Republicans Never Abandoned Their Hatred Of The New Deal
They just got better at hiding it! But tax and spending issues will come roaring back if they win the election and set about dismantling the safety net.
Last week I had the honor of participating in the Travers Conference, U.C. Berkeley’s big annual public-facing political science symposium on ethics and accountability in government.
My presentation was about deficiencies in our presidential nominating system, but that’s not what this edition of Off Message is about.
I’ve been thinking instead, consistently since last Friday, about the presentation UCLA’s Lynn Vavreck delivered on a separate panel about the backdrop for the 2024 election. I don’t have video or audio, and I was in listening mode throughout that panel, so I’m going to have to reconstruct her argument from memory, but as I recall it was two pronged.
First: 2012 marked the end of a lengthy stretch of American political history in which presidential elections were battles in the rearguard Republican war against the New Deal consensus. In 2016, we entered a new period in which elections turn on “identity inflected issues” (I’ll call them culture wars), which pertain to sectarian power in America: who gets to call themselves an American, who can become one, which groups are favored or disfavored, whose rights are assured and whose are negotiable?
Second: The 2024 and 2020 elections were (loosely speaking) 2016 rematches, and critically—due to the calcification of U.S. politics—we should expect to rerun these closely fought culture-war elections every four years well into the future.
I’ve learned an awful lot from Lynn’s work over many years, so I don’t want to say I disagree, exactly, but I do want to stress test both of these ideas, particularly the second one. Because, whatever we know about the thematic emphasis of this election and the past two, we also know that Republicans have not abandoned their 80-year war against the welfare state. And with such vast sums of money at stake, along with near-universal reliance interest on the social safety net, I think we should be prepared for New Deal politics to regain its salience quite abruptly.
GOTTA PLUMB!
The disjuncture in Republican politics between 2012 and 2016 should be obvious to anyone who lived through it, but to me the question of whether the party painted on new stripes or speciated irreversibly into something new is still open.
Mitt Romney might have won his election had he and his party not chosen to make it a referendum on the New Deal. Four years later, the GOP nominated Donald Trump. Big difference! But also at least somewhat artificial, because Romney’s campaigns, and the GOP campaigns that came before it, weren’t only about the New Deal.
The 2008 campaign unfolded amidst the collapse of the housing market and then the financial system, and was thus inextricably about the government’s role in the economic lives of its citizens. Should the government regulate essential sectors of the economy? Should it bail them out? Should it tax those entities and distribute the revenue to social-insurance programs that protect people from total ruin? But it was also about identity. That was the year Sarah Palin coined the term “real America,” disavowing Obama’s famous 2004 repudiation of divide-and-conquer politics. Vavreck recalled the brief political-celebrity turn of “Joe the Plumber,” the Ohio Republican who confronted Obama about his tax plan, and Obama’s somewhat clumsy defense of the social compact—“I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.” That exchange undoubtedly had roots in the New Deal. But it was also dripping with identity politics: The unpolished blue-collar white tradesman putting the uppity black Harvard-educated liberal in his place.
Romney’s campaign hewed closer to the substance of economic policy, but Romney was virulently anti-immigrant. He popularized the concept of “self-deportation”—making America so unfriendly to undocumented residents that they’ll leave of their own volition. He embraced trickle-down theory, yes, but he did so to guard the country against the much-maligned “47 percent”—his running-mate Paul Ryan called them “takers”—who “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.” Who do we think he was talking about?
2016 really does look different in obvious ways, consistent with Vavreck’s thesis. Trump had a distinct approach and (through bluster, outrageousness, and lying) a unique agenda-setting ability. Though he was bereft of credibility, he disclaimed Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid cuts in that election. He emphasized anti-immigrant politics, anti-Muslim politics, and (irony of ironies) anti-corruption politics, and the election turned largely on contrasts over those issues. The party coalitions resumed steady polarization around educational attainment, which has (again, irony of ironies) increased the GOP’s vote share among racial minorities, and reduced it among white voters.
But! Trump also promised to cut rich people’s taxes, and to repeal Obamacare. Republicans never abandoned those goals. After Romney lost they hobbled along in a state of denial, and chalked their political woes up to xenophobic social policy. They were desperate to hang on to the aspects of the Romney-Ryan agenda that had hurt them most, so much so that even Trump realized he might lose the GOP nomination if he didn’t play along.
And then, when he won the election with a governing trifecta, he squandered his already scarce political capital cutting rich people’s taxes and attempting to repeal Obamacare. The failure of the ACA-repeal effort was a low point for Trump era Republicans, and if at that juncture they’d truly abandoned their aims to devolve or extinguish the safety net—given up the dream of tax cuts forever—I think there’d be no denying the old politics had died. Culture wars would predominate, perhaps over a less-salient fight about whether to expand the safety net, how much, how quickly, and for whom.
They did not do that, though. And so I see the reorientation a bit differently. For most of my adult life, Republicans were quite overt about their objectives: Cut taxes to the bone in order to starve social insurance-programs, then link arms against tax increases so that fiscal sustainability could only be restored by gutting the welfare state; to the extent that the conservative agenda cut against the pocketbook interests of working-class white voters, reach them with sub rosa xenophobic tribal appeals. Before Trump we called them dog whistles.
Trump’s innovation wasn’t to convince Republicans to abandon the main plank of that approach but to subordinate and lie about it more aggressively. Now you might say their objective is to assemble a winning coalition with more overt tribal appeals (train whistles) and then use the power they amass to impose the old agenda on the unsuspecting new members of their party.
DOG EAT DOG EAT DOG
Three dog cliches apply to this state of transition.
The dog that didn’t bark;
The hit dog that hollers;
The dog that caught the car.
The dog that didn’t bark is the GOP’s stubborn-but-blithe dedication to its anti-New Deal politics. The bills they write, the budgets they propose, the white papers they publish are all plucked from 2012. The conservative movement machine whirs in its familiar way and the rest of the political establishment is unperturbed, because—well, what else is the Republican Study Committee going to do?
This is why Biden has been at such pains to draw Republicans into high-profile fights over their true objectives, and why every time he does, they feign anger or scurry away, like a hit dog. They know their agenda remains a huge political liability—and they know it hasn’t really changed.
Thus, if they regain power in the near future, I believe they’ll transform into the dog that caught the car. Without John McCain around to thwart Trump’s plans, they’ll do what they were purpose built to do and gun for the money.
Which isn’t to predict the calcification thesis won’t bear out! Things could unfold in many different ways.
If Biden wins re-election with governing trifecta, I suspect we’ll see Democrats advance an agenda of abortion rights, modest safety-net enhancements, and perhaps some democratic reforms (particularly if the Supreme Court takes aim at their mandate). What will the 2028 election be about then? No clue! And not just in the sense that we might have a recession or a war or some other act of god—I’m just genuinely not sure if Republicans will want to run on repealing the Women’s Health Protection Act, or on repealing a public option or child tax credit. They will be rebuilding after the failure of two paradigms. What is the Republican party if it decides that Randian economic policy and right-wing culture wars are both losers?
If Biden wins without a governing trifecta, I imagine things will look like they do now, but without Trump on the scene. He will likely spend time in prison if he loses, and while the spirit of Trumpism will outlive his political career, there’s no heir apparent. He’s sui generis, at least for now. Culture war issues and retributive politics will remain most salient in 2028, but without a new cult figure, Republicans will struggle.
If Biden loses, then we’re in even murkier territory because we have to contemplate the possibility that our elections will become Potemkin. Will the 2028 election be in any meaningful sense about anything if the system is perverted to assure Republican victory? But for argument’s sake, let’s assume Trump wins, satisfies himself with proving the losers and haters wrong, serves out his term without corrupting the electoral system, Republicans abandon their anti-democratic power grabs (haha), and then he passes the torch back to a Trumpified GOP establishment. From there, we run the same analysis, inverted.
If Trump wins without a governing trifecta, we’ll be in a dogfight (again with the dogs). Governing and constitutional crises will lurk around every corner, and Democrats will be badly outgunned—an extremely messy situation, but without the votes to attack the safety net, I imagine politics would turn on ugly culture wars, abuses of judicial power, and economic hardship induced by tariffs and a crackdown on immigration.
If he does gain a governing trifecta, though—then we get to the meat of my uncertainty. What’s going to happen to the new GOP coalition if, after returning Trump to power to buck the elites, Republicans christen their majorities with a budget-reconciliation bill that pairs $5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich with $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, $1 trillion in cuts to Obamacare, and higher taxes on middle-income Americans? What happens when 30 million people lose their health insurance, and standards of living drop almost across the board? Is the educational realignment really so secular as to withstand that kind of assault on the livelihood of the multiracial working class? Would Trump-curious black and Latino voters remain Trump-curious if he tried to square that circle by reorienting the safety net to benefit whites at their expense?
I guess I have my doubts.
Vavreck’s argument last week was essentially that Republicans will be loath to run another election like the ones they ran in 2008 and 2012. They lost those, after all. Then they won with Trump, and have attributed their subsequent underperformance to fictional voting fraud. She’s right about that. Republicans won’t choose to revert to Romney/Ryan campaigning—and I’ve been adamant for years now that as long as Republicans want surface-level politics to be about culture wars, Democrat should try to win the culture wars, not just try haplessly to drag every debate back to “kitchen-table issues.”
But the thematic center of American politics is not entirely within GOP control. We see now in the new, post-Dobbs abortion politics that Republicans are perfectly capable of springing retrograde ideas on an ungrateful public and reaping the backlash. They’re desperate for the 2024 election to be about anything other abortion. But to a greater extent than they’d like, it will be about abortion. Dodging backlash against something so sweeping, devastating, and unpopular turns out to be very hard.
I suspect something similar will happen if Trump worms his way back into office and—surprise—everyone’s health and income security goes poof. If there’s a free and fair election in 2028, after Trump winds down his second term, there’s a strong chance it’ll pit Democrats promising to restore health care and tax fairness to the tens of millions of Americans Trump swindled, against Republicans who won’t be able to wriggle away from their record.
I agree that Republicans never abandoned their hatred of the New Deal. The writer of this article imagines that if Trump were re-elected that there would be a legitimate election in 2028. The “dictator on day one” will not leave even if his cheating doesn’t work. He will have all the power at his disposal with his loyalists and friends like Putin, etc. He must not be allowed back in the White House.
Ever since Romney and Ryan’s run at it 12 years ago, I’ve thought about the seeming contradiction between culturally appealing to white rural voters on the one hand and decimating the social safety net for everyone on the other. Like Matt Yglesias, I assumed Trump had won by “moderating” on the latter even while getting more extreme on the former, and assumed that required squaring a circle at some point.
But lately, I’ve decided that way of thinking misses the big picture entirely. More to the point, it lacks imagination.
There is actually NO contradiction between seeming to “moderate” on the social welfare state for some, AND slashing it brutally for others. That is, in fact, exactly what authoritarian right wing parties are campaigning on in countries all over the world. Bigotry is, in fact, the glue that holds that position together.
What Trump is doing is a much more crudely direct, more openly ruthless version of what Romney and Paul implied in 2012–Preserve standards of living and the social safety net for loyal supporters of the Republican Party, and savagely curtail them for those not loyal and not supporting.
That nakedly corrupt, nakedly tribal position, basically a declaration of aggression against— treating as enemy, really—half of the country, allows Trump to play the role of “moderate” to those who benefit from it, laissez-faire capitalist to those who want others to suffer from it, and bigot to both of those categories, and benefit politically in all three ways.
It’s the kind of thing we lack the imagination to grasp in the American context, because we are not used to thinking of a president as leader of one tribe of Americans pillaging another tribe of Americans.
Vavreck clearly lacks the language to grasp what’s happening here, and assumes because Trump emphasizes culture war and denigrates slashing the New Deal, that battle must be “over”.
On the contrary. He’s found a way to potentially gain victory in that very material battle. Or thinks he has. (His billionaire, anti-New Deal donors, certainly think he has.)
That situation seems pretty darn clear to those who look at politics abroad and see the picture shaping up in America. It’s hard to comprehend, in part because it’s so seemingly unprecedented here, albeit depressingly generic and routine in a global sense.
Trump is trying to immiserate millions, and get away with that by placing other millions under his contingent, “loyalist” protection. Romney and Ryan tried to do the same thing; they were just far too polite to state it out loud, even to themselves. And it’s long been a brutal mainstay of politics in too many countries to count, democratic and not so democratic. We’re just not used to being confronted directly with it in the flesh.