How Trump‘s populism could be the lifeline for a flailing Democratic party
People often say that this Republican Party is a fundamentally new and revolutionized coalition. In fact, it‘s not. It‘s your father‘s Republican Party that added some more voters under Trump last year - most of them temporarily. But it’s fundamentally a party built around farmers, local protestant churches and small businesses. If you were to ascribe an ideological identity to each of these groups and then combined them you’d be identifying the very core of the Republican Party.
When Trump came along he shifted the internal balance within the GOP on some issues (that are very important to me) away from the Reagan-Bush orthodoxy which I strongly prefer to Trumpism. He abandoned the goal of SS/Medicare entitlement reform, he criticized the Iraq war and he made it a point to bash neoconservative foreign policy in general. Most of all, he offered Americans a fix to what they considered excessive and unregulated immigration when no one else offered one. It was simple, albeit, technocratically counterproductive. But it gave people what they wanted.
Finally, he promised something to Americans that they vaguely supported in abstract terms, which was the re-industrialization of the US economy because he led many voters to believe that he had rediscovered this magic bullet to make it happen - tariffs. Meanwhile, many Americans were erroneously told that re-industrialization could actually happen and that it could be achieved painlessly through smart deals negotiated by the grand master and with the help of his purportedly imperial tariff authority.
Republican elites prior to Trump were too smart for their own good. In a way, they were anti-populist on an array of critical policy issues. They embraced good or necessary policies or made concessions to the opposition even though large chunks of their voters disliked the pragmatism of their own leadership.
As the war in Iraq turned unpopular, the Bush administration could’ve announced a withdrawal as soon as the public mood turned sour. They didn’t. They listened to the experts who made the case for a troop surge, thereby defeating the insurgency and putting an end to the Iraqi civil war.
Obama didn’t care, he ran an election in opposition to the Iraq war and left prematurely, shattered the fragile equilibrium created by the surge and the counter-insurgency and opened the floodgates to ISIS and Iran.
Bush and Hank Paulson also could’ve leaned back in 2008 and accepted the likely implosion of the US economy on a scale akin to 1929 by not bailing out the banks but they did anyway. The optics were awful and the decision palpably eroded trust and confidence in elites, also among diehard conservatives, not just leftists. But it had to be done and they did it.
Republicans also knew that at least for the Americans who don’t want to pay more in taxes, the only viable solution to Medicare and SS - not just Medicaid - would be a structural overhaul of each program. As the average life expectancy grows, as the population ages and as well-off earners with considerable entitlements phase out of the labor market and tap into the public retirement and healthcare pots, an increased age of eligibility and partial privatization become an unavoidable necessity.
Both Bush and Romney were burned by even trying to reform these programs. They didn’t try to do it because they had a financial stake in the outcome of their proposed policies, they didn’t do it because it was popular but because they thought it was necessary.
The same can be said about immigration. Republican elites realized that immigration was a touchy subject for their base. But America had a particular kind of immigration model. While immigrants or asylum seekers in Europe often stay unemployed, under-employed and certainly depend on generous welfare transfers, in America people came in large part to work silently and diligently under the radar. It probably also made a difference that most of the immigrants weren’t coming from Africa and the Middle East. But immigrants in the US are objectively an asset to the US in any material and I‘d also argue spiritual sense. They‘re not a drain on the country and most of them are more pro-American than many young progressive American students on college campuses.
Still, the modus operandi behind the growing surge in immigration over the last decade was problematic, mainly because it was marked not by legal immigration but by illegal immigration. It was also never democratically sanctioned. No President ran on seriously reforming the broken immigration system that emerged after the 1920s restrictions.
Before then, almost anyone (except Chinese at some point) could enter the country. After that, it got more complicated. First, it was race and quota based and then, in the 1960s, it became solely quota based while some quantitative restrictions were lifted yet it was still intricate to legally immigrate to the US. Much more intricate than in the 19th century, in fact.
So instead people migrated illegally and there was a steady and growing demand for foreign labor. If that market-driven demand hadn’t existed, Americans would now be facing massive unemployment and deflation. Yet, they don’t.
Still, people would enter the country illegally, no law nor democratic seal of approval sanctioned their entry, the numbers were continuously growing, the effect on border communities and their local services and demographic composition was both stark and disruptive and people entered the US without being vetted whatsoever. They could be anyone. In the 19th century, most Europeans could enter the US but if they were deemed shady, likely criminal or had lice or other diseases they had to stay on Ellis Island until the next ship would take them home.
And all of this was made possible by political elites who were aware of the net benefits of illegal immigration and tolerated the disruptive status quo through an informal, bipartisan consensus on laissez-faire enforcement. Republicans couldn’t move beyond that informal policy. Bush tried to formalize it by passing an immigration bill to liberalize the restrictive legal immigration system and failed.
Finally, even though immigrants, by and large, are not a drain on US resources, the emergence of the welfare state made the issue of immigration and in particular asylum a distributional issue of fairness.
150 years ago, no poor Polish, Irish or Scandinavian immigrant was housed in a New York hotel or was provided with comprehensive government services since many of those weren’t even available to Americans at that point. However, people‘s standards and expectations have evolved since then. Democrats truly tend to believe that all “disadvantaged” people deserve to reap the rewards from a comprehensive redistributive welfare state, including immigrants.
Many American voters are more skeptical and don’t share such a paternalistic worldview.
As for trade, Americans were sold a cost free utopia by a good tv salesman but now they‘re in the process of finding out that tariffs are actually bad for any economy. Both Democratic and Republican Presidents were often criticized for the free trade agreements they‘ve painstakingly negotiated. But it is in fact free trade that advances the economic interests of the US, not protectionism.
A re-industralization of the US economy is the same dangerous mirage that some luddites and romantics envisioned when they demanded a return to artisanal crafts and an economy based on agriculture rather than machines.
In the end, very few people want the jobs, wages, and work hours of Vietnamese factory workers. What they do want is easy access to good jobs that suit their individual preferences in general and an increasing purchasing power which is effectively diminished by protectionism.
What does all this mean for the Democratic party? When populism fails to deliver, the best way for the opposition is to highlight the failures and promise a better way forward.
On crime they need to embrace a tough on crime & tough on the causes of crime mantra.
On immigration they ought to support a zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration, advocate for the deportation of only recent and criminal immigrants and promise a reform of the legal immigration system which can be accomplished once the American economy runs out of new immigrants and voters realize that the absence of human capital will undermine their own quality of life.
On tariffs Democrats need to be honest with the American public. There won‘t be a fantastical re-industrialization of America. The only industrial renewal will be military in nature because the defense industrial base of the US has to be reinvigorated (at great cost and inefficiently) to match China’s and Russia’s concurrent military buildups. Beyond that, any other industrial sectors are unlikely to come back to the US for good.
So Democrats need to promise a better economy for Americans with less cumbersome regulations or taxes, an end to the tariff regime and embrace free trade.
Will Democrats actually do that?
No. At the moment the Democratic party is veering further to the left. They don’t want to embrace free trade, they‘re not rigorously exploiting the damage done by the the tariffs, they want to return to the Biden status quo ante on immigration, they want more regulations not less, a bigger government, not a smaller and leaner one, they won’t abandon their climate or cultural priorities and they‘re uncomfortable with anything that appears to be a hardening of their stance on crime fighting in urban communities.
When Trump came along he shifted the internal balance within the GOP on some issues (that are very important to me) away from the Reagan-Bush orthodoxy which I strongly prefer to Trumpism. He abandoned the goal of SS/Medicare entitlement reform, he criticized the Iraq war and he made it a point to bash neoconservative foreign policy in general. Most of all, he offered Americans a fix to what they considered excessive and unregulated immigration when no one else offered one. It was simple, albeit, technocratically counterproductive. But it gave people what they wanted.
Finally, he promised something to Americans that they vaguely supported in abstract terms, which was the re-industrialization of the US economy because he led many voters to believe that he had rediscovered this magic bullet to make it happen - tariffs. Meanwhile, many Americans were erroneously told that re-industrialization could actually happen and that it could be achieved painlessly through smart deals negotiated by the grand master and with the help of his purportedly imperial tariff authority.
Republican elites prior to Trump were too smart for their own good. In a way, they were anti-populist on an array of critical policy issues. They embraced good or necessary policies or made concessions to the opposition even though large chunks of their voters disliked the pragmatism of their own leadership.
As the war in Iraq turned unpopular, the Bush administration could’ve announced a withdrawal as soon as the public mood turned sour. They didn’t. They listened to the experts who made the case for a troop surge, thereby defeating the insurgency and putting an end to the Iraqi civil war.
Obama didn’t care, he ran an election in opposition to the Iraq war and left prematurely, shattered the fragile equilibrium created by the surge and the counter-insurgency and opened the floodgates to ISIS and Iran.
Bush and Hank Paulson also could’ve leaned back in 2008 and accepted the likely implosion of the US economy on a scale akin to 1929 by not bailing out the banks but they did anyway. The optics were awful and the decision palpably eroded trust and confidence in elites, also among diehard conservatives, not just leftists. But it had to be done and they did it.
Republicans also knew that at least for the Americans who don’t want to pay more in taxes, the only viable solution to Medicare and SS - not just Medicaid - would be a structural overhaul of each program. As the average life expectancy grows, as the population ages and as well-off earners with considerable entitlements phase out of the labor market and tap into the public retirement and healthcare pots, an increased age of eligibility and partial privatization become an unavoidable necessity.
Both Bush and Romney were burned by even trying to reform these programs. They didn’t try to do it because they had a financial stake in the outcome of their proposed policies, they didn’t do it because it was popular but because they thought it was necessary.
The same can be said about immigration. Republican elites realized that immigration was a touchy subject for their base. But America had a particular kind of immigration model. While immigrants or asylum seekers in Europe often stay unemployed, under-employed and certainly depend on generous welfare transfers, in America people came in large part to work silently and diligently under the radar. It probably also made a difference that most of the immigrants weren’t coming from Africa and the Middle East. But immigrants in the US are objectively an asset to the US in any material and I‘d also argue spiritual sense. They‘re not a drain on the country and most of them are more pro-American than many young progressive American students on college campuses.
Still, the modus operandi behind the growing surge in immigration over the last decade was problematic, mainly because it was marked not by legal immigration but by illegal immigration. It was also never democratically sanctioned. No President ran on seriously reforming the broken immigration system that emerged after the 1920s restrictions.
Before then, almost anyone (except Chinese at some point) could enter the country. After that, it got more complicated. First, it was race and quota based and then, in the 1960s, it became solely quota based while some quantitative restrictions were lifted yet it was still intricate to legally immigrate to the US. Much more intricate than in the 19th century, in fact.
So instead people migrated illegally and there was a steady and growing demand for foreign labor. If that market-driven demand hadn’t existed, Americans would now be facing massive unemployment and deflation. Yet, they don’t.
Still, people would enter the country illegally, no law nor democratic seal of approval sanctioned their entry, the numbers were continuously growing, the effect on border communities and their local services and demographic composition was both stark and disruptive and people entered the US without being vetted whatsoever. They could be anyone. In the 19th century, most Europeans could enter the US but if they were deemed shady, likely criminal or had lice or other diseases they had to stay on Ellis Island until the next ship would take them home.
And all of this was made possible by political elites who were aware of the net benefits of illegal immigration and tolerated the disruptive status quo through an informal, bipartisan consensus on laissez-faire enforcement. Republicans couldn’t move beyond that informal policy. Bush tried to formalize it by passing an immigration bill to liberalize the restrictive legal immigration system and failed.
Finally, even though immigrants, by and large, are not a drain on US resources, the emergence of the welfare state made the issue of immigration and in particular asylum a distributional issue of fairness.
150 years ago, no poor Polish, Irish or Scandinavian immigrant was housed in a New York hotel or was provided with comprehensive government services since many of those weren’t even available to Americans at that point. However, people‘s standards and expectations have evolved since then. Democrats truly tend to believe that all “disadvantaged” people deserve to reap the rewards from a comprehensive redistributive welfare state, including immigrants.
Many American voters are more skeptical and don’t share such a paternalistic worldview.
As for trade, Americans were sold a cost free utopia by a good tv salesman but now they‘re in the process of finding out that tariffs are actually bad for any economy. Both Democratic and Republican Presidents were often criticized for the free trade agreements they‘ve painstakingly negotiated. But it is in fact free trade that advances the economic interests of the US, not protectionism.
A re-industralization of the US economy is the same dangerous mirage that some luddites and romantics envisioned when they demanded a return to artisanal crafts and an economy based on agriculture rather than machines.
In the end, very few people want the jobs, wages, and work hours of Vietnamese factory workers. What they do want is easy access to good jobs that suit their individual preferences in general and an increasing purchasing power which is effectively diminished by protectionism.
What does all this mean for the Democratic party? When populism fails to deliver, the best way for the opposition is to highlight the failures and promise a better way forward.
On crime they need to embrace a tough on crime & tough on the causes of crime mantra.
On immigration they ought to support a zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration, advocate for the deportation of only recent and criminal immigrants and promise a reform of the legal immigration system which can be accomplished once the American economy runs out of new immigrants and voters realize that the absence of human capital will undermine their own quality of life.
On tariffs Democrats need to be honest with the American public. There won‘t be a fantastical re-industrialization of America. The only industrial renewal will be military in nature because the defense industrial base of the US has to be reinvigorated (at great cost and inefficiently) to match China’s and Russia’s concurrent military buildups. Beyond that, any other industrial sectors are unlikely to come back to the US for good.
So Democrats need to promise a better economy for Americans with less cumbersome regulations or taxes, an end to the tariff regime and embrace free trade.
Will Democrats actually do that?
No. At the moment the Democratic party is veering further to the left. They don’t want to embrace free trade, they‘re not rigorously exploiting the damage done by the the tariffs, they want to return to the Biden status quo ante on immigration, they want more regulations not less, a bigger government, not a smaller and leaner one, they won’t abandon their climate or cultural priorities and they‘re uncomfortable with anything that appears to be a hardening of their stance on crime fighting in urban communities.
