That’s all there is
This piece by JV Last at the Bulwark is sadly on target:
This is a thought you often hear:
Joe Biden is unpopular because he was elected to bring normalcy back to politics, and instead there is inflation and $5 gas. And in addition to a couple of big-ticket bipartisan bills he passed, Democrats also failed to pass a couple of large-scale, party-line bills that were unpopular.
This is a thought you never hear:
Ron DeSantis is unpopular because he spends all of his time passing culture-war legislation that has nothing to do with people’s real lives and he does this without any bipartisan support.
This is a thought you often hear:
Democrats are in trouble because whatever Joe Biden’s legislative achievements may be, he gives too much rhetorical ground to the left wing of his party.
This is a thought you never hear:
Republicans are in trouble because they attempted a coup on the American government and support for this coup is now an item of dogma for most GOP candidates, at every level of government, nationwide.
This is a thought you often hear:
Democrats overreached when they failed to pass two bills—BBB and H.R. 1—sufficiently moderate to attract 16 Republican senators. Voters are going to punish them for this overreach.
This is a thought you never hear:
Republicans overreached when they passed laws awarding bounties for citizens who spied on women seeking abortions and for passing many laws banning abortion that have barely 40 percent approval. Voters are going to punish them for this overreach.
This is a thought you often hear:
Democrats must not use Procedure X (eliminating the filibuster, adding states, expanding the Supreme Court) because (1) voters would punish them for such unwise maneuvering and (2) you should never play hardball politics because some day the other side will be in charge and they will do the same to you.
This is a thought you never hear:
After Republicans refused to vote on a Supreme Court vacancy while Barack Obama was president and then rushed to fill a Supreme Court vacancy shortly before Donald Trump was defeated, (1) voters were deeply upset by this procedural irregularity and (2) Democrats retaliated once they took control of the White House and Congress.
It is almost as though there are different rules for the two political parties.
The reason for these divergent rule sets is that voters still apply the standards of the before times to the Democratic party. And the Democrats themselves still act as though they are living in the before times.
Meanwhile, the Republican party is evolving into a post-liberal institution in which various insane people and white nationalists and aspiring authoritarians ride herd over the old chamber of commerce set. Voters have watched this transformation and mostly not been repelled by it. Instead, the general public has decided that this is the new normal for Republicans and that judging the party by the old standards is impossible.
So they don’t even try.1
Just as a for-instance, consider the Pennsylvania governor’s race.
Josh Shapiro is a normal, by-the-numbers, Democratic candidate running in a state that’s pretty close to par. Maybe you like his politics. Maybe you don’t. But he clearly lives between the 40-yard lines of American politics.
The Republican candidate, Doug Mastriano, is an insane person. A seditionist. A Christian nationalist. A conspiracy nut.
And yet this race is a toss-up.
I don’t know what the Democratic version of Mastriano would be. But let’s pretend that, instead of Shapiro, Democrats had nominated that guy. Our pretend insane Democrat won’t stop talking about how the Diebold voting machines stole the 2004 election for George W. Bush and why 9/11 was an inside job. He’s a tankie who constantly spouts Russian propaganda. He’s a militant atheist. Maybe he’s a member of the New Black Panthers. Again: We’re pretending that Democrats nominated their mirror-image of Mastriano.
Do you think Pennsylvania voters would be poised to give this hypothetical insane Democrat 48 percent of the vote?
Because I do not.
I think that in a 50-50 state like Pennsylvania, Republicans can run a crazy person, count on a floor vote-share of 45 percent, and have a fair chance to win. But if Democrats ran a similarly crazy person, his floor would be closer to 35 percent and he’d get blown out.
Because today voters hold the parties to different standards.
2. Power Rules
It is very nice that Joe Biden and Democrats have tried to make real differences in the lives of ordinary Americans. They went to a great deal of trouble to make COVID vaccines widely available. They spent political capital trying to persuade, then bribe, and then cajole the people most likely to vote against them into taking these vaccines so that they would not die. That was kind and largehearted.
Similarly, Biden and Democrats gave up a great deal of ground in order to pass an infrastructure bill with many Republican votes. This new law will, among other things, spend a piles of money to help Americans living in rural areas. Here is an impressive fact sheet with some of the many, many pieces of federal spending being dedicated to improve the lives of rural Americans.
To pick just one example, the Biden administration is spending $45 billion to bring high-speed internet to rural communities across this great land of ours.
Donald Trump carried rural voters 66-33 in 2020. I’m sure that redistributing tax dollars from the more economically productive parts of America to help these very fine people get to Gateway Pundit and Parler and Steve Bannon’s podcast faster will be appreciated and will bear good fruit for the body politic.
The Republican party has taken the position that it will actively use the power of the state to punish its opponents.
I am not suggesting that Democrats should adopt this tactic. But for the love of God, maybe they could stop spending political capital in an effort to help their opponents?
For instance, the Biden administration is going after Juul and tobacco products. The new FDA measures will better the health of many Americans and also prove to be deeply unpopular among many of those same Americans.
Do you know who smokes? The average American smoker is poor, white, with a high-school education, and lives in the South or Midwest.
It is nice that the Biden administration wants these people to live longer so that they can vote for Republicans more times. And if Biden could help them for free, that would be great. But this is another case of Democrats trying to help their opponents even when it imposes a political cost on themselves.
Maybe the Democrats can learn something about power from Republicans.
Here is another thing Democrats can learn from Republicans: Ideology and philosophy are subservient to power.
In his piece today, Will Saletan talks about the inconsistency of conservative legal doctrine:
If Alito, Thomas, and their colleagues want to go back to a world where the Supreme Court guarantees only those rights specified in the Constitution—or even if they just want to roll back the doctrine of substantive due process, as Thomas proposes—that’s a defensible, intellectually consistent position. They’re free to argue that any right not named in the Constitution is fair game for legislation. What’s not defensible is pretending that this rollback applies only to abortion—and basing that pretense on a distinction invented by Roe itself.
This is charmingly naïve because it supposes that the legal reasoning behind this or that decision needs to be defensible.
It does not.
The only thing any legal doctrine needs is five votes on the Supreme Court.
In a way, last week was a perfect distillation of the state of American politics.
On Thursday the House January 6th Committee excavated Donald Trump’s attempts to use the Department of Justice to carry out his coup. We learned about Jeffrey Clark’s eagerness to lie on Trump’s behalf and the rush of Republican politicians seeking preemptive pardons for their role in the attempted coup.
What’s important to note is that these actors initially sought to carry out their coup not through force, but through perversion of the law. They were seeking to subvert democracy by using existing laws and loopholes. They were saying, in effect, We have the power to do this; so we will do this.
And on Friday the Supreme Court overturned a decision made half a century ago—a flawed decision, but one that had already been upheld once—on a 5-4 vote. Implicit in that act was the same message: We have the power to do this; so we will do this.
They do not care about being consistent and they sure as hell don’t care about hypocrisy, Shamelessness is their superpower.