The Tea Party
[I started writing this post as a kind of naive "Did the Tea Party really stand for anything?" analysis. But while writing it I realized that first of all, probably not, and second of all, it doesn't really matter. The Tea Party (under a new name) will spring up whenever a Democrat is President again. This is the cycle of U.S. politics, and I don't see a way out.]
When Obama became President, the "Tea Party" emerged as his most vocal opposition. Ostensibly the Tea Party was focused on debt and deficits, with a sort of sideline in quasi-libertarianism. These are the people who showed up at townhall meetings and screamed at their representatives about Obamacare. They also mobilized against Obama across the board, handing the Republicans big gains in 2010 and 2014.
This set up a toxic dynamic that caused a tremendous amount of needless suffering. Tea Party (and Tea Party-inflected) rhetoric so dominated the Republican caucus that the Republican Party effectively functioned as a purely anti-Obama institution. As Obama told Michael Lewis, the Republicans saw any interaction with him as a zero-sum game. (Obama attributed the same attitude to Putin.) If Obama was for it, then the Republicans were against it.
This made it impossible for the Republican leaders to negotiate with Obama in good faith. Now you can certainly question whether they wanted to negotiate in the first place, but I am inclined to think that they did (Boehner more than McConnell, but both of them more than their caucus would allow). Obama was left to pursue his agenda unilaterally, which was unfortunate in many respects. To the extent Obama did attempt to compromise, he viewed himself (rightly I think, but more below) as compromising with the Tea Party ideology, and so he proposed entitlement cuts combined with tax increases. The Republicans rejected it. They also starved the economy of fiscal stimulus at a time when it could have made a big difference to employment and desperation. In essence they created the desperate voters inclined to view Obama's economy as a failure.
Now of course we have Trump, and Congress has approved vast tax cuts and spending increases. The tax cuts are not good, but they are also not very damaging from a macroeconomic perspective, while the spending increases largely restore the sanity that prevailed before the Tea Party arrived.
In other words, the pattern here is for any Democratic President to be hamstrung with painful austerity, while any Republican President will get expansionary, lift-all-boats fiscal stimulus. This will give Republican administrations the appearance (and to some degree the reality) of simply being better for the economy.
What is to be done? The problem is that it simply doesn't matter whether the Tea Party was acting in good faith. In fact, probably millions of its supporters were acting in good faith, in the narrow sense that they subjectively believed the rhetoric they embraced. This shows the limitations of good faith, since they have now conveniently shifted their views, and will conveniently shift them back again if a Democrat, especially a nonwhite Democrat, is in the White House again.
But it just doesn't matter. When a political group has power, you have to treat it as a real entity, even if it will opportunistically change its colors when circumstances change. If Obama had said, "You claim to be a bunch of small-government patriots, but in fact you're mostly a bunch of racists who will gladly embrace trillion dollar deficits as long as the executive branch is making nonwhites miserable," it would have accomplished nothing. In fact it would have been politically devastating.
Now maybe the point is not to attribute any ideological valence to the Tea Party. If you simply think of it as a white racist/anti-Obama expression of rage, then maybe you won't be tempted to "negotiate" with it at all. But that leaves you pretty much where Obama was: making policy unilaterally. Most of his concessions were not meant to get the Tea Party on board, but to get conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans to vote for his bills. And again, those moderates don't have the luxury of calling the Tea Party what it is or ignoring it.
Sorry for a mess of a post.
When Obama became President, the "Tea Party" emerged as his most vocal opposition. Ostensibly the Tea Party was focused on debt and deficits, with a sort of sideline in quasi-libertarianism. These are the people who showed up at townhall meetings and screamed at their representatives about Obamacare. They also mobilized against Obama across the board, handing the Republicans big gains in 2010 and 2014.
This set up a toxic dynamic that caused a tremendous amount of needless suffering. Tea Party (and Tea Party-inflected) rhetoric so dominated the Republican caucus that the Republican Party effectively functioned as a purely anti-Obama institution. As Obama told Michael Lewis, the Republicans saw any interaction with him as a zero-sum game. (Obama attributed the same attitude to Putin.) If Obama was for it, then the Republicans were against it.
This made it impossible for the Republican leaders to negotiate with Obama in good faith. Now you can certainly question whether they wanted to negotiate in the first place, but I am inclined to think that they did (Boehner more than McConnell, but both of them more than their caucus would allow). Obama was left to pursue his agenda unilaterally, which was unfortunate in many respects. To the extent Obama did attempt to compromise, he viewed himself (rightly I think, but more below) as compromising with the Tea Party ideology, and so he proposed entitlement cuts combined with tax increases. The Republicans rejected it. They also starved the economy of fiscal stimulus at a time when it could have made a big difference to employment and desperation. In essence they created the desperate voters inclined to view Obama's economy as a failure.
Now of course we have Trump, and Congress has approved vast tax cuts and spending increases. The tax cuts are not good, but they are also not very damaging from a macroeconomic perspective, while the spending increases largely restore the sanity that prevailed before the Tea Party arrived.
In other words, the pattern here is for any Democratic President to be hamstrung with painful austerity, while any Republican President will get expansionary, lift-all-boats fiscal stimulus. This will give Republican administrations the appearance (and to some degree the reality) of simply being better for the economy.
What is to be done? The problem is that it simply doesn't matter whether the Tea Party was acting in good faith. In fact, probably millions of its supporters were acting in good faith, in the narrow sense that they subjectively believed the rhetoric they embraced. This shows the limitations of good faith, since they have now conveniently shifted their views, and will conveniently shift them back again if a Democrat, especially a nonwhite Democrat, is in the White House again.
But it just doesn't matter. When a political group has power, you have to treat it as a real entity, even if it will opportunistically change its colors when circumstances change. If Obama had said, "You claim to be a bunch of small-government patriots, but in fact you're mostly a bunch of racists who will gladly embrace trillion dollar deficits as long as the executive branch is making nonwhites miserable," it would have accomplished nothing. In fact it would have been politically devastating.
Now maybe the point is not to attribute any ideological valence to the Tea Party. If you simply think of it as a white racist/anti-Obama expression of rage, then maybe you won't be tempted to "negotiate" with it at all. But that leaves you pretty much where Obama was: making policy unilaterally. Most of his concessions were not meant to get the Tea Party on board, but to get conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans to vote for his bills. And again, those moderates don't have the luxury of calling the Tea Party what it is or ignoring it.
Sorry for a mess of a post.
posted by James | 12:07 PM
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