Emancipate the Entitlement Plantation

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Like many other freeloading losers, I receive a wide range of government handouts.  Taxpayers give me money to pay for housing and health care.  For years the government helped me pay my student loan interest.  Federal money has helped me cover the cost of raising my children and placing them in daycare.  The “producer class” subsidizes my lifestyle in more ways than I can count.

I’m a white married suburbanite with a great job who lives in a really nice neighborhood.  My house is surrounded by a white picket fence – no kidding.  I haven’t broken into the 1% just yet, but I have ambitions.

I am the face of the Welfare State.  And so are you.

We can’t hope to rein in government spending and reform our entitlement culture until we are willing to view it honestly.  Borrowed government money is spread out all over our culture and few of us are volunteering to give it up.

I earn tax deductions for the courageous public service of holding a mortgage.  I get tax credits for having kids.  The government credits me money for contributing to a retirement account.  Tax deductions subsidize my medical costs through a convenient flex spending card and deductions help me pay my health insurance premiums.

At different times in my life taxpayers helped me pay for day care and student loan interest with deductions.  And it doesn’t stop there.  Taxpayers are going to help me buy a beach house by subsidizing my interest payments, taxes, and maintenance costs.

Just like the coffee I drink, my entitlements aren’t cheap.  The mortgage interest deduction by itself costs the taxpayers more than the entire Food Stamp Program.  That’s right, even at the depth of the Great Recession, with enrollment at a record high, food stamps cost $70bn a year compared to $100bn for the mortgage interest credit.  Federal “tax expenditures,” those myriad little giveaways that reduce personal and corporate tax payments, cost over a trillion dollars a year – twice as much as Medicare.

It takes serious chutzpah, supported by a generous dose of bigotry, to vehemently defend Medicare and the mortgage interest deduction while ranting about an entitlement culture.  In their “outreach” to black communities, Tea Party figures like Allen West decry a plantation mentality that keeps African-Americans voting for Democrats.  They claim that blacks are chained to government programs that keep them poor.

Where do affluent suburbanites fit on this plantation?  What’s keeping the oppressed white folk from throwing off the chains of their flex cards and free Rascal scooters?  Liberation, by this definition, is best for the other guy.

Congress is beginning to flirt with the Simpson-Bowles plan which would trim entitlements in every direction.  It’s time for the public to get behind it.  We can’t keep paying for this lifestyle.  For a long list of reasons we need to make real Bill Clinton’s hollow claim that “the age of big government is over.”

I’m ready to leave this plantation.  You go first.

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Posted in Taxes, Tea Party, Welfare State

Is Obama Trying to Enslave You?

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 7 Comments

“In Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case, in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.”    – Edmund Burke, 1775

A Republican Congressional candidate in Florida this year produced a campaign ad depicting President Obama as the captain of a slave ship full of white children. That seemed outrageous, but it was only the beginning.  The rash of Obamacare=Slavery rhetoric that followed the recent Supreme Court’s ruling on the ACA has made the slave ship ad seem restrained.

This persistent “slavery” line has a deeper resonance than your run of the mill wacky Facebook post.  It exposes an old understanding of the role of politics that poisons our culture and limits our ability to build a government that can serve our needs.  We need to grow beyond this legacy, but first we must confront it. And time is running out.

The authors of the book Why Nations Fail explain that prosperity and political stability rise from open, inclusive public institutions.  A rich network of broadly participatory institutions channel the public will into public policy, creating government with a deep well of legitimacy and responsiveness.  By the same token, public institutions of the opposite character explain the persistence of oppression.

The authors also describe “The Iron Law of Oligarchy,” the strange phenomenon that allows repressive institutions to recreate themselves even after a regime change.

“The internal logic of oligarchies is that they will reproduce themselves not only when the same group is in power, but even when an entirely new group takes control…Even when challenged, as US Southern planters were after the Civil War, their power remained intact and they were able to keep and even recreate a similar set of extractive institutions from which they would again benefit.”

Institutions are far more persistent than any particular government and Southerners have inherited political institutions with a frightening history. Much of the white public still is leaning on political assumptions older than they can remember; a legacy of those repressive institutions.

While the rest of America embarked on a great experiment in open institutions and economic development the slave states lived under a regime as cruel and violent as any banana republic.  For the planter aristocracy, maintaining power under U.S. electoral democracy was a thorny challenge demanding the maximum independence from Washington and a careful compromise with ordinary white citizens.

Slavery in early America was not limited to Africans and early on the distinction between European and African slaves was murky.  A large number of European immigrants came to the colonies either as semi-voluntary indentured servants or as outright slaves.  Many were kidnapped (see the origin of the term) from the streets of British port cities.

The Revolution had no direct impact on white slavery in the South.  A failed 1800 petition to the North Carolina Legislature to free a white slave girl demonstrates that even after the Revolution there was nothing about the institution of slavery that provided inherent protection for whites (also see the fascinating 1857 Louisiana case of Alexina Morrison).

The planters understood that if the South’s small farmers, tradesmen and merchants ever organized their own independent institutions their slave capital could be destroyed in a single election cycle.  Over time the planters developed a racial alliance, a sort of unstated compromise with the white voting public.  That alliance granted limited protection to whites by shifting the basis of slavery onto an ethic of white supremacy.

Racism among ordinary white Southerners was not merely ignorance or bias, it was a survival strategy.  The subtle compromise between the planters and ordinary whites combined racial supremacy and a shared fear of powerful central authority to keep the aristocracy intact and the remaining white population more or less free.

The Southern formula for liberty became embedded so deep in our psyche that it’s practically a genetic marker:

Freedom = Weak Government + White Racial Superiority

Tamper with either of those variables and you open the door to white slavery.  The idea is so old and etched so deep that it has passed to our generation unchallenged.  It inspired an enduring legacy of self-generated repression, a sort of crowd-sourced Fascism, able to perpetuate itself with little direction from above.

Freedom in that equation meant nothing more complex than being left alone. If your government is so corrupt that it enslaves a large portion of the population and consistently threatens to enslave you, then you aren’t looking to that government to deliver schools, roads, infrastructure or other services.  In the best scenario, that government is impotent and distant.  That attitude toward government travelled wherever Southern culture went, from Oklahoma, to the Mountain West, to California’s Central Valley, and elsewhere.

The Civil Rights Acts of ’64 and ’65 weakened the old compromise.  A more muscular Federal government put Southern institutions on the defensive where they have remained ever since.  Under pressure from in-migration, Federal enforcement, and the influence of global capitalism, the old formula is at last teetering on the edge of collapse, but that weakness has inspired a surprising rally.

Southern whites today, like my ancestors, still carry an almost primal fear that a strong central government could give unstoppable power to either wealthy elites or to minorities who would use that power to strip them of what they have (look again at the slave ship ad).  Growing racial equality weakens ordinary whites’ psychological ties to the wealthy.  Hispanic migration scrambles the racial order, giving the wealthy a new source of labor and weakening the leverage of working whites.  The formula is in trouble and much of the white public, rather than cheering the promising development toward open institutions and authentic liberty, is terrified.

As the Democratic Party grew hostile to the old formula Southern political institutions faced a unique challenge.  The South has never tolerated multi-party democracy.  In just over a decade, Southerners accomplished the remarkable transformation from single-party white Democratic rule to single-party white Republican rule as the defenders of the old ways fled into the nearly empty Southern Republican Party apparatus, overwhelming any resistance.  Their growing power in the Republican Party has created a miserable muddle at a national level as party of Lincoln and Reagan struggles to absorb waves of fuming Dixiecrats hostile to much of the party’s traditional, Hamiltonian message.

A cold demographic reckoning looms for Southern whites.  Their domination of public institutions there will end soon, perhaps within a decade.  They could use the time they have left to finally build services and social capital that support authentic community, respecting and serving the needs of all citizens.

They could construct fair systems for public education funding, set up rational tax structures, and build the kind of public institutions that foster compassion and understanding across cultural lines.  They could cultivate tolerance and respect for diverse religious and cultural traditions.

They could make a choice to break the Iron Law of Oligarchy while they still have time.  When political dominance passes to a new demographic coalition, that group could inherit effective public institutions that respect the rights of all citizens regardless of race or wealth.  Public institutions could be so open and representative that race and ethnicity become politically meaningless.

Or they could go down in a destructive frenzy, tearing down public institutions, slashing the shared burdens of citizenship, and seizing every trivial scrap of lordship until the last vestiges of authority squeeze out between the fingers of their bleeding fists.

Demographic Karma can be a bitch. White Southerners will soon get the chance to live with the political institutions they constructed, under someone else’s dominance.  Whether they will reform those institutions while they have the chance is an open question that will find its answer sooner than most people expect.

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Posted in Election 2012, Neo-Confederate, Race, Tea Party

Candy Cigarettes and Social Conservatives

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

Growing up, there was a U-Totem just a block from my cousin’s trailer park.  We used to walk there to buy candy cigarettes and a brand of gum that came in a fake Skoal can.

I developed a pack-a-day candy cigarette habit on my summer visits.

Apparently those chalky sugar cigarettes I loved as a kid were never outlawed.  This summer I found them in a specialty candy store in Nashville.  My kids couldn’t grasp the appeal.  When I showed them the candy they looked at me like I was offering them a box of spiders and warily refused the treat.

Social conservatives could learn a lot from public health and safety campaigns of the last generation.  With relatively modest legislative support those efforts transformed our culture at its core in a very short time.  Instead of leading with prohibition they chipped away at the culture with a steady onslaught of reason, science and careful political pressure.  Anti-tobacco activists successfully slashed the incidence of a practice that was not only a cultural icon, but a physical addiction.

This lesson is important because culture issues remain Republicans’ core differentiator.  Those issues, when stripped of hysteria and extremism, are perhaps more popular than they have ever been, yet social conservatives are a serious electoral drag. Republicans need to find a strategy that preserves the high ground on culture issues while avoiding authoritarian policies that frighten voters.

Social conservatism, at its best, represents an optimism born of the understanding that law can never be separated from morality and that right always prevails over time.  To borrow Dr. King’s phrase, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.   This confidence, when embraced, gives rise to an open-minded fearlessness that forms a powerful draw.  There is much in our modern era to fuel this kind of confidence.

A social conservative from the ‘70’s, plopped down into our age, might be thrilled by what they found as most of the greatest fears of their era have faded.  Divorce rates have not only leveled off, but declined.  Children are treated with near-reverence, buckled up, cherished, and sheltered from negative influences.  New York’s Times Square in our time is a ’70′s conservative’s wildest fantasy made real.

Substance abuse, crime, and smoking not only halted their rise, they have declined significantly.  Public disapproval of adultery has strengthened.  Abortion is in steady, long-term decline.  Teen sexual activity and pregnancy are in dropping.

Our visitor from the ‘70’s would be treated to one particularly mind-boggling phenomenon.  Homosexuals, once mistakenly derided as lust-driven deviants, are pressing for the right to settle down in stable families and raise children.  The Village People now have entirely different plans for the YMCA – signing their kids up for soccer and gymnastics.

By most reasonable measures, social conservatism has experienced a generation of triumph.  So why are today’s family values advocates such a gloomy bunch?

Social conservatism can be confident when its goals are rooted in the real world of rational, measurable outcomes, but there is a tendency among the rigidly religious to view the wider world with fear rather than confidence.  When social conservatism becomes dominated by insecurity, dark authoritarian impulses emerge that set it at odds both with traditional conservative values and with the mainstream of American public opinion.

We live in an age of near-continuous social transformation. That reality of wrenching, dislocating change is causing heartburn for religious conservatives of all faiths globally.  Their discomfort is rising toward a crescendo of blind, apocalyptic terror as the predictable assumptions of the past all fall into question.  Their paranoia is pressuring the wider political movements which depend on their support.

Social conservatism, at its worst, can be a political gateway drug, paving the way to ugly tendencies toward religious fundamentalism, bigotry and repression.  When “values voters” are motivated primarily by fear, their political movements descend into identity politics.  Their failures in this past election are just the tip of the iceberg.  If social conservatives cannot soon find a broader ethnic and racial foundation a political eclipse looms.

The greatest real-world challenge facing social conservatives in our era is the way in which lower income Americans are seeing their lifestyle and opportunities decline relative to the more affluent.  Under the pressure of falling wages for unskilled labor, rising education costs, and the growing challenge of obtaining quality healthcare, lower earners are seeing every pillar of their social networks crumble.  In those communities, family life and traditional values are crumbling along with their economic prospects.

Among those who are struggling to survive many of the positive cultural trends that have improved the quality of life for everyone else are nowhere in evidence.  Social conservatives have a critical role to play in spreading values that not only promote family welfare, but improve the chances of material success.

They cannot accomplish those goals while mired in racially-tinged apocalyptic fears.  The Great White Freakout has hit social conservatives hard, devastating their ability to spread their message across cultural boundaries.

The insight that social conservatives could bring to the most pressing economic issue of our time is their recognition of the crucial role of moral values in economic success.  The problems facing lower income Americans cannot be solved with government programs alone.  By the same token, they cannot be solved with a reflective urge to prohibit, repress, and scourge.

As David Frum explained, “If social conservatives can shift away from the urge to ban and condemn, and instead think more about how to support and encourage, they can be a rich source of inspiration for the larger conservative world and the Republican party in the years ahead.”

A broad swath of Americans of all ethnicities and religions are open to the core values of social conservatism.  An overwhelming majority of Americans are spiritual, values-oriented, prepared to sacrifice their own personal desires to support their families.  At the same time they are generally hostile toward religious scolds who want to use the political process to impose their beliefs on others.

Can social conservatives overcome their urge to write religious dogma into legislation and instead use their influence to shore up traditional social and economic values in struggling communities?  Can the lessons of the successful science and reason-focused health campaigns of the past generation form a blueprint for a new era of conservative priorities?  Their success proves that a values campaign can win if it is based on something more universal than personal religious convictions.

With the right approach and a healthy dose of humility, social conservatives could have a very bright political future.  You don’t need to pry the candy cigarettes from my cold dead hands to change public attitudes.  Persuasion is more powerful than prohibition in changing a culture.

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Posted in Ownership Society, Religious Right

Chick-fil-A, Gay Marriage, and Your Grandchildren

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

It’s hard to read about the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement without playing a game of ‘what would I have done?’  That’s a particularly pointed exercise for a white Southerner whose cherished ancestors placed themselves so consistently and even courageously on the wrong side of history.  Ultimately, of course, the only meaningful test of ‘what would I have done’ is what I choose to do right now and fortunately (or unfortunately) those opportunities arise in every generation.

This spring when Obama described his “evolution” on the question of gay marriage I felt like I could relate.  Perhaps there was cynicism in the structure and timing of his message, but having traveled a similar road I’m not so certain.

As a conservative in the traditional meaning of the word, I’m very uncomfortable with efforts to redefine any social institution, especially in the courts.  At the same time, a conservative loves liberty in all its forms.  When a group of people rise up and demonstrate their commitment to their rights in a responsible, well-articulated manner, how do you say no to them in good conscience?

Looking back for guidance one is inevitably reminded of the Civil Rights Movement.  The pattern of non-violent resistance adopted by Martin Luther King had a complex beauty, operating at one time on so many levels.  Sure, it defied stereotypes by demonstrating the discipline, order, and humanity that segregationists sought to deny Southern blacks.  However, its most potent impact may have been the way it forced otherwise indifferent observers to recognize the ugliness of the segregation lobby.

The Civil Rights Movement placed the burden of black suffering squarely on the plates of people all over the country who otherwise felt that they had no part in Jim Crow oppression.  It forced citizens with little direct interest in the matter to consult their moral compass and decide where their loyalties should lie.  The movement for gay rights is having the same effect.

I can still make an esoteric argument that gay marriage is meddling or social engineering or whatnot, but I have lost my ability to put my soul behind it.  Maybe you can sit across the table from a beloved friend and tell them that your straight family is more legitimate, more right, more legally and politically appropriate than theirs.  Perhaps you can look into the eyes of people you care for and respect and explain that providing their children with the full legal protection of an official family would threaten something important that no one seems to be able to coherently define.

I am not going to do that.  Eat your sandwich alone.

Before you put down that shake and reach for your Bible, let’s make something clear.  According to the Bible, marriage is a sacred covenant between one man, one woman, his additional wives, his slaves, his wives’ slaves, his concubines, virgins he’s caught raping, and any women he happens to capture in battle.  Oh, and his sister-in-law, if his brother dies without giving her a male child.

The Bible also explicitly and repeatedly condemns interracial marriage. The New Testament never redefines any of these rules.  The Bible is a volatile weapon that should be handled with care and humility.

And tradition?  Until about the time I was born, traditional marriage in my ancestral state of Texas meant same-race marriage.  Anything else violated God’s natural law.  Virginia Circuit Judge Leon Bazile explained traditional marriage in elegantly bigoted language in his ruling which finally reached the Supreme Court in 1967:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.”

It probably sounded good to him at the time.

As long as this remains a free country (which cannot be taken for granted), the culture warriors of every generation will lose, just as they have for centuries.  From the dawn of the Republic, almost decade by decade, we have expanded the scope and meaning of liberty.  Each new wave faced a futile line of opponents, struggling to stop others from exercising personal liberties that frightened them, or that threatened their entrenched interests.  This week that line of dead-enders stretches out the door of the Chick-fil-A.

Enjoy that sandwich.  Your grandchildren will be so proud.

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Posted in Civil Rights, Religious Right

Republicans Should Not Surrender the Cities

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 1 Comment

America crossed a remarkable threshold last year when Democrat Bob Filner won the race for Mayor of San Diego. For the first time in the modern era and perhaps the first time since the two major parties took shape, none of the nation’s ten largest cities have a Republican mayor.

It would be tough to find a more pressing symptom of the party’s demographic challenge than the decline of the iconic Republican Mayor. Symbols of pragmatic, sensible leadership, Republican mayors formed a powerful link to the party’s Hamiltonian capitalist roots. Our countryside is continuing to empty as more and more Americans build a life in the city. Rebuilding a competitive urban agenda will be a critical key to building a 21st century GOP.

The decline of the party’s influence in urban areas is particularly shocking for how quickly it has developed. Outside of the machine politics of Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, Republicans were regularly competitive in most of America’s major cities until the late sixties.

During that decade, cities like Detroit, San Francisco, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles all had Republican mayors. Beyond the urban core Republicans in all of America’s big cities remained a potent, sometimes unchallenged force in suburban politics until the last few elections.

As recently as 2001, half of the country’s ten largest cities were still governed by Republicans (New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Antonio, Phoenix). Even Jersey City had a Republican mayor. Now, not only have we lost all of the top ten, there are only two Republican mayors in the country’s 25 largest cities (Indianapolis, Fort Worth).

The party’s shift during the Sixties away from its Hamiltonian capitalist traditions toward a more rural, southern, Jeffersonian agenda began a slow erosion of Republicans’ urban heft. That situation has become critical in the past two decades as the party’s rhetoric has grown more divisive and its ability to enforce ideological discipline has increased.

Republican mayors have a history of independence and distance from the party’s ideologues. The increasingly hostile national agenda has smothered the efforts of urban Republicans to carve out a city-focused appeal.

The Jeffersonian ideals the party has so enthusiastically embraced in the decades since it began its retreat into Greater Dixie are dead on arrival downtown. Life on the streets of a major city exposes serious flaws in a Libertarian-leaning, laissez faire agenda.

No one in Chicago or New York can meet all of their survival needs entirely on their own. Cities are by their nature cooperative, commercial enterprises that cannot survive without effective government. That collaborative energy feeds a commercial environment that generates massive wealth. The knowledge economy needs cities, and cities need infrastructure and administration.

The traditional conservative notion of personal liberty emphasizes the interconnected nature of rights and duties. That older understanding of freedom is the only one that makes sense in the packed, interconnected environment of a city. Downtown, the surly “don’t tread on me” attitude to personal freedom that dominates current Republican thought is a recipe for misery.

What I do with my garbage, my stereo, my dog, or my arsenal of weapons, has an immediate impact on the life, liberty, and happiness of my neighbors. Urban life demands a much more sophisticated understanding of personal liberty than modern Republicans at the national level seem willing to tolerate.

Old world, traditional conservatism is extremely well-suited for urban life, but the southern-fried Jeffersonian model wreaks havoc on the city. Unfortunately, the style of conservatism that our cities so desperately need has no political sponsor in our current environment.

Republicans have retreated into a parallel reality, an insular worldview one can only maintain with very light, carefully mediated contact with the outside world. That kind of limited horizon is almost impossible to sustain in downtown Seattle or Chicago or even Houston.

Democrats, as demonstrated by the struggles of Rahm Immanuel in Chicago, still can’t shake the bonds of 19th century machine politics. Under Democrats, the demands of administration are always subordinate to the need to hand out favors. City taxpayers under Democratic control are living food for an insatiable political patronage machine.

Urban voters care deeply about transportation, education and crime. Their politics is haunted by corruption, expensive patronage engines, self-serving bureaucracies, and public employee unions with extraordinary power. Traditional Republican pragmatism, separated from divisive cultural politics, would find and enthusiastic audience.

Unfortunately, the national climate has made this almost impossible. A national message tailored for a white, rural or exurban audience and mercilessly policed by ideologues is stifling efforts to promote the party in the city. Urban Republicans want less Jefferson and more Hamilton.

Ideology doesn’t plow the streets or fix potholes. Cities either work or they die. That’s why America’s cities, even cities that consistently voted Democratic at the national level, once cherished their hard-nosed, iconoclastic Republican mayors. And that’s why they seldom elect Republicans anymore.

A looser, more forgiving ideological stance inside the GOP would work wonders for urban America. If the Republican Party could tolerate a wider range of voices then conservatives in the cities could build a more customized appeal with fewer burdens from above. In turn, a new generation of Republicans recruited and fostered in the city could help the party craft a broader appeal for the future.

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Posted in Republican Party

How Republican Institutions Empower Extremists

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 1 Comment

Politics in the US is steadily devolving into a form of consumer entertainment. That corrosion of basic civic interest has hit the Republican Party particularly hard because of institutional factors that leave the organization bent toward extremes. It will be difficult to stop the GOP from nominating cartoon characters like E.W. Jackson without examining and addressing the institutional characteristics that have made the Republican Party America’s choice for the politically weird.

A glance across the aisle at the Democrats might yield some insights. Ideology is a secondary concern in Democratic politics. Since the mid-19th century the party has been organized around the skillful manipulation of patronage.

That style of organization has been a weakness at times, blocking efforts to update the party’s policy priorities (think of the Civil Rights battles or the ’68 convention). However, it breeds a rock-hard pragmatism that acts as a persistent check on the extremes.

That structural difference between the Republican and Democratic organizations helps explain why the GOP has been more severely damaged by the crazy wave. In structural terms the Democratic Party is inherently more conservative in the sense that it is more protective of the status quo than the GOP.

Extra-political groups form the backbone of Democratic Party politics. The term refers to organizations with strong political interests, like a state teachers’ union, whose main purpose is not inherently political. These groups cannot live on activism alone. They have jobs to do, jobs which depend on effective government.

In the Democratic Party, you can push ideology all you want until it bumps up against patronage demands. If the machinery of government stops working the impact will be deeply felt among the people who control the party’s ground operations. Government effectiveness matters to interests at the core of Democratic politics.

The difference this makes can be seen by comparing the styles of two predominantly Democratic organizations, Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women. NOW is an issue advocacy group. Its grass-roots activities consist mostly of tracking legislation of concern and mobilizing members to voice support or opposition.

Planned Parenthood operates women’s health clinics all over the country. Those clinics rely heavily on public funding and often provide abortion services in areas that are deeply hostile to Democratic politics. While NOW’s structure requires it to motivate a base to action, Planned Parenthood must do more than influence politics. It has to perform a function in the day to day world that depends heavily on public support.

Groups like NOW can afford to be as unreasonable as their most generous donors will tolerate. The organization itself is not threatened by any failure to accomplish a practical objective. Advocacy groups feed on controversy. Achieving their policy goals would be like a dog catching the car.

NOW, for example, took a hard line on the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Alito, threatening to campaign against otherwise choice-friendly Senators from both parties who refused to obstruct his nomination. Planned Parenthood recognized the obnoxious irresponsibility of subverting the democratic process purely to activate a political base.

They backed down from a filibuster of the Alito nomination, angering activists on the extremes but preserving their vital policy influence on Capitol Hill. Planned Parenthood has more to worry about than motivating an extremist base. Planned Parenthood is no more “moderate” on the issues than NOW, but they are forced to be vastly more pragmatic.

The dominating presence of extra-political organizations like unions, Planned Parenthood, and other groups performing public functions checks the pressure from Democratic activists to pursue irrational extremes. The GOP political universe, by contrast, is made up of dozens of major advocacy groups comparable to NOW, but Republicans have almost nothing like Planned Parenthood or the unions.

There are hardly any traditional Republican interests, apart from perhaps Chambers of Commerce, who have a vested material interest in government effectiveness. That leaves no structural force to press back against the entertainers who would motivate turnout in primaries and caucuses with appeals to rabid Id.

There are sensible people involved in Republican politics who sacrifice time they could devote to family or work to participate in politics out of a sense of civic duty. The game is rigged against them. They are outgunned and constantly on the retreat. They have been walking away from day to day engagement for decades when they aren’t being actively chased to the margins.

We can talk about solving the problem by encouraging greater grassroots participation by “moderates,” but that is a fantasy. The kind of people who care about rational, pragmatic political outcomes are in large part the same people who are busy taking care of their families, their businesses, and the increasingly intense demands of successful American life.

Even if they, somewhat heroically, chose to carve out time from their jobs and their kids to battle for months for the opportunity to spend all day at Virginia’s GOP nominating convention, would they ever choose to do it again? How many of the sensible people who form the backbone of American life would consistently volunteer to spend weekends in the crowd that nominated E.W. Jackson?

This has created a rift between the Republican activist base and the Republican electoral base. If the mechanics of Republican politics continues to favor people with more time than sense, we’ll nominate fewer and fewer candidates that general election voters will accept. Worse, the traditional core values of the conservative movement will be swamped beneath layers of paranoid muck.

Replicating the Democrats’ emphasis on patronage is not the answer. In fact, that tactic is already losing its punch, likely exposing the Democratic Party very soon to the same forces of weirdness that have ravaged the GOP. The best structural response lies in adapting Republican nominating and decision-making practices to make them open to broader involvement by otherwise busy successful people – the GOP’s alienated, traditional electoral base.

Here are a few ideas that might help.

1) Abandon the sanctity of the nominating process

There is little hope for meaningful improvement in the Republican Party until pragmatic conservatives openly reject the extremes. That means organizing internal institutions that will allow rationalists to coordinate general election challenges to outrageous nominees. It is a decade too late to work this out behind the scenes in conventions or in local party meetings. We have to leverage the frustration of general election voters to force a change.

2) Forge new institutions that support pragmatic goals

Rational conservatives need organizations that allow them coordinate their activities and lend material support to candidates who would challenge the extremes. Jon Huntsman just launched one such effort. We need hundreds more.

3) Drain the influence from deeply anti-representative organs like caucuses and conventions

After weakening the hold of extremists by taking decisions directly to general election voters, use the influence gained from the process to strip power from unrepresentative processes. Caucuses are crazy-factories. They require far more investment of personal time than most reasonably competent people in the prime of life can afford. Our emphasis on in-person institutions is constructing a Republic of the Bizarre. We must blunt their influence.

4) End the practice of primary runoffs

A primary is already a low-turnout process. Primary runoffs are a cruel joke. Without the anti-representative dynamics of a runoff, David Dewhurst would be Texas’s Senator.

5) Explore communications technology to expand participation

There is a quality to in-person political involvement that cannot be replicated online. That said, this is not the 19th century. People do not have months of downtime waiting for the harvest season. Our in-person grassroots institutions are no longer the engines of quality representation that Tocqueville observed. We need to explore alternatives enabled by communications technology that can keep people connected with a smaller investment of personal time.

Solving the GOP’s nutjob problem is more than a partisan issue. The techniques that succeed in restoring the Republican Party’s sanity may provide the key to adapting representative government to succeed in a new century.

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Posted in Republican Party, Tea Party

The Republican Dilemma on a Map

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 2 Comments

The Republican Party’s most electable candidate starts this race trailing Obama by only a few points in national polls.  That seems like a promising development until you look at the map.  At this point the most likely outcome of the 2012 Presidential race is a modest win by Obama in terms of the popular vote, but an Electoral College landslide virtually identical to 2008.

The apparent contradiction between a close race for the popular vote and a looming Electoral College rout rises from a Republican strategy to concentrate our appeal in an ever-narrowing swath of the country.  The map tells a tale of alarming geographic polarization that over time could threaten the party’s national relevance.

This regionalism is a fairly recent development.  Only 28 years ago Ronald Reagan swept 49 states and won 57% of the popular vote on the strength of a broad coalition that spanned traditional party boundaries.  When that coalition began to break it led to Republican losses in some unprecedented places.

In ’92 we lost previously reliable Republican states like Illinois, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Michigan.  That was the first year we lost intensely conservative Delaware County, home to Philadelphia’s prestigious Mainline. We’ve never again been competitive in those places.

In ’96 we lost the Wall Street bedroom counties in Connecticut.  In 2008, the national Republican ticket lost Chicago’s collar counties for the first time since the parties took their modern shape.  That year we even lost the old Goldwater/Reagan base around San Diego and McCain carried Orange County by only 30,000 votes.   In 2011, Democrats won local leadership of suburban Philadelphia’s Montgomery County for the first time ever.  None of those classic Republican strongholds are likely to support the party’s Presidential nominee again anytime in the near future.

There are numerous states that have elected Republican Governors, Senators, even legislative majorities, in which the Republican Presidential ticket is no longer competitive.    Republicans remain a force at the state and local level across the Northeast and the Midwest.  Nevertheless, from Maine to Minnesota the only state in which Romney has ever held a lead is Indiana.  If Romney takes two states in those regions it will be an achievement.

In a single generation we have abandoned our overwhelming center-right majority and replaced it at the national level with a bitter, racially-tinged fortress strategy.  Facing the weakest Democratic competition in decades, this year’s Republican nominee has a chance to win your state if:

1)      It failed to outlaw slavery prior to the Civil War, or

2)      It has no major metropolitan areas, or

3)      You live in Ohio and the vote suppression campaign works

None of those conditions guarantee that Republicans will be competitive in your state.  Those conditions only describe the limited subset of states where the modern GOP can try to rally voters to the national ticket.

Instead of competing nationally, the GOP is embracing a strategy of extreme ideological rigidity in the areas where its message still resonates.  What we have lost in breadth we are compensating for in intensity.

The national GOP has set itself firmly against every dominant demographic trend.  America is becoming more ethnically diverse, less religious, and more urban in an unrelenting march.  Hispanics are the country’s fastest growing ethnic group. Two elections ago George Bush carried almost half of the Hispanic vote. Now they support Obama at a whopping 70% rate. City-dwellers are solidly Democratic. Obama holds more than a 10-point lead among women.

The future looks even worse as young people are trending Democratic at rates not seen in decades. In 1980, Reagan carried 60% of young voters.  As recently as 1992 more voters under thirty identified as Republicans than Democrats.  In 2008 two-thirds of young people voted for Obama, and he retains a 26-point lead going into this election.

Obama won both Virginia and North Carolina in 2008, the first time that’s happened since the Dixiecrats joined the GOP.  As the Neo-Confederate Republican firewalls in Texas and Georgia grow more urban and Hispanic, those critical anchor states are showing signs of Republican weakness.

There is a dim glimmer on the horizon.  Republicans remain a serious force in many states that vote reliably Democratic at the top of the ticket.  Like a living time capsule, Republicans there generally preserve the popular Hamiltonian values the party represented prior to the Great Dixiecratic wave.  Their power is dampened at home by the depressing Neo-Confederate drumbeat from the national party, but their appeal and their organization is intact.

Blue state Republicans might at some point muster the will to push back publicly against the national party’s bizarre extremes.  If that happens, we could see a relatively speedy revival of the center-right coalition that two decades ago appeared destined to dominate America’s future. Such a revival probably won’t happen before the party experiences a truly humiliating collapse at the national level – which is not likely this fall.  The story in the electoral map will probably get much worse for Republicans before it gets better.

For your consideration, two maps –

The electoral map from 2012:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/election-map-2012/president/

The map of states and territories that allowed slavery at the start of the Civil War:

US SlaveFree1861

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Posted in Election 2012, Neo-Confederate, Republican Party, Tea Party

The Tea Party vs. Math: A Detailed Look at the 2012 Results

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — Leave a comment

The Religious Right and Tea Party groups are making the case that Romney could have won if he had more clearly and unambiguously embraced their policies.  They are determined to force the Republican Party to stop nominating “moderates,” on the shaky premise that compromise has cost the party at the polls.

Election results from across the country tell the opposite story.  By comparing Romney’s winning percentage to the margins of other Republican races it is clear that the far right, especially hardline religious conservatives, were a drain on the GOP ticket in almost every corner of the nation.  The party’s most stubborn ideological core is unlikely to coaxed back to reason by anything as flimsy as numbers, but the results still deserve a look.

Romney out-polled the Republican Senate field by a national average of four points.  The story gets even clearer with a look at specific races.  Candidates who were able to break completely from the party’s religious conservative base were consistently more competitive than the Romney/Ryan ticket.  There was not a single Republican Senate candidate with opposition who outperformed Romney by embracing Tea Party or religious conservative priorities.  Not one.

Of the 33 Republican Senate candidates, only eight of them gathered a higher percentage of the vote than Romney (one was a virtual tie, a stand-in candidate in California).   Of the eight who outpolled Romney, three ran essentially unopposed (in Tennessee, Wyoming, and Mississippi).  The other five all ran centrist campaigns at maximum distance from the Tea Party and they pointedly rejected culture war themes.

Laura Lingle in Hawaii (+10% over Romney/Ryan), Scott Brown in Massachusetts (+9%), Linda McMahon in Connecticut (+3%) and Heather Wilson in New Mexico (+2%) avoided pro-life positions.  Dean Heller in Nevada (+.2%) has ridden both sides of the abortion debate while downplaying its importance. Brown supported gay marriage and financial reform.  McMahon actually passed out fliers urging people to vote for her and Obama.

The rest of the GOP Senate field under-performed Romney/Ryan by an average of seven points. The underperformers included Palin-endorsed hardliners in deep-red states like Ted Cruz (-1% under Romney/Ryan), Deb Fischer (-2%), and Jeff Flake (-4%).  If a deeply evangelical Tea Party fantasy candidate can’t outpoll Romney in Texas then perhaps the Republican far right is not the force they think they are.

As in 2010, Tea Party activists in 2012 gave the Republican Party some of its worst performing candidates. Two of the Tea Party’s most prominent primary winners, Todd Akin (-14% against Romney) and Richard Mourdock (-11%) cost the GOP near-certain Senate gains.  Josh Mandel in Ohio (-3%), Tom Smith in Pennsylvania (-2%) and Denny Rehberg in Montana (-11%) rode their Tea Party message to big embarrassing losses in races that Republicans could have won.

The ideological fringe was no more popular farther down the ballot.  Some surprisingly tight Congressional races and outright losses from prominent Tea Party candidates like Chip Cravaack in Minnesota, Allen West in Florida, and Joe Walsh in Illinois point to the same anti-Tea Party dynamic seen in Senate results.

In Gubernatorial races pragmatic Republicans who avoided Tea Party rhetoric again outperformed the field.  In the eleven campaigns, only four Republicans gained a larger percentage of the vote than Romney/Ryan.  All of them ran toward the center.  Clearly, “moderation” was not a drag on the Romney campaign.

Patrick McCrory won in North Carolina (+5% over Romney) while taking a muted stance on abortion, supporting state-funded pre-Kindergarten, and backing campaign finance reform.  Rob McKenna came within 60,000 votes of the Washington Governor’s office (+8%) while taking an aggressive pro-choice position and backing civil unions.  By contrast, Indiana Tea Party favorite Mike Pence under-performed Romney by almost five points, winning his deep red state with a mere plurality.

The story of the 2012 election was a continuing pattern of Republican geographic concentration.  For two decades Republicans have been giving away traditional bastions in places like suburban Philadelphia and New York, Chicago’s collar counties, and Southern California.  The Republican Party is instead catering to shrinking geographic strongholds in the south and rural west, trending farther and farther to extremes in those bolt holes while becoming less competitive nationally.

In the Northeast, Republicans lost every major state and Federal race.  New England hasn’t had a Republican Congressman since 2008.  California, which gave the country Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, is now run by a Democratic supermajority.

Christian Right donor and activist Richard Viguerie claims that “Tea Partiers will take over the Republican party in the next four years.” That would be great news for Democrats.

A hardline base strategy might allow Republicans to hold their own in low-turnout elections. Over time, though, the fundamental unpopularity of far right politics will take its toll.  The math is relentless, but the Tea Party is too pure to be swayed by failure.

When a decision boils down to math vs. ideology, which choice is the modern Republican Party most likely to make?

*****

Full table of results:

Romney vs. GOP Senate

Romney vs. GOP Governors

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Posted in Election 2012, Tea Party

How the GOP is Winning Among the Poor

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 2 Comments

Among the far-right entertainer class, 2012 was defined as the “takers versus makers” election. According to that narrative, Romney lost because the grasping poor wanted a President who would promise them “free stuff” instead of opening up opportunities to succeed through hard work. Minority voters supposedly chose Obama by spectacular margins because, well…you know what those people are like.

The results tell a very different story. Obama performed well in many of America’s wealthiest areas, including places that have been Republican strongholds for generations. Romney, on the other hand, racked up lopsided wins won in some of the country’s poorest counties. A closer look at Romney’s success among the poor reveals a disturbing picture of the forces overwhelming the Republican Party in our time.

Brian Kelsey at Civic Analytics in Austin did an excellent analysis of voting patterns in the most government dependent counties in the US. He used data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to gather a list of counties whose residents are most dependent on government aid in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and other “welfare” programs.

Strangely, Kelsey discovered that Romney won 21 of the 25 most welfare-dependent counties in the country. The pattern Kelsey found extends beyond his limited data set. Romney won some of his most overwhelming support in the 2012 election from America’s most “dependent” regions, carrying 77 of America’s 100 most welfare-dependent counties.

It turns out that America’s most aid-dependent counties share some other characteristics that might explain their voting patterns. They are overwhelmingly white, southern, and rural. In fact, 86 of them are in areas that did not outlaw slavery prior to the Civil War and 81 of them are majority white.

Romney lost only four of those 81. Three of those four are in the North. He lost only one county on that list which was white and Southern (Elliot, KY), and he lost there by 60 votes.

Another surprising pattern emerges from the analysis – the stark racial divide between the poorest Americans, and those who receive the most poverty relief. In an interesting irony, the list of most dependent counties does not line up with the list of poorest counties. The counties which receive the highest levels of welfare assistance are disproportionately white; while most of America’s poorest counties are majority-minority.

Though African-Americans and Hispanics suffer far higher poverty rates, they receive far less proportionately in government transfers. Poor whites receive government assistance at a far higher rate than poor non-whites. In other words, even in poverty, it pays to be white.

On the other end of the spectrum, Obama won half of the nation’s fifty wealthiest counties. He lost all of the counties on the 50 wealthiest list which are located in the South (if you exclude Virginia’s DC suburbs – not exactly the heart of Dixie).

This reflects a pattern seen across the country in the 2012 results. The Republican ticket saw its greatest success based not on wealth or welfare, but on three, ranked criteria:

1) Region – The single highest indicator of success for the GOP ticket regional. Republicans won reliably in sections of the country in which slavery was legal until Lincoln’s election.

2) Urbanity – The lower the population density, the more successful the GOP ticket.

3) Race – Romney performed best among white voters, particularly older white voters.

Where factors were at tension with one another, as in Harris County (Houston), the outcome was muddled. Houston is Southern, urban, and ethnically diverse. Obama scored a narrow win there, also winning Texas’ other big cities by modest margins.

In rural, Southern, majority-white counties, Romney racked up margins sometimes topping 90%. Apart from those three criteria, outcomes appear to be almost completely unaffected by poverty rates, welfare, food stamps, or any other socio-economic factors.

The “takers” narrative is not born out anywhere in the election results. Like voter fraud and un-skewed polls, it’s one of those ironclad facts of life that somehow only exist inside the magical world of rightwing media. Were those desperately poor white voters in counties across Kentucky and Tennessee choosing Romney in order to end their own “dependency,” or did some other factor inspire their passionate support of the GOP ticket?

The racial and regional character of the 2012 election and every subsequent political fight is ominous. It helps explain why political compromise has come to be equated with betrayal and why so-called “patriots” are willing to bring the country to its knees just to take rhetorical swipes at this Administration.

This approach to politics is not just failing the GOP at a national level. It is placing the party at odds with the country’s future direction. By playing on latent racial tensions, the party is fostering a degree of bitterness that will be difficult to diffuse and may have dangerous implications down the line.

More of this discussion and other links at Building a Better GOP on Facebook.

Links to datasets:

100 most welfare-dependent counties, with demographics and election results

100 poorest counties

100 richest counties

Complete list of US counties ranked by government dependence, from Brian Kelsey (.xls).

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Posted in Economics, Election 2012, Race

Why I Still Vote for Republicans

Posted on November 17, 2013 by Chris Ladd — 2 Comments

Pressed up against the big shoulders of Chicago is a suburban county that has been governed by Republicans since sometime after Noah’s Flood.  While the state of Illinois, which hasn’t seen full Republican leadership since the 1950’s, struggles with the second-worst credit rating in the nation, DuPage sits on a Aaa, shared by only 2% of the nation’s counties.  While Chicago, Cook County, and the state struggle to shed a legacy of entrenched official corruption, DuPage County leadership rarely sees the FBI.

The generations of Republican leadership here have produced sound fiscal responsibility and remarkably capable day-to-day administration.  DuPage County is a living example of what pragmatic Republican governance can accomplish.

You might imagine that this picture of “sound fiscal responsibility” in Republican hands means spartan public services consistently sacrificed in the interests of low taxes.  This is not Texas.

My home is in a leafy suburb, yet we only keep one car. The train is an easy walk from here, even in the winter.  The same goes for the grocery store, movie theater, pool, parks, and shops.  The kids walk to school. Our Republican Congressmen are not using their influence to block federal funding for local rail transit.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

Public capital is abundant and well-maintained.  There is a park within walking distance nearly everywhere and the Illinois Prairie Path sustains 62 miles of beautiful hike and bike trails in a unique public-private partnership.  The county is dotted with a matrix of local museums, nature centers and public pools.  For someone who grew up fishing at Lake Rayburn, it’s a slightly disorienting experience to help your kid land a perch in the shadow of an office tower, but it’s still nice.  Plus, it’s close to home and inexpensive.

The county offers some of the best public schools in the country as well as a dense network of public-funded community colleges and continuing education programs that reach deep into our communities.  The local parks districts in addition to their other duties maintain gyms and other athletic facilities at reduced rates.  Great places for kids’ sports, yoga classes, etc.

After a lifetime in the South, the libraries here seem like something out of a science-fiction movie.  I don’t know how to begin to describe these book-palaces which make some major university libraries look like warehouses.  Since they’re tied into a network of greater-Chicago area institutions, you can get almost anything, quickly, and order it online.  If none of the metro libraries stock a certain book you’re looking for (very rare), send an email and they’ll find it.  You can drive through and pick it up in a couple of weeks.

Thanks to the professionalism and investment that goes into these institutions, the library sits at the center of many communities here, a hangout for kids and adults, especially in the winter.  My family has 8-10 books checked out at any given moment.

Republicans here are not balancing the budget by running some Libertarian experiment in zero-public-capital government.  They are making prudent choices about how best to use available resources and that even means occasionally raising taxes or issuing bonds.

So, taxes must be sky-high, right?  That was perhaps the biggest surprise of all.  When I moved from Houston to suburban Chicago eight years ago my overall tax bill dropped significantly because Illinois funds a portion of its public services through a novel mechanism  – they call it an “income tax.”

In Texas I was squarely in the bull’s-eye of the state’s regressive tax system – young, middle income, and a relatively new home-owner.   Texas’s spectacular property and sales taxes hit hard early in a career.  It’s no wonder Texans feel they are being taxed to death in spite of enjoying federal tax rates at historic lows.

Many years later I now pay more in taxes here than I would in Texas, but that’s because my income has grown. I’m entirely okay with that.  Paying more now that I have more makes obvious sense.

Republicans here cling to strong traditional values, but by some miracle that leaves room for them to support families through meaningful public services.  Party meetings here do not open with a prayer, which I initially thought was an oversight.  Many of these folks will eat their chicken sandwich with pride, but I’ve yet to personally hear a conspiracy theory, a gay slur, Birther nonsense, or some goofball smear expressed at a party meeting.

And a strange wonder lurks around the margins.  Here in this Republican Jurassic Park I have once or twice spotted a liberal Republican [republicanus obscuris].  Younger readers might not realize that such an awkward creature once existed in the wild.  We still have a few people here who combine traditional conservative positions on fiscal matters with a passionate respect for labor unions, concern for the immigrants and the poor, belief in a woman’s untrammeled right to an abortion, and enthusiasm for environmental protection.  They are rare and odd, but as real as the platypus.

Here on the Lost Island of Rational Republicans, life is pretty good.  Obama was the first Democrat to carry this county at any time in modern history (I can’t find any other time that happened and I researched it back to the ‘30’s).  He won by more than ten points and he will probably carry the county this fall.  In fact, given conditions at the national level, one wonders when a Republican Presidential candidate will be competitive here again.  However, the local Republican leadership remains quite popular.

They deliver a practical, valuable suite of public services with efficiency and transparency.  They have steered the county clear of the union-patronage and corruption that cripples so many Democratic local governments.  Republicans in this remarkable place deliver solid representation without drama, hyperbole, or theatrics.  They serve their constituents and they win.

These folks deserve a chance to lead Illinois and in a better world they would be the model for the national Republican Party.  I’ll be supporting them this fall as always.

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Posted in Republican Party
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