January 16, 2021
W, NOT RWR:
A Reaganesque Scheme for a GOP Reboot: If the party is going to survive Trump, it needs to cut the extremists loose and craft a broader message. Here's how that succeeded before. (MONICA PRASAD, 01/16/2021, Politico)
There are three paths for the Republican Party, but only one path forward.One option is to double down on xenophobia and protectionism, recruiting more Marjorie Taylor Greenes, hoping to increase the base by ramping up the rhetoric. But there seems to be a built-in ceiling to this strategy: It gets you passionate supporters but turns off many others. Even at his most popular, Trump's approval ratings never cracked 50 percent, and mostly hovered in the low 40s. He's on track to leave office as one of the most unpopular presidents on record.The second path is the one the party is on now, and the one it will stay on if it does nothing to distance itself from Trump. This is the path of a split within the GOP, and this option is actually in Trump's interest--maybe even more than path No. 1. [...]There is a third path. All Republicans have to do is imitate Ronald Reagan.To explain how the party can move forward, we have to back up and understand how Republicans got here, how the party of Lincoln has come to rely more on nationalistic and racist sloganeering to unify its members than on the limited government, free-market principles many Republicans have long believed are the party's core ideals.The basic problem the Republican Party has faced over the past century is that Americans actually love big government. They say they don't, but if you ask them what spending they want to cut, they want to cut none of it. Social Security and Medicare, the largest parts of the budget? Off limits. Education, roads, research and development? Of course not. Even aid to the poor is popular as long as it's not called "welfare." Republicans have never managed to roll back government to where things stood before the Progressive Era, or before the New Deal, or even to before Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. And they have more or less given up the attempt to do so, because they know they can't.So how do you rule, and how do you run, as the party of small government in a nation that loves big government? For much of the 20th century, Republicans completely failed at answering this question, and the Democrats controlled Congress for four decades after Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The problem with this third option is pretty obvious; Reagan was the last New Dealer. One of the signal achievements of his presidency was the rescue of the Second Way social programs he worked out with his fellow retrograde figure, Tip O'Neill.
Accept that Americans--like the citizens of every developed democracy--want a thorough social safety net and the task for conservatives is how to make it work more efficiently. The most effective advocate for this Third Way was W. While fellow Republicans refused to help him create the private SS accounts he won on twice, he did revolutionize health coverage by putting HSAs in the prescription drugs law, included school vouchers in No Child Left Behind, made buying a home easier, and revolutionized homeless policy, among other achievements. Along with these policies he was the most forceful advocate for the free movement of goods and peoples ever to serve as president.
Even at the time he was forging this new path for the GOP though, the Trumpish wing of the party rebelled. The two great goals of his second term were SS and immigration reform which Congressional Republicans rejected and we haven't outpolled the Democratic nominee in a national election since. As Ms Prasad points out, that wing of the party--older white men--really made its love of Second Way welfare programs clear when the Tea Party raged against the imagined threat to their checks posed by a black President who they were terrified would give "their money" to the minorities. Rhetorically fiscal conservatives, they opposed any changes to SS and Medicare which is where savings would have to come from. Then we were treated to the spectacle of Republicans raging against the very health care plan the party had developed--via Newt, Heritage and Mitt--because it was adopted by that black president. And what did they offer in its place? "crickets" Finally, given a choice to either return to Bushism or double down on Nativism/racism the party rejected Jeb in favor of Donald, leading to the current wreckage.
The path back to being the majority party is plain enough. It starts with a return to being pro-trade and pro-immigration. It follows with using Third Way reforms to reduce the costs of the social welfare state. This is as simple as exploiting the genius of compound interest, creating individual accounts for all Americans in which indexed stock funds grow wealth across a lifetime so it is available when needed. For instance, if you borrow an idea from W's Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, and just put $10k in such an account at birth, even if we never put another dollar in, it will be well over a million dollars at age 70. Make and/or require consistent contributions and then means test traditional programs against the accounts and you effectively end SS. Universalize HSAs and make and/or require contributions to them and you effectively end Medicare, other than for those with such expensive chronic conditions that providing some kind of national health service makes sense. Make all such accounts heritable so that the wealthy dying can transfer to the accounts of the young. Convert housing assistance into mortgage payments and give the poorest among us ownership interest in the properties they live in, equity in which can again be transferred to the young at death. Add community college to the current free K-12 public education scheme. Meanwhile, switch to a Neoconomic tax structure that taxes consumption instead of work, savings, and investment. We want people to earn wealth and maintain it, so advantage those choices.
It is not unlikely that such generous treatment of the many Americans who the Trumpists despise would drive them out of the party. But it would attract the vast majority of Democrats who have no interest in their own party's Identitarian Left. Most importantly, it would work better than our antiquated Second Way system. Across the Anglosphere and Scandinavia it is these sorts of Third Way programs that are being adopted because the big government we all desire has to be funded and this is the most efficient way to do so--money upfront, that can grow over time, instead of on the back end in absolute dollars
We all know that we have to head in this direction, no matter how much Grandpa objects, the party that gets there first, or the coalition across the two parties that ignores the two wings, stands to dominate national politics for a generation as Democrats did after pioneering the Second Way 90 years ago.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 16, 2021 9:37 AM