leaders who are stampeding to the port side. Democratic voters are becoming more liberal too. In the past 17 years, Pew Research has found, the percentage of Democrats who described themselves as liberal jumped from 30 to 50 percent. This is reflected in issue positions. In 2008, the percentage of Democrats who agreed that immigrants here illegally should be permitted to become citizens was 29 percent. That increased to 51 percent in 2018. Between 2010 and 2017, the portion who said “racial discrimination is the main reason many blacks can’t get ahead these days” rose from 28 percent to 64 percent. (Notably, among white liberals, 79.2 percent agreed that discrimination was the main thing holding blacks back, whereas among black respondents, the percentage was lower — 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the obstacle to progress. Hmm.)
The liberal nostrums on offer are utterly disconnected from the actual challenges the nation faces. It’s hard to see how the “war on the middle class” theme can get traction in an economy with 3.9 percent unemployment. Poverty has been declining and middle incomes have been increasing since 2013. Jobs are plentiful. Median household income reached $61,372 in 2017, which is higher than comparable countries like Canada, Germany, France, Britain, and Denmark, and exceeded only by a handful of tiny rich nations sitting on oil (Norway) or numbered bank accounts (Switzerland and Lichtenstein). US median household size, meanwhile, has declined, so individual wealth has increased even more than the income numbers reflect.
Admittedly, facts need not impede a good political pitch. Republicans have succeeded by offering their own fractured fairy tale about what ails the nation. They’ve insisted that we are being overrun by illegal immigrants, when border apprehensions are at an 18-year low. They assert that immigrants bring crime, which is false. They’ve claimed (along with some progressives like Bernie Sanders) that outsourcing has decimated U.S. manufacturing, when the real story is that automation has been the chief cause of lost manufacturing jobs. And they’ve claimed that globalization has hollowed out the middle class when, in truth, global trade, while costing some jobs, has created far more and provided middle-income Americans with a bounty of affordable products, thus improving their standard of living.
Republicans and Democrats alike encourage victimhood. We need a party that will address the true problems we face.
As a governing matter, our greatest problem is that we are not behaving like citizens, but like consumers. We are gorging on entitlements and washing them down with tax cuts. The bill? What bill? We can always borrow more! Medicare’s trust fund runs out in 7 years. Social Security’s, in 15. But what the hell, let’s have free college! Bartender, let’s have another tax cut, this time for the middle class! (By the way, what ever happened to that pre-election pledge?)
Any individual who behaved the way our nation does would be obese and broke.
Also, we are living in a civic cesspool. Our language, our manners, and our hatreds are out of control and out of all proportion to our problems. We are marinating in mutual contempt and suckers for conspiracy theories. Do you think the Covington High imbroglio was bad? Wait until deep fakes come along. They are video impostures. Any politician (or anyone else) will appear to say anything. Imagine the kids at the Lincoln Memorial having the N word put into their mouths by video manipulation.
It’s not that our problems are so intractable, it’s that our spirits are so sour. We desperately need some uplift, some commitment to the rule of law, more suspicion of centralized power, and a stab at trust. It’s a lot to ask of a political party, and frankly, most of our problems, like the decline of families and churches, are pre-political. But leadership is important, and the majority of Americans are not at the extremes. A recent survey found that 54 percent of Democrats would like their party to be more moderate. And two of the most popular Republican elected officials are Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker.
That’s a start.
Wait until? It just happened.
Sagacious column, Mona. As usual.
Rambling.
Except for shelter, education, health insurance-health expenses, and for some reason the Fed has to run with a supposed 2% CPI.
The top line is not rising enough for enough people. In the face of automation and a wide-open globalize labor market, the government is making everything worse.
then
(they’re popular because they’re not going to address the problem set out lest they upset their blue populace)
I’d love for this magical unicorn of a charismatic bold Republican leader who speaks truth to power, adheres to smaller government and more power to the states, cutting of entitlements, etc. that will magically be able to withstand all the non-Fox/WSJ/IBD media without that person fighting back who can get a 70 percent approval rating to appear.
It wasn’t Donald Trump that lied to me about “Tom Price has been working on a healthcare solution since ACA was passed.” Paul Ryan could have submitted any entitlement reform he wanted and probably gotten it through no matter Trump’s bloviating and Mitch’s public position of wanting 60.
No one took a bold step. They wanted half measures because even our own commentariat was saying “if you help Trump, you may not get re-elected”
The right has a great product with lousy salesmen, some of whom only want the sale without believing in the product. The rest have no clue how to sell it, thinking that if they just set up a display that it will attract buyers. Republicans castrated the Tea Party revolution, Democrats are embracing soft socialism and it’s energizing the party.
So here’s my deal, I know Donald Trump isn’t a conservative. But what’s the point of fighting hard for control of a party that doesn’t deliver on promises? I did that once with the Tea Party. I was told our voice was heard.
Well put @jeffhawkins. Here is Mona, crying about our deep, deep problems with which I agree. The problem is always the same unfortunately. When we had the power and control Mona only complained about Trump…and “his people”. She did everything she could to bring Trump down and lose the power or any chance of fixing those problems of which she now complains. It’s always the same thing. Talk the big talk as long as they know nothing will get solved. When they get the power to actually do something, they run for the hills. There’s always some reason the Republicans can’t get the job done.
ANALYSIS: True
@jeffhawkins
Maybe it’s not the product that “our” salesman don’t believe in.
Maybe it’s the customers that they don’t really like.
After all, look at all the conservative writers and pundits who jumped ugly at the image of a teenager smiling at a Native American and assumed the worst about the kid.
Would Ben Shapiro have retweeted the tweets supporting Nathan Phillips from Jonathan Capehart and Rich Lowry (editor of National Review) if the kids shown “mobbing” Phillips were from Yeshiva High School and wearing yarmulkes?
Be honest.
I don’t know, there was nothing in THIS article I didn’t agree with and I appreciate she focused on the Left and overall problems instead of bashing President Trump so I’m going to cut her some slack. I truly believe if this can be a sustained trend with her and others more promises will start getting delivered on.
For years I’ve wanted to start my own party. The Realist Party who’s slogan is “Get Real!”.
So go join your radical lefty friends in the Democratic Party and good riddance, Mona.
The second part does not negate the first.
Nice trick. Illegal immigrants bring massive crime. I have debunked your lies before but you repeat with a cultish fervor.
Several problems with this. As with many of your positions, it’s a canard. The second part does not rebut the significance of the first, in fact it highlights it. Key jobs we now lose through “outsourcing” (discussed below) are the high productivity jobs that would have survived automation.
What do you mean by “outsourcing”? Clearly, outsourcing low productivity portions of the supply chain in a free market while retaining high productivity portions seems good. But a big issue is when our foreign competitors (mainly China) use trade barriers to take the high productivity portions. This key area is often lumped in under “outsourcing” but we need a better name to distinguish it. That the US may have both comparative and absolute advantage in high productivity portions is not relevant when faced with such predatory tactics.
US Widgets, Inc. may be the most efficient widget producer in the world. Very profitable with significant positive externalities. If so, it faces a situation where China does not let it sell widgets in China which represents half the world widget market. China tells US Widgets: “Instead of upgrading your US factory with $1billion in robots, how about you close it and put that money into a new factory 51% owned by the Shanghai government. If you say ‘no’, your slightly less efficient competitor Euro Widgets, AG will say ‘yes’ and crush you internationally via economy of scale.”
Agreed, I hope you are correct and this is a new trend with Mona. It will take a while to overcome the past three years of elegantly delivered drivel.
Edit:
Mona is a smart gal. She may be learning how to criticize without naming. She certainly has every right to her own view of policy even though that policy won’t win.
There are two issues here. People are sick of illegal immigration; that is enough. Let’s start worrying about assimilation, prosperity, and not degrading government resources. Second, even though apprehensions are way down, they are handling way more families and fake families because it’s an easier way to beat the system. Obama wanted to kick them all out after imprisoning them, but it’s just too complicated politically, so he gave up. Catch and release.
Supposedly they need to double the number of immigration judges from 300 to 750 or something like that. This is very hard because it’s an underserved legal specialty.
Plus how would you like to be the person evaluating asylum claims?
Her two paragraphs dismissing the concerns of the middle class by tossing out cherry-picked statistics is rather annoying. But this column is two different things: First, it’s a continuation of her column from two weeks ago where she joined the mob in attacking Tucker Carlson for his concerns for the middle class. Second, it’s wishcasting about a 2020 Republican Primary challenger, as well as a PR bit for Bill Kristol’s candidate of choice for 2020: Larry Hogan.
This isn’t my thought and I don’t know who to attribute it to, the Tea Party was voters asking nicely–Donald Trump is voters asking not quite as nicely.
The problem with this piece — and it’s a big problem — is that it’s a more verbose version of the popular canard that Republicans and Democrats are all the same.
Consider the list of indictments leveled against Democrats in this piece: they want huge new government spending programs; they want to destroy free-market capitalism; they want essentially open borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants; and they embrace an identity group/victimization model that pits a constantly expanding set of grievance groups against their fellow Americans. And, she observes, the Democratic rank and file are rapidly becoming more extreme in their views.
And Republicans? They think illegal immigration is more harmful than Ms. Charon thinks it is, and they think some of the structural challenge to America’s economy result from foreign trade and immigrant labor.
If the Democratic will prevails, we’ll be a nation lurching toward socialism and torn by internal strife. If the Republican will prevails, we’ll be a nation with better immigration enforcement and, possibly, some counter-productive trade restrictions.
Put simply, essentially every bad idea in the Democrat’s list of bad ideas, as Ms. Charon presented it, is opposed by Republicans.
She then goes on to talk about the general profligacy of the American citizen — that is, that we tend to abuse those social programs created by Democrats. Well, yes, and that’s precisely why we don’t want more such programs created by Democrats.
Finally, she bemoans our painful division as a nation. This idea of division is popular in the press, which is understandable: these people spend their days in the fever swamp of social- and mainstream media. Of course they get all twitterpated (no pun intended): they’re helping grease the wheels of the 24/7 rage machine.
The awful division is an illusion — or, more accurately, a tenuous reality sustained by an angry gale blowing from the left. Let the wind pause, let honesty and balance dominate our opinion-shaping institutions — our press and our entertainment and our universities — and we’ll discover that most Americans aren’t at each other’s throats, nor even strongly interested in the matters that Ms. Charon and her peers assure us are tearing us apart.
There isn’t going to be a perfect party. There isn’t even going to be a terrific party. But we have one party that is driving hard for more and bigger government, greater spending, fewer choices, more regulations, more identity politics and anger and reparations — and one party that, while it often doesn’t put up much of a fight, still managed to get tax cuts passed, the individual mandate rescinded, and Constitutionalist judges confirmed, all in the face of a united, multi-year assault from the left and its organs of persuasion.
I’ll keep my party, thanks, and encourage them to do better.
I say the people in her camp just don’t get how dysfunctional all of this centralized power and government have gotten. They want to make it work in a way that it used to, but we are way past that point.
Well, yes, but it’s also a not-very-subtle promotion of the idea of primarying President Trump in 2020.
And it specifically points out Larry Hogan, who this week emerged as Bill Kristol’s current magical unicorn who will defeat the bad orange man. Tell me that’s not coincidental.
I’ve written elsewhere about how profoundly bad, I think, is the idea of a Republican challenge to President Trump in 2020. I believe the only ways in which a Republican other than Trump can win in 2020 are (1) Trump decides he does not want to run for good personal reasons, or (2) he doesn’t survive (literally, as in passes away) his first term.
This Larry Hogan fellow, whose name I’d never heard until Drew mentioned him here, is the current Republican governor of Maryland! I do not have any idea of his politics, but I would bet he is no conservative. I would bet he is a globalist and an open borders dove. And I would guess that, being an unknown, the media would do what they could to keep him that way. In other words, he wouldn’t have a chance of winning. Which is exactly why pundits like Mona and Billy like the man so much.
Playbook would be the same: he’s the kind of Republican Democrats love up until it’s clear he’s going to get the nomination, then he’ll be a racist homophobic xenophobic fascist that it a singular threat to the Republic and the most dangerous candidate the GOP has ever put up.
Meanwhile the Democrat will run to the right of whatever his weak spot is
Hi Hank!
I must admit that, for the first time since I’ve been reading you, I am genuinely stumped by this comment. I do not agree at all with what I think you are saying. Far from being a verbose version of the silly notion that Republican and Democrats are alike, Mona is pointing out the many ways they are different. You yourself pointed them out in them out in your second paragraph.
I do agree with the sentence I’ve highlighted above. I do not think the Republican Party has gone not too far overboard, and I encourage them to do better. Mitch McConnell has been great at making sure the good appointments the president has made went through, especially the judges.
But I do agree with Mona. I guess maybe you don’t. While I do want to secure the border and stop illegal entry into our country, I really do not see this as big a threat as Trump and many in our party do. I think that is an honest disagreement.
Far from being a problem, I believe, as I said in my own comment, that Mona’s column is sagacious. I am sorry you don’t. But we always said that there were going to be areas where we disagree. Maybe the fact that you find Mr. Trump less troubling then I do has something to do with it.
In any case, I just wanted to put my two cents in.
Take care.
George, I’m sorry, but I’ve re-read the post and I just don’t see where she distinguishes between the parties in any meaningful way.
Hank, I’m also sorry, but I have to say, “You’ve got to be kidding”.
I suspect you might be referring to this phrase:
“Republicans and Democrats alike encourage victimhood” I agree with this. They are doing it in different ways. Democrats are up to their usual silliness about how how everyone is abused by Capitalism, and only more spending on federal programs and more involvement in people’s lives can save us. Republicans are doing it – in their newly found populism – by encouraging people to blame all their troubles on illegal aliens and countries cheating us through trade (regarding China, I agree). The mere fact that she says they are doing it in different ways means she is distinguishing between them. She prefers the Republican Party of old, which encouraged people to stand on their own two feet; not to blame others, the way Democrats do. Put me down as a Mona-style Republican.
George, I hear what you’re saying. But, re-rereading her piece, I still can’t find where she draws an important distinction between the two parties.
And, by the way, saying that the Republican encouragement of victimhood is in any significant way similar to the Democrats is just wrong. The Democrats are the party of identity politics and grievance; Republicans resent illegal immigration and have some issues with international trade. It’s a silly comparison for her to make.
No, I think she’s painting both parties as bad and out of touch with reality.
We will have to agree to disagree. I believe you are – as usual – speaking from a good place. But I also believe that, regarding Mona, you are misreading her; and, regarding me: We are just speaking past each other.
But, have a good night, Hank.
We don’t practice capitalism. That’s why populism and socialism are the thing now.
link
Mona et. al. want something that can’t be had anymore.
Mona is literally for everything this guy is against.
It “worked” several decades ago. Not now.
Don’t like Trump or Bernie? Adopt all of the Mises.org policies.