I’ve mentioned many times that I really respect Dan Balz as a bigfoot political print reporter. I think he does his job about as well as anyone can within the strictures of the genre. I believe he has respect from officeholders on both sides of the aisle who know he is tough but fair. That’s why it’s notable that when he went to report of the state of the GOP in the post-Charlottesville world he discovered that “Few [Republicans] were willing to talk about what comes next, even anonymously, and most elected officials and party leaders contacted declined requests for interviews altogether.”
In the aftermath of the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Republican lawmakers and leaders face the most unpalatable set of choices yet in their relationship with President Trump. They are caught between disgust over his failure to unequivocally condemn neo-Nazism, a desire to advance a conservative agenda and fears of rupturing the Trump-GOP coalition ahead of the 2018 elections.
As a result, he needed to collect statements that were already in the public record. And, of course, he had to use some anonymous quotes even if they were also hard to come by. I was particularly struck by the following:
A Republican strategist who is directly engaged in 2018 politics said progress on the GOP agenda, particularly tax cuts, could help to diminish some of the anguish that has been on display this past week. “Cutting middle-class taxes and improving the economy?” the strategist said. “A lot of people will forgive a lot of sins if that happens.”
But he conceded that the week’s events could complicate that path to success. “I would be very hesitant to say [Charlottesville] has real meaning six months from now,” he added. “I think where it hurts the most, it’s just another thing that makes it harder to get the middle-class tax cut done.”
Maybe that reads worse than it should, and maybe it’s clear-eyed and shrewd political analysis, but it comes off as morally bankrupt. The president of the United States has been openly siding with neo-nazis and white supremacists, calling many of them “good people.” If you don’t believe me, listen to the son of the founder of Stormfront, Derek Black:
[Trump] said: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
But this protest, contrary to his defense, was advertised unambiguously as a white nationalist rally. The marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us”; in the days leading up to the event, its organizers called it “a pro-white demonstration”; my godfather, David Duke, attended and said it was meant to “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump”; and many attendees flew swastika flags. Whatever else you might say about the rally, they were not trying to deceive anyone.
Mr. Black claims that Trump’s “words marked possibly the most important moment in the history of the modern white nationalist movement” and that “his comments supporting the rally gave new purpose to the white nationalist movement, unlike any endorsement it has ever received.”
This somehow has “no real meaning” except, perhaps, that it will complicate efforts to reduce taxes on our nation’s most affluent citizens.
Obviously, the president’s comments have meaning for millions of Americans. They gave encouragement to white nationalists. They appalled the vast majority of Americans. His position was objectively indefensible on any moral plane. But supposedly they were the kind of sin that can be easily forgiven if an envelope full of tens of thousands of dollars arrives in the mail.
Except, who would gets those envelopes? How many people would receive them? And what percentage of those people would truly forgive and forget this kind of behavior from their president in return for cold hard cash?
In truth, Trump’s base is made up of people who sympathize with the white nationalists or who judge all politics by how well it pays. This helps explain Trump’s persistently high poll numbers among self-identified Republicans. It also explains how he carved out a narrow Electoral College victory.
Yet, that narrow Electoral College coalition isn’t looking so great:
NBC News poll: Approve disapprove of GOP among reg voters:
Pennsylvania- 30/60
Michigan- 30/55
Wisconsin- 33/57https://t.co/0XGpbSE52o— Evan Siegfried (@evansiegfried) August 20, 2017
We already know that Trump is capable of significantly outperforming his poll numbers, and whether he can win again or not isn’t really relevant when we’re discussing the moral dimension of the Republicans’ response to his behavior. Anyone who is quick to forgive the president in anticipation of financial compensation is clearly deficient as a moral actor. If that accurately describes most of the Republican officeholders in the country and the majority of GOP voters who don’t outright agree with the neo-Nazis, then we’re on solid ground condemning the entire political party on moral grounds.
This Republican strategist “who is directly engaged in 2018 politics” is making a cool calculation that Trump’s approval ratings will recover if the right people get paid and the economy hums, but he goes further than that and says that this will mean that the whole Charlottesville incident will not matter in six months.
Of course, we have to ask: “matter, to whom?”
Or maybe we have to ask “who matters?”
Matter, to whom?
It will matter to his base….which at this point is every racist, overt or otherwise. But Charlottesville itself won’t matter to everyone else..because the nazis have been empowered, and they have plans, and far worse things than Charlottesville are coming. Plus…Trump is very very ill, and he is not going to get better. People with Alzheimer’s don’t get ‘better’, only worse. So Charlottesville won’t matter, we will be talking about worse things.
Who matters?
To Trump’s crowd…only white people….and specifically, only white people who spew the proper hate. The rest are traitors.
It’s very important to not dismiss what has occurred. The Nazis have been empowered in this country. The Bundy’s have been empowered. Once these types gain an inch, it’s very difficult to push them back.
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This is not a well man.
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It matters to me and I can assure you I won’t forget and neither will my family. My uncle joined the army in 1941 and spent three years in combat against those Nazi bastards all the way from Kasserine pass through Sicily and eventually ended up near Munich. He saw Dachau. My cousin reminded me he has 6 battle stars. Not that it matters here but I had a cousin in the Pacific as well. So fuck Trump and his “nice guys” brandishing swastikas and the fucking monuments to traitors.
It is significant that white powers-that-be in Southern cities have taken down statues that were intended as propaganda that the plantation Confederacy and its culture survived the Civil War.
It is significant that white residents of Southern cities supported them and even participated in the toppling of a monument to “our boys in gray”.
It is significant that the mayors of New Orleans and Richmond are stripping their cities of major post-Civil War monuments to the “redeemed” South.
It is significant that the City of Baltimore (1) had Confederate monuments at all and (2) removed them in the middle of the night under the leadership of a black female mayor.
Those will still be significant more than six months from now just Bree Newsome’s climbing a flagpole and taking down the Confederate Battle Flag at the South Carolina State House is significant to what has occurred during the past week.
The reality is that conservative ideology is now a zombie philosophy, having failed at war, failed at the economy, and having failed at “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” as a public an open philosophy.
That explains the scramble to rig institutions without public view and without public consent. It also explains the turn to the authoritarianism that always lurked behind conservatism even when it was it its McCarthyite phase in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The authoritarian impulse in the GOP has brought the neo-Nazis out of the woodwork; the white bigots and gunslingers have been pretty open since the Democrats offered health care reform and a black President. Now we know what the Nazi Rifleman’s Association has been up to for 40 years (since a leadership coup). Time to be open about that history.
The elected GOP politicians are stuck because they can no longer bafflegab, dance smartly, or bob and weave. The made their deal with the devil (Trump) and he’s going to collect their pound of flesh; just watch.
“Tax reform” in the GOP vernacular will not mean tax cuts for anyone who is not already rolling in enough cash to significantly finance GOP campaigns. Democrats can point that out and offer real tax reform plans that strip a lot of the Christmas ornaments out of the IRS code. The problem they face is the large number of taxpayer-small impact per taxpayer items (mortgage deduction, charitable donations) suck out a whole lot of the money that could go elsewhere without meaningfully creating better lives for those below the $100K income level. Subsidizing McMansions could be better spent subsidizing medical copays and deductions.
Can Democrats come up with meaningful tax reform as a foil to the GOP nonsense and then run on that as a practical plan in 2018? Can they do it without selling out to tax accountants and tax shelter sales gimmicks? They did have major struggles on this score with the Reagan tax cuts.
The struggle amounts to not introducing hooks that future entrepreneurs can use to roll back reforms and privilege higher taxpayers with deductions. We saw one of those hooks create the end of pension coverage and the rush to worker-funded 401(k) plans with management fee degradation from a hidden feature of a 1978 IRS bill change.
I bet if the Democrats in Congress to put their staffs to researching it, they could find provisions in the tax code and other laws that amount to a more sophisticated 21st century form of redlining and segregation of schools, employment, and provision of government services that discriminate by class and use that to hide fundamental racial discrimination in practices that all those with incomes under $100K can complain about. Remember that redlining affected the VA loans and FHA loans that created the suburbs (and white flight) after World War II. There were whites who could not qualify for loans because of housing price and downpayment requirement mismatches.
But there was public housing to shove them into.
Democratic mayors have the response to Charlottesville handled relatively well at this point.
Democrats in Congress should stymie the GOP plan to use tax reform to hobble budget-making once again by pointing out that the GOP plans really have nothing for Republican voters. Think Democrats can make that case simply and straighforwardly without bobbing and weaving. That’s what they must do.
Has Selma mattered after 50 years?
Yes, Charlottesville will matter after 6 months because it was the big reveal of Nazis in the Trump campaign. And that has caused some research into Trump’s history.
It will matter because it came within 8 months of Trump’s inauguration before he could get his juggernaut of an administration in place. Lucky for USians that he’s too lazy to play with juggernauts.
Can the GOP do without their “southern strategy?”
It was strong and decisive at the national level in 1972, but not strong enough to withstand Nixon’s impeachment and a southern Democratic nominee in ’76. Shortly after that they added “family values” (code for god-fearing and anti-abortion) to their quiver and got an EC landslide but only 50.7% of the popular vote.
Perhaps two generations on those overt and specific appeals to shift traditional Democrats to support the GOP are no longer necessary. They’ve become internalized as by those people and voters as “Republicans are like me.” Didn’t Trump demonstrate that the god-fearing had no difficulty supporting a thrice married, non-church going, girlie-mag fan? During his campaign, he was also careful not to denigrate AAs; so, he didn’t use the “southern strategy” SOP dog-whistles. Muslims and Mexicans became stand-ins, but what he was tapping into (and that he’s not sophisticated or savvy enough to recognize) was the desire for an authoritarian. A rough rider. A Reagan as presented for public consumption.
The cat that Charlottesville let out of the bag wrt Trump is his affinity with Nazis (or neo-Nazis). If there’s one version of authoritarian racism that divides that faction, it’s Nazism. The memory (direct or secondary) of that enemy remains alive.
And once again (the other was the civil rights era) the association of slavery and genocide (KKK and Nazis) works against the bigots. Thank God the Nazis are still toxic over 70 years after the Holocuast.
That keeps Trumpism from rescuing the failure of the Tea Party, which was the desperation move against Barack Obama and the 2008 economic failure of conservative economic priniciples (deregulation and fraud).
Only the failure of Democrats to go on the attack will allow the failure of conservatism to continue in a zombie state.
Amen.
Nazi apologetics aside, raising the debt ceiling and passing a budget may make “improving the economy” somewhat problematic.
indeed.
Zombie conservatism at its worst.
What puts the financial sleight-of-hand that is the GOP intentions in the public’s face?
The GOP postures as the “responsible” financial stewards trying to balance the budget by cutting spending.
That’s not been true since Reagan ran with David Stockman’s Defense budget error and doubled the budget increase.
If the opposition party cannot get that clearly stated in the media because of moderator bias or their own hoof-in-mouth-disease, how does that message get into the streets? Allowing an unauditable Defense Department and holding everyone else to budget discipline is C-R-A-Z-Y as in getting the same bad outcomes repetitively.
I clearly suck at predicting results of Trump behavior. When he called Mexicans killers and rapists during his campaign, I said, “He’s done.” and then he wasn’t. He mocked a disabled man, and I said, “He’s done” and then he wasn’t. And then when the video dialogue about grabbing pussies came out, I said, “Based on eveything I’ve seen so far, I’ll bet he stays.”
And he did. And he won.
Look, we have reached new depths with Trump. One would hope that sheer racism, the KKK and the Alt-Right would be a bridge too far. Charlottesville, a genuine tragedy with loss of life, will continue to be another reminder of the depravity of this terrible president and his followers.
And in my travels this past week, guess what the topic is: the taking down of statues. Nazi, KKK, Russia, all non-topics. But the taking down of Confederate statues is the worst crime of our society. And the discussions are laced with FOX talking points, like “trying to change history” and “people need to stop being so sensitive”.
So Charlottesville, like so many other outrageous events that are Trump-related, will be knocked off the front page to be replaced by something else that won’t bring him down.
Ask yourself who manages those front pages that Trump’s latest failure gets knocked off of.
For those who seek the perpetuation of bigotry, knocking down the the statues that paint bigots and tyrants as heroes IS the biggest crime. So is destruction of any of the institutions that keep Confederate bigotry permanent.
The polling I have seen suggests most want to leave these statues up. And the margin isn’t small.
I don’t think politically this was the disaster it should have been.
In 1999 Jeb Bush essentially ended affirmative action at Florida Public Universities.
One of the reasons Florida in 2000 was close was because this generated a good deal of anger in the African American Community, and turnout was stronger as a result.
By 2004 this anger had largely receded, though it was a factor in 2002 (or would have been had the Democratic gubernatorial candidate known how to debate).
I doubt those monuments will all come down, but I will be pleased to see some go. I see now that UT in Austin is taking one down from the main campus.
I don’t personally buy into the heritage argument. Those statues represent the leadership of the secession and in my mind they are traitors, not like George Washington or Tom Jefferson, despite them holding slaves. Plus they were placed there during Jim Crow years to encourage and maintain segregation and discrimination. That time is passed in our history and the damn statues can go with it.
This might be a good time to remind people of the civil rights and voting rights act and to carry it forward to the election. It is important to POC who are a very significant part of the dem base that we show support to them. The KKK was also present at Charlottesville and we need to defeat them along with the likes of Beauregard Sessions once and for all. Trump is a hateful man and that is an issue in this campaign.
I’m not sure there is “a bridge too far” for a country that essentially shrugged off the murder of 20 children, sitting in their classrooms in Sandy Hook, as simply a sacrifice we must all just accept and the price we just have to expect to pay for being an American.
I think for me that was the turning point when I realized that there might not really be a nadir for the collective soul of our country. The fact that we have a system which is incapable of even having a discussion about this horrific event tells me that the national cancer might have metastisized beyond our ability to mend it. Trump, Trumpism, Nazism, ascendent white supremacy, and all the shit that has come along with it is just a natural progression of the disease that is killing our country.
The “turning point” will never be due to revulsion among citizens or the political class to events, actions or words. It will be only because the political price of support becomes too high. I’m not really sure that an American moral conscience even exists anymore.
The success of non-violent tactics of opposition an resistance depends on the oppressor having enough of a conscience to be shamed as the the nation was during the civil rights movement.
“No bridge too far” means the nation lacks a conscience, Antifa becomes correct that that the only way to win is to punch a Nazi, and the country risks pitched battles instead of counter-protests. Despite the loud noises, not even Antifa has gotten that cynical in aggregate. Therefore, we are not yet to that extreme that we can tell. Calls for repentance still have some usefulness and life in them.
It will be people of conscience who make the political price too high. We will have to wait and see. So far some stones are crying out. That’s a good sign.
I think the “Good Nazis” thing will at the very least buy us some time as we get a few more Judgement Day Republicans, who finally realize that maybe the Nazi thing is a bridge too far, to at least not publicly support Cheetolini.
From my position in the middle of the fever swamp though, the Both Sides Big-Lie is doing it’s job and obscuring the issue, though it not working nearly as well as it normally does.
If there is another big incident soon, it may actually push them over the edge of their ability to rationalize support for Nazis. However, if this dies down or reverses course because there’s a big kerfuffle that can be blamed solely on anyone to the left of the aforementioned Nazis, they will go right back into their bubble content to continue to rationalize Repub bullshit.
That said this is Arkansas, and White Resentment has been on the rise here since the Dems let a charismatic black man give the keynote speech at the 2004 Dem convention and turned into outright White Rule Forever when said black man was elected President. This is Trump country now, if for no other reason than the majority of non-Trumpers are Both Siders Republicans.
Conscience is holding out for “good Americans”, not “good Nazis”.
Public resistance regardless of motives helps in this. Public resistance that has a popular alternative vision helps more.
One searches in vain for a crack in the GOP.
So I tore apart the Marist numbers.
Remember: most polling has fallen the following breakdown:
80 % of GOP voters approve of Trump,
30 % of Independents
10% of Dems
Approval among GOP in the 3 states:
MI 80
PA 71
WI 71
PA and WI break the 80 line. In fact this one of the few times that it is below 80 decisively.
Marist asked an interesting question:
Are you embarrassed by Trump
GOP only again
WI Proud 55 embarrassed 31
MI Proud 62 Embarrassed 27
PA Proud 54 Embarrassed 32
Absent an event, a Trump collapse may come from a sense that Trump is so shameful he can no longer be allowed to be President. Note the gap: There are Republicans who give Trump favorable numbers, but who say he is an embarrassment.
So maybe the accretion of Trumpism will bring his demise.
If so it isn’t effecting Party members view of their own party.In MI and WI GOP members viewed their Party as favorable as Dems viewed their own. Trump doesn’t appear to be hurting the GOP brand the way you would think, though the generic ballot look bad for the GOP.
One last point, before I watch GOT with my son:
Approval ratings for incumbent Senators, both Democrats
PA – 38
MI – 39
Trouble. No two ways about it.
Gov
PA – 46 (Dem)
MI – 40 (GOP)
Trouble as well.
The key issue is the failure of what has become zombie conservatism, snatched from the grave twice in the past decade.
Is there some alternative vision that might possibly motivate the people who want to “make America great again” but find Trump an embarrassment….that can be communicated without the “make America great again” nonsense. Conscience…Prosperity…Peace…Accomplishment….Honesty…For real…Can anyone convince voters that we can indeed get going in that direction again?
It’s time to stop talking marketing, branding, ….and talk in political categories again. Or has everyone bought the consultant koolaid?
At this point both parties are out of gas in many ways, and as a result their strategy is mostly “were not the other party”.
Progressive politics, real progressive politics, requires broad based tax increases.
Fear of proposing this neuters Democratic policy. So we get things that don’t cost much money. It’s why anti-trust sounds good: you don’t have to increase taxes to pay for it.
Grover Norquist said when the Democrats agreed to make the Bush tax cuts permanent for the middle class that they had effectively killed their own agenda.
He is far more right than most Democrats would admit.
If I were a politician I would be vary wary of supporting middle class tax increases.
Exactly. Taxes are a requirement of government–to reduce inflation more than to finance debt.
Democrats must overcome their fear of Grover Norquist and make public goods legitimate again if they are to be an opposition party.
Most politicians are unwilling to make the rhetorical effort to have voters deal with reality. They allow fantasies to persist.
Yes, making the Bush tax cuts permanent legitimized Bush’s entire regime instead of treating it as stolen. Saying “Me too” on the Iraq War did the same thing.
It’s why politicians are not trusted.
Steve Bannon has said that as long as Democrats focus on race and identity politics while Republicans focus on economic nationalism, the GOP crushes the Dems.
Bannon conflates economic prosperity with economic nationalism.
As long as you give away your seed corn to shysters who sell it to other countries, you have the worst of both.
Morally bankrupt is a precondition to being a Republican.
Tax cuts and crony capitalism are the ends that justify tolerating:
Morally bankrupt is the very fabric that keeps the cult together.
There have been no Eisenhower, Rockefeller Republicans since they died.
The pattern has been clear for a very, very long tine
What is it that Republicans have produced as accomplishments since the conservatives took over the party under Reagan?
Isn’t that the question they need to answer and the public needs to ask?
In what way is 50 years of conservative politics a success at anything?
There was a lot of huffing about Pruett-Igoe as a sign of liberalism during the Carter administration. Show me one accomplishment of Republicanism as temporarily beneficial as Pruett-Igoe was when it was first opened. And granted, it was a liberal program that incorporated some not well hidden racism. The GOP has not accomplished even that much.
They have made the rich vastly richer.
They have cut back on the vision of the War on Poverty, which to conservatives was only about giving money to black people.
By their terms that is success.
When RBG or Kennedy retires they will also remake American Jurisprudence.
Were any of those what they promised the public in 1964?
I am admittedly in the bubble known as Portland, Oregon. At the local level, at least, people here have been very willing to raise their taxes to pay for, say, retrofitting of schools for earthquake safety, to replace ancient plumbing, etc. Similarly improvements to parks and libraries. But commonly these measures run up against limits set by a statewide property-tax measure passed by the voters in the early 1990s, and nobody in the legislature or the governor’s mansion has suggested changing that. And nobody has ever persuaded Oregonians to impose a sales tax, so at the state level all depends upon income tax. (Oddly enough, just across the Columbia River in Washington state–where I work–the tax system depends entirely on sales tax, and voters have rejected every proposal for an income tax.)
No Charlottesville won’t matter in six months, as it truly doesn’t matter NOW to GOP voters.
We continue to witness the Overton Window pushed ever rightward to the point where, ironically, Nazi’s are acceptable, at least to GOP voters.
Why do I say “ironically”? Recall in 2009 after Obama was inaugurated, the Teapers frantically ran around with Obama-as-Hitler signs and shrieked about the perfidies of Nazism that Obama was implementing RIGHT NOW RIGHT HERE aiyeeeeeeee!!
And yet, these self-same GOP voters witness “their own” giving the Nazi salute (which some disingenuously claim is “simply the Roman salute” – yeah right), with Nazi flags and other symbols and shrieking about the Jews, and eh? It’s FINE. NO PROBLEM. It’s the “alt-left” who’s the problem, not those “fine people” on the right, who are, after all, “just history buffs,” who are protesting their “right to free speech (when did that right ever go away??).”
And so and so forth.
The Trump Admin is currently plundering and pillaging everything in sight, but GOP voters are simply delighted with it all.
Yes, let’s FREAK OUT and “worry” about “erasing history” by tearing down Jim Crow intimidation racist monuments, all while clapping and cheering Trump declaring National Monuments defunct and selling off mineral and land rights to the highest bidder, from which sale the US taxpayer will enjoy no benefit. But GOP voters are “just concerned” about “national monuments”…. my azz.
The GOP, at least since the days of Nixon, has been a party of racism, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and hatred, and it appears that the election of a Black Man to be POTUS sent these voters waaaay over the edge. And they’re quite willing to “accept” Nazis in America if it “preserves” their precious, vaunted status as WHITES, even though there’s hardly any threat to their so-called “status” by minorities.
The REAL threat to their stupid idiot “status” comes from the Oligarchs are destroying all of our economic status. But the Oligarchs are more than happy to let these heavily brainwashed buffoons believe that the root of all evil and their so-called “problems” are the minorities… and how minorities supposedly somehow magically get “all this stuff that they don’t deserve.”
GAH!!!!
Of course, Charlottesville won’t matter to these heavily propagandized voters. Some other shiney “evil” will be dangled in front of them by Fox, Rush, and their amoral, sold-out “churches” by then.
You can bank on it.