The November 20, 2016 Thread

Filed in National by on November 20, 2016

Jeet Heer says outlandish campaign promises and lies helped Trump win. Should the truth-prone Democrats follow him down that rabbit hole?

It’s not news that Donald Trump is perhaps the biggest fabulist in American political history, someone who engages in a wide variety of untruths, ranging from tall tales and fibs to outright fabrications. Perhaps his slippery relationship with truth comes from being a real estate developer, a profession where fantastic hyperbole is accepted—if not required—in the negotiation room. Trump’s political promises can be viewed through a similar lens: If he has no real intent to make Mexico pay for the wall or ban all Muslim immigrants, these statements can be seen as a special type of deception: pie-in-the-sky salesmanship.

Trump says whatever it takes to get the deal done—to win. In this way, he’s merely an extreme version of your average Republican. And now the Democrats, who too often sprint to the moral high ground, are facing at least two years without any control in Washington. It’s time for them to start promising the moon too. […]

To fight Trump-style politics, Democrats will have to steal at least a page or two from Trump’s playbook by making more audacious promises, as Sanders did with his call for free college education for all and a $15 minimum wage—both of which Clinton balked at. While her plan might have been more fiscally responsible, Sanders better understood the power of raising expectations, especially during a populist wave and change year in American politics. To go the full Trump would be nihilistic, but Democrats need to stop worrying about the fine print and start forging their own unrealistic utopia.

Andrew Prokop at Vox lists the The Trump blame game: 9 screw-ups that helped get the GOP nominee to the White House.

Eric Sasson says the Democrats need a Tea Party of the left:

Like many others, I was unconvinced by the narrative of an angry electorate. It seemed at odds with the America I knew, one that was generally prosperous and clearly recovering from the worst recession of modern times. Obama’s approval numbers seemed to encourage this blindness, as did the polls showing a healthy Clinton lead.

It was this misreading of the electorate and the complacency of many Democrats (like me) which bordered on smugness that allowed for Trump to sweep to power. Still, nothing stirs people out of complacency like a genuine threat to their way of life, which Trump and total Republican control seem certain to provide over the next four years. A Trump presidency leaves us with no choice but to wake up and engage with politics in a way similar to that of the Tea Party.

Democratic leadership is aging. Its ranks are thin thanks to Republican dominance on the state and local levels, and we need fresh blood to bubble in and take over the progressive cause. We must translate despair and anger into action, but not just with protests and marches or with well-meaning but politically ineffective movements like Occupy Wall Street. These are important but insufficient. The only way to effect real change is to encourage a new generation of leaders to commit themselves to running for office at every level of government and empower them to be the change they want to see in this world.

We must make the 2018 midterm elections a national cause, insist that these election years are just as important, if not more so, than presidential election years. Starting today, we must come up with our own “Contract with America,” a plan that can express in clear terms what Democrats stand for, and what they will not stand for. If we believe the survival of our republic is at stake, do we have any other choice?

Ed Kilgore with some cold water, on why there won’t be a Tea Party of the Left.

Which wavering Democrats are going to be intimidated by a “tea party of the left”? The obvious targets for either a bipartisan Trump outreach or for disciplinary efforts by progressives are the Democratic senators up for reelection in 2018 who represent states carried by Trump. There are ten of them: Bob Casey (Pennsylvania), Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Bill Nelson (Florida), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Debbie Stabenow (Michigan), Joe Donnelly (Indiana), Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), Heidi Heitkamp (North Dakota), and Jon Tester (Montana). You might imagine some of these states are not reliably Republican in the future, but the flip back to the Democrats won’t be automatic, either, in a midterm election when the turnout dynamics have recently favored Republicans.

Now, Sherrod Brown and Tammy Baldwin and probably Debbie Stabenow are not the sort of Democrats who will be hankering for a way to show Trump voters they’re not all bad, and Bob Casey has his own appeal to white working-class voters that doesn’t necessarily depend on bipartisanship. But the rest of these vulnerable Democratic senators could waver.

And if they do, what exactly is “the tea party of the left” going to do about it? Joe Manchin, for one, would probably pay for left-bent protests against his “centrist” heresies in West Virginia, and would definitely welcome a progressive primary opponent to triangulate against. Heitkamp’s state went for Trump by 36 points; Tester’s, McCaskill’s, and Donnelly’s by 20 points or slightly less. Does anyone think a candidate more progressive or partisan than any of these worthies has a prayer of carrying their states in the immediate future?

Alex Shepard wonders if Democrats are overlearning the lessons of Trump’s victory.

As the Democrats seek to put the pieces back together again, progressives and leftists are calling for a populist economic platform to be at the center of the party’s new agenda and identity. No less a figure than President Barack Obama appeared to ascribe to this idea. In his first press conference since Trump was elected, the president simultaneously laid out a new political playbook and subtweeted the Clinton campaign, saying, “The key for us—when I say ‘us,’ I mean Americans, but I think particularly for progressives—is to say your concerns are real, your anxieties are real; here’s how we fix them.” He added that Democrats, going forward, had to be “attentive to inequality and not tone deaf to it,” and had to reach out to “folks that are in communities that feel forgotten.”

But it’s one thing to embrace economic populism on a conceptual level, and quite another to translate it into a political platform and a governing agenda. To name just one issue: How does it square with the neoliberal championing of free trade, an issue in which Trump campaigned to the left of Clinton? Even Obama seemed to hedge on this issue, saying, “Yes to trade, but trade that ensures that these other countries that trade with us aren’t engaging in child labor, for example.”

Matt Yglesias on the multiple cases against Nancy Pelosi remaining as Democratic Leader in the House:

The strength and weakness of Pelosi’s position is that there are a bunch of different complaints with her, some of which are contradictory while others are complementary:

1. The party needs a new face: A Republican Party administration in Washington makes a “wave” election inspired by an anti-Trump backlash a plausible scenario for 2018. But House districts have been drawn in such a way that a wave would need to win plenty of seats that are 4 or 5 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the national average to win. Candidates running in those kind of districts would benefit from running under the banner of a leader whom Republican-leaning voters don’t already have strong preexisting negative opinions about. That means Not Nancy Pelosi, though basically anyone else on the planet would do.

2. The party needs to moderate to win the white working class: On Twitter, the idea of a strategy oriented toward the white working class is heavily associated with the left-wing program of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. On Capitol Hill, the members of the Democratic Party who have successfully run and won elections in heavily white working-class constituencies tend to be moderates like Joe Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp, and Joe Donnelly. These members note that Evan Bayh ran way ahead of Hillary Clinton in Indiana, and that Clinton ran on a policy platform that was much more left-wing than Barack Obama’s. They think there is a proven formula for winning elections that progressives have willfully blinded themselves to since 2010, and that now is the time to turn it around.

3. The party needs to move to the left: This is the view of the Sanders wing of the party, which now regrets that Rep. Keith Ellison is running to chair the Democratic National Committee because he seems like the kind of member who could theoretically spearhead a cross-racial left-wing coalition to recommit House Democrats to progressive policies. Pelosi herself was considered a leader of the party’s left wing 15 years ago, but a decade spent in leadership growing closer to donors and vulnerable members at a time when the party as a whole has shifted left has somewhat cut her out from her base.

Sarah Kliff read the 7 Obamacare replacement plans. Here is what she learned:

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Republicans can’t just repeal Obamacare — they need to replace it with something.

It turns out Republicans have a lot of choices: There are at least seven different replacement plans that Republican legislators and conservative think tanks have offered in recent years. I’ve spent the past week reading them, and what I’ve learned is this:

Yes, Republicans have replacement plans. It is true that the party has not coalesced around one plan — but there are real policy proposals coming from Republican legislators and conservative think tanks. There is a base that the party can work from in crafting a replacement plan.

There is significant variation in what the plans propose. On one end of the spectrum, you see plans from President-elect Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz that would repeal Obamacare and replace it with virtually nothing. On the other end of the spectrum, there are plans from conservative think tanks that go as far as to keep the Affordable Care Act marketplaces and continue to give low-income Americans the most generous insurance subsidies.

If we can say one thing about most Republican plans, it is this: They are better for younger, healthy people and worse for older, sicker people. In general, conservative replacement plans offer less financial help to those who would use a lot of insurance. This will make their insurance subsidies significantly less expensive than Obamacare’s.

Economic analyses estimate that these plans reduce the number of Americans with insurance coverage. The actual amount varies significantly, from 3 million to 21 million, depending on which option Republicans pick. They will near certainly provide more coverage than Americans had before Obamacare, but also less than what exists currently under the health law.

I’ve spent the past week talking to authors of Republican replacement plans, economists who support them, and economists who oppose them. I’m focusing here on the two plans that are likeliest to be the most influential in the coming replacement debate: Better Way, from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), and the Patient CARE Act, from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee.

Toni Morrison offers her perspective on the election of Trump.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

The new national legal director of the ACLU, David Cole, has written an article titled, “The Way to Stop Trump.”

Whether Trump will actually try to implement these promises, and more importantly, whether he will succeed if he does try, lies as much in our hands as in his. If Americans let him, Trump may well do all that he promised—and more. Imagine, for example, what a Trump administration might do if there is another serious terrorist attack on US soil. What little he has said about national security suggests that he will make us nostalgic for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

We let a minority of voters give Trump the presidency by not turning out to vote for Clinton. (Trump didn’t even get as many votes as McCain and Romney, but Clinton received nearly five million fewer votes that Obama in 2012). But if we now and for the next four years insist that he honor our most fundamental constitutional values, including equality, human dignity, fair process, privacy, and the rule of law, and if we organize and advocate in defense of those principles, he can and will be contained. It won’t happen overnight. There will be many protracted struggles. The important thing to bear in mind is that if we fight, we can prevail.

Mark Schmitt picks up on a theme we’ve been hearing more about lately, “Trump’s Capitol Hill Problem.”

Read any of the long books written about significant legislative victories, and even with one-party control, it’s always a high-wire act, full of moments when leaders pull the bill back from the brink of failure or force difficult votes. Keeping the process on track requires a president who is fully engaged, making calls to the Hill, intervening to resolve conflicts, and providing technical support through competently staffed federal agencies. It helps a lot if the president is popular and members want to be associated with him; Ronald Reagan’s approval rating was almost 60 percent around the time Congress enacted his sweeping tax and budget cuts in 1981.

Even right after the election, Mr. Trump’s favorability ratings were comparable to Richard M. Nixon’s in the depths of Watergate, and he lost the popular vote. Nor does Mr. Trump have warm relationships with members of Congress. Most have never met him, and others he has viciously attacked.

Sen. Sherrod Brown’s NYT op-ed “When Work Loses Its Dignity” should be a handout for Dems concerned about rebuilding the party in the wake of the 2016 election. Sen. Brown, frequently mentioned as a future Democratic presidential candidate, writes, “Ohio families will watch to see if the new president follows the billionaire agenda of the Republican leadership in Washington, which has called for overturning a new rule that increases overtime pay for many workers — an action that would strip thousands of dollars in wages from 130,000 of Ohio’s moderate-income workers. They will measure this president to see if he continues to oppose increasing the minimum wage, which is worth nearly 20 percent less than in 1980. Workers will expect the president to keep his promise of a trade agenda that puts their jobs above corporate profits. And they will scrutinize whether he will throw in with Washington’s moneyed interests at the expense of middle-class and working-class families…If President Trump takes the likely path that almost all Washington Republicans hope — tax cuts for the rich, an easing up on Wall Street, more voter suppression — Ohio workers will feel betrayed. Again. And they will respond.”

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  1. ex-anonymous says:

    instructive essay by mark lilla on the cover of today’s sunday review section of the new york times. it’s called “the end of identity liberalism.”

  2. pandora says:

    Okay, so it’s sounds like the Dems new message is shaping into: Lie to white people. They don’t know no better. 🙂

  3. Steve Newton says:

    @pandora–while morally bankrupt it does have the advantage that it worked for Trump in the last election.

  4. bamboozer says:

    I may well be better in touch with “angry white America” than any one else here, I play music for them every weekend and talk to them, sometimes at length as it’s a part of the business. They never graduated high school and see nothing wrong with that, and to some extent they live in the past. Some are “good people”, some not so much. I can say that they don’t like corporate Dems, odd as they just voted for the people who intend to let corporations run wild. Sounds crazy but all it would take to reach them is a “we care” outreach. In short Pay Attention To The People, and not the guy in the two thousand dollar suit with a check.

  5. puck says:

    “Okay, so it’s sounds like the Dems new message is shaping into: Lie to white people. They don’t know no better. :-)”

    That would be an especially bitter and twisted way to frame a message of hope and aspiration. Whatever economic policies Democrats eventually get behind, I am confident they will not have separate policies for whites and blacks.

  6. Rusty Dils says:

    Are you sure puck that dems won’t be for seperate policies for whites and blacks, cause they have been for the last 50 plus years.

  7. Steve Newton says:

    Worth the read: a high school teacher in Henan, China, wanted to do a unit on the American presidential elections, but he apparently did not have access to the full text of any Trump speeches, so … he wrote his own.

    Not sure if he should get a position in the Trump White House or on SNL, but this is definitely worth the read …

    http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/11/teacher-uses-mock-trump-speech-patriotic-education/?google_editors_picks=true