Republican Party
leaders have lost touch with their base, with Independents, and with the
general electorate’s craving for equitable prosperity. That’s odd. The economy
consistently polls at the top of voter concerns. The single most important
factor in the 2016 presidential election pithily was described by the New York Post’s John Crudele in a
column headlined Americans haven’t gotten a
raise in 16 years:
One last statistic, from Sentier Research.
Median annual household income in the US reached $57,263 this past March, which
was 4.5% higher than in March 2015. But — and here’s where the anger comes in —
this March’s figure is still slightly below the $57,342 median annual income in
January 2000. January 2000!
Americans haven’t gotten a raise in more than
16 years. Both Republicans and
Democrats alternately have been in control of or possessed shared influence
over the federal government for a long, dreary, Little Dark Age. Both
Republicans and Democrats have come up short in resolving this slow motion
crisis. No wonder we voters are dissatisfied. No wonder the appeal of outsiders
and party mavericks. The incumbents have
failed us. Comes now Donald Trump as a wake-up call.
We enter an epic
political era. It rather puts one in mind of the second verse of Genesis: And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Trump’s rhetorical
focus on worker prosperity promises light. But … can he deliver? The Republican
Party now is waiting for Trump to prove himself an Agent of Light rather than
just another political Lucifer. To what policies will Trump commit himself? On
whose advice will he rely? Will he refine his disposition to display the kind
of maturity required from the leader of the free world?
Much now depends on
Donald Trump’s immediate next moves. While waiting for these moves let us spend
a moment contemplating the darkness currently besetting the face of the
political deep, both Democrat and Republican.
Consider how
brilliantly economic growth performed under President Bill Clinton’s neoliberal
economic regime. We experienced massive job creation, upward income mobility,
even a federal budget surplus. It is more than mildly bewildering as to why the
Democrats are giving only a weak cheer for neoliberal economic growth policies.
As for the
Republicans: public intellectual Tevi Troy recently provided a profound and
convincing autopsy in Politico:
How GOP Intellectuals’ Feud with
the Base Is Remaking U.S. Politics: What happens when the partnership that
created the modern Republican Party shatters.
What’s really going on is that the ideas that
the conservative intellectual community has been peddling for decades have
failed to appeal to an angry blue-collar voter base. What worked in Reagan’s
era just doesn’t work anymore, and Trump is simply exploiting the divide.
Mainstream conservative think tank positions
on free trade, U.S.-led internationalism, lower personal income tax rates,
Social Security reform and immigration regularization simply do not appear to
speak to today’s high-anxiety voters. … Lower taxes, small government,
free-trade, and more immigration appealed to blue-collar voters in Reagan’s
day; they don’t so much today. And so far, the elite has been reluctant to
adapt.
I, to the best of my
knowledge, am the only capo of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy who also is a
proud card-carrying member of the AFL-CIO. Heresy?
My primal political
influences, Jack Kemp, co-founder and second president of the AFL Players
Association, and Ronald Reagan, president of the AFL-CIO affiliated Screen Actors Guild, both were union bosses. Reagan, as
president, spoke to the nation of the “basic right of free trade unions and to
strike.”
Note also that the
great John L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers and prime founder of the
CIO was a lifelong Republican. He was a supply-sider, willing to see the number
of miners reduced by advanced mining technology so long as the remaining miners
equitably participated in the associated productivity gains.
The founder of the
Republican Party, one rail-splitting Abraham Lincoln was deeply empathetic
toward and supportive of laborers. Today’s GOP has lost touch both with its
roots and its rank-and-file. If Trump can reawaken the GOP that would be
creative destruction at its best.
The American Dream has
two components: prosperity and economic justice. Realizing the Dream demands
that labor and capital both thrive. The parties are polarized.
Republicans champion
prosperity (but a prosperity in practice largely inuring to the “rich.”
Democrats champion fairness, but at the cost of thwarting the prosperity to
which we workers aspire.
The two values,
economic prosperity and economic justice, are not antithetical. Trump, at least
rhetorically, has fused the two. He is receiving an enthusiastic response and
not just in the GOP.
Trump is formidable
yet something of an enigma. He rhetorically hits the nail – equitable
prosperity – on the head. Yet Trump’s proposed highest profile remedies — high
tariffs and mass deportations — would take us out of the frying pan and into
the fire.
Herbert Hoover proved
how toxic tariffs can be. Tariffs contributed to, some say even precipitated,
the Great Depression. His tariffs caused immense misery to millions of workers.
Hostility to
undocumented workers is a proxy issue for stagnation. A policy to deport
derives from the pressure from enough jobs to go around it causes an
understandable grievance to allow illicit competitors for available jobs. To
succeed in his aspirations Trump needs more than a “a big beautiful door” in his wall. He needs job creation.
Trump surely wishes, if elected, to become “the greatest jobs president that
God ever created” rather than the next Depression-inducing Herbert Hoover. Is
Donald Trump able to offer up the kind of mechanisms that propelled America to
create nearly 40 million new jobs under Presidents Reagan and Clinton.
Trump shows some
promise in his unequivocal praise of the gold standard as a crucial element in restoring equitable
prosperity. Trump: “Bringing back the gold standard would be very hard to do,
but boy, would it be wonderful. We’d have a standard on which to base our
money.”
There is plenty of
evidence that the gold standard would let the djinn of equitable prosperity out
of the bottle. Restoring it would be far less difficult than Trump suggests.
Trump’s propensity for
tax rate cuts holds promise. Going into the general
election, Trump need only double down on the gold standard and cutting marginal
tax rates to unite the party and excite America. Will he?
“God divided the light from the darkness. And
God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” Will Donald Trump
credibly offer the voters a recipe to restore the daylight of the American
Dream? Or will his recipe portend an even longer, darker, night?
No comments:
Post a Comment