The Party Reform Possibility

I recently got this video in email:

It's a ~17 minute "confessional" from a Republican election strategist, Stuart Stevens, promoting his book (It Was All a Lie) about the Republicans' shortcomings, expressing regret for a Republican party that now is behind Donald Trump.

This is not a huge surprise, since Stevens was a member of the Republican insiders for which Trump is a repudiation. Given the chance, Stevens probably would have backed Jeb Bush in 2016. He was a participant in many national Republican campaigns, including Bush 43's and Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential run.

Typical of party insiders, Stevens decries the current Republican Trumpist thuggery that devalues education and expertise, avoids public policy solutions for the less fortunate, and denies the fundamental core beliefs that made him a Republican in his heart. We can guess that Trump's embrace of the wrestling kayfabe--the name for the phony drama in professional wrestling--is repugnant to Stevens' sensibilities, too.

What are Stevens' (and the Republican establishment's) core beliefs? He says they include personal responsibility. Republicans also used to say character counts, and the federal deficit is important, says Stevens.

Stevens even mentions Reagan was a fan of legal immigration--Reagan provided amnesty for the undocumented--currently taboo for Republicans to consider. And, of course, in the good ol' days Republicans were anti-Russia. No more! (That Russians backed Trump has been thoroughly debunked, but never mind that!)

I've written previously about encountering such Republicans in the "Better Angels" program that sponsored meetings between politically estranged voters, where I heard some similar sentiments. The trouble with these sentiments is not just that they are lies. They are lies within lies.

So, Stevens is lying when he says they were All a Lie. The trouble with lying, besides its being unethical, is that liars start to believe their own bullshit. Lying becomes delusion.

So is Stevens sincere? Who knows? I'd bet even he doesn't know, although a more cynical person might speculate that Stevens is providing a safety valve for the Republicans if the Trump presidency ends in disaster. "See!" Stevens might say then, "All Republicans weren't all taken in by Trump!"

Balancing the Federal Budget

In that Better Angels meeting, a member of our local Republican party central committee, Jack Frost--I couldn't make up that name!--like Stevens, told us that he was regretful that Republicans hadn't done more to reduce the deficit, or national 'debt,' the accumulation of those deficits.

Just so you are clear about what that dog-whistle statement is really saying, Jack Frost (and Stevens) want to reduce Social Security and Medicare--popular, cost-effective social safety net programs that are nonetheless anathema to the "individual responsibility" core Republican value.

Eighty-five percent of federal spending is those two programs plus the military. The remaining 15% covers everything else--courts, borders, the Centers for Disease Control, etc. So reducing federal spending--a Republican would rather die than increase taxes--means reducing those three programs, and hell will freeze over before a Republican would reduce military spending. The Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) is a core constituency for them. So when a Republican talks about reducing the deficit s/he actually means reducing Medicare and Social Security, nothing else.

But there's a lie within that lie about regretting the absence of "fiscal responsibility™" in Republican policy. The truth: Republicans have absolutely no intention of reducing the deficit. Dick Cheney famously said "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Republican strategist Jude Wanniski--a journalist who promoted trickle-down, voodoo, supply-side economics--advised the party to run up as big a deficit as possible when in power, then complain about it as bitterly as possible when out--a strategy he called "Two Santa Clauses."

And Reagan--the apotheosis of modern Republicanism--took Wanniski's advice. His deficit exceeded the sum of all previous administrations' deficits. This spending produced an average business cycle recovery, falsely marketed as a remarkable "Morning in America" by the Wall Street Journal.

Notice the big spikes in GDP growth on the left of that graph. The first one is the New Deal, and the second is that big public works project we call World War II. "Morning in America" is the tiny spike around 1982, about in line with the rest of the business cycle recoveries. Federal spending matters.

Who was the last Republican president to balance a budget? Answer: Herbert Hoover. That worked out ever so well, didn't it? In fact, as we'll see below, when federal spending lags, the economy goes into a tailspin, 100% of the time. (See here for the footnotes)

So Stevens, and the Republicans', allegiance to the "balance the budget" value is entirely mythical. It was not a core value for Republicans, even before Trump, and even if he is sincere, it's a bad idea.

Systemic Problems

The "individual responsibility" meme is a similar head fake. Government exists to handle systemic problems, not individual ones.

What does a systemic problem look like? Imagine throwing nine bones out your back door, then releasing ten dogs to retrieve a bone. No matter how good the dogs' character, how well-trained, well-educated, or what good citizens the dogs are, one will come up short. Scolding the dog who retrieves no bone for being a lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing dog wastes everyone's time. Caging the dog is similarly useless. Yet these are the kind of solutions proposed when "individual responsibility" is the context, and it's always those other individuals who need to fix something, not ourselves.

The big problems of today--climate, health care, education, immigration, poverty, unemployment, etc.--all of those are systemic problems, perhaps with individual components, but primarily systemic.

One systemic solution: A job guarantee. Could we afford a federal job guarantee? It would certainly revolutionize the labor market and eliminate a systemic problem.

Do we have the money, though? Absolutely, and history validates that answer. In addition to about $800M in TARP, the Fed issued $16 - $29 trillion in credit to the financial sector in 2007-8, according to its own audit. The multi-trillion-dollar responses to the Great Recession, and the more modest response (~$2 trillion) to coronavirus, all without raising taxes or causing inflation, mean the less costly job guarantee would be easily financeable. The New Deal's WPA provides a precedent, too.

Now, the federal government provides price supports for farmers, buying surplus soybeans and cheese, why not a price support for labor? We've already implemented "Quantitative Easing," something that amounts to price supports for financial markets.

And a job guarantee need not be just "make work." It's not as though there isn't plenty of work to be done. After all, caring for children and seniors, upgrading our infrastructure to at least account for the climate change problems, never mind the collapsing bridges, lack of good rail connections, etc... all of that needs to happen. It's just not profitable enough (short term) for the private sector to undertake or underwrite it. Meanwhile, those WPA projects continue to provide public benefit.

And just a reminder: during World War II, the government took over roughly 50% of the U.S. economy. Economists calculate the Green New Deal, including a job guarantee, would only consume 5% of the economy. All the austerity talk about balancing the budget is just baloney, no matter how sincere Jack Frost or Mr. Stevens looks.

And lest people believe the government can't do innovative, important work, I'll remind you of some  more recent inventions produced by government research that profited our illustrious private sector:
Steve Jobs (great name, eh?) was a clever fellow assembling the fruits of all this basic research into a single device, but he was not the origin of cellular technology, the internet, GPS, etc. Government research produced these things.

 

Federal 'Debt'

Let's also not overlook what austerity (reducing the federal deficit) actually means--something the Democrats have done more recently than Republicans with the Clinton surplus, and a "core value" to which Nancy Pelosi declares her allegiance with her vow not to begin new programs without the tax revenue to pay for them ("PayGo"). This core value relies on another lie.

One common expression describing government fiscal operations is "tax & spend." But that can't be true. For one thing, as the monopoly provider of non-counterfeit currency, the federal government, must spend before any tax revenue comes in so tax payers have the dollars with which they can pay taxes.

So the accurate expression would be "spend first, then get some back in taxes." This just reflects the operational nature of reality. People have to have dollars before they can pay taxes. And the Federal government, the monopoly producer of fiat dollars, is therefore fiscally unconstrained, since it can spend before it gets tax revenue. Taxes don't provision federal programs, they make the money valuable.

What do we call the dollars left out in the economy, not retrieved by taxes? Answer #1: The dollar financial assets of the population (i.e. their savings). Answer #2: National 'debt.' Both answers describe exactly the same thing, just as we can describe your bank account as your asset, but the bank's liability.

Now imagine a mob of depositors marching down to the bank to demand that it reduce its debt. "But that would mean reducing the size of your accounts," an honest bank manager might say. "We don't care! We hate the word 'debt' and want you to reduce our accounts' size if that's what it takes." replies the mob.

Not very sensible, is it?

So the core value of balanced budgets is not only something to which Republicans aren't committed, it's a counterproductive thing to do. History validates that statement, too. The U.S. has succumbed to the siren song of "fiscal responsibility™" seven or eight times since 1776. The last one was the Clinton Surplus. Hoover balanced the budget in 1929. Andrew Jackson even paid off the entire national 'debt' in 1835. All of these are followed by gigantic holes in the economy, including the Great Recession, the Great Depression, and the Panic of 1837.

And economic tailspins are what you might expect if you impair the population's savings, which is what such "fiscal responsibility™" does. Ordinarily, people have obligations, and savings gives them the means to pay their obligations if there's an unexpected an interruption to the expected flow of income. Waves of asset forfeitures and foreclosures follow such fits of "responsibility" because reducing people's savings makes them vulnerable to such interruptions.

Just as tyrants thrive in emergencies ("We don't have time to play politics and debate this! It's an emergency!"), plutocrats love downturns, and even promote them, because they can pick up assets on the cheap. The late Pete Peterson's "think" tanks and foundations all promote "fiscal responsibility™" for just that reason. Peterson's "Blackstone" hedge fund is now one of the largest property owners in the U.S. thanks to their cheap acquisitions in the Great Recession.

A population on the brink of not surviving, with a relatively weak social safety net also enforces what economist Michal Kalecki calls "labor discipline." The message is "You had better take whatever crappy job is on offer, or suffer the indignities of poverty, even homelessness and starvation. And if you're extra ornery, we'll incarcerate you." When, as now, 40% of the U.S. population can't handle a $400 emergency without selling something or borrowing, the plutocrats have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

But is this really something for which we can exclusively blame Republicans? After all, corporate Democrat Bill Clinton signed the "end of welfare as we know it." Before that "end," 76% of those needing public assistance got it. After: 26%. And let's not forget that, after he deregulated the financial markets making the sub-prime/derivatives scandal possible, Clinton also struck a deal with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security--just before the Great Recession would have tanked the financial markets. Monica Lewinsky saved us from that.

 

Education

The current Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, has previously indicated his willingness to reduce social safety nets, and, after voting to authorize the war in Iraq, voted to tighten bankruptcy, making student loans a burden for life, just before the Great Recession. The U.S. is literally garnishing Social Security checks to pay for student loans right now.

As a consequence of votes like this, education itself has become financialized, too--which is one legitimate reason Trump voters distrust the educated. Since 1972, federal funding for higher education has declined 55%. State funding for higher education has declined even more (35% in just the last decade for Oklahoma). Gosh, I wonder why tuition keeps rising!

Worse still is the widely-shared sentiment that professors can't fail students since they are the source of their institution's revenue. When the incompetent aren't eliminated, they can graduate with that valuable certificate that gives them access to better-paying jobs, where their incompetent mismanagement can have real-world consequences.

A sensible society funds education to improve its human capital. Thanks to financializing education with things like high-tuition universities, charter schools, and schools so bad they require after-school training, and the like, our current education system has devolving to a place to get certificates rather than useful knowledge. It's not accidental that celebrities were recently arrested for conniving and bribing to get their children into "good" schools, even if the kids weren't qualified.

Degrading our education has been a bipartisan project too. Betsy DeVos isn't the only one lobbying for charter schools; Democratic Gov. Cuomo of New York is a fan of that bit of privatization too.

The professed values of the school "reformers" are (union-busting) charter schools, merit pay (because teachers are so motivated by money) and testing, testing, testing (please ignore that plutocrats' relatives own test firms).

The financial-izers have even produced a propaganda film (Waiting for Superman) promoting these ideas, and Michelle Rhee's tenure as the "tiger mom" superintendent of Washington DC schools. Rhee fired teachers for not producing better test results, and moved on to briefly head a plutocrat-funded operation called "Students First" to promote those three values.

Waiting for Superman promoted what successful schools might look like, touting Finland's very good schools as what we need to emulate. Oddly enough, the film did not mention that Finnish teachers were tenured, unionized and very well paid.

Yet no studies validate the charter school, merit pay, or testing strategies produce better educational outcomes. What does correlate with those better outcomes? Childhood poverty. In Finland, childhood poverty afflicts only two percent of the population. In the U.S, the figure is 23%.

So even the U.S.' education problems provide an instance of something systemic, probably better addressed by poverty or social safety net programs. Meddling with the "individual responsibility" of schools or teachers is like trying to steer your car by grasping the rearview mirror. Such steering might be believable for a few seconds, but is ultimately bound to fail.

 

Lies and their Remedy

So the lies compound: Neither party wants to serve people; both want to con them and serve the donor class of plutocrats. And to whom does one lie? Answer: an enemy. Sun Tzu's classic The Art of War is an instruction manual about how to lie as one attacks one's opponent.

Is there any authentic willingness within the major parties to re-examine their positions? Stevens himself notes a reluctance to address fundamental policy issues in Republicans, and the defeat of, and connivance against Bernie Sanders indicates the Democrats aren't much different. Ralph Nader reports suggesting a third party to his father, who replied he'd settle for a second.

Stevens even makes the same prediction corporate Democrats make that demographics will force the Republicans to change...but there's no sign of that occurring now, and Donald Trump repudiates the corporate Republicans just as surely as Sanders repudiates the corporate Democrats.

My question is why do these parties continue to pick the mote out of their neighbors' eyes while ignoring the beam in their own--the beam being the only problem they could really solve? And isn't  that old chestnut saying an observation that it's all-too-human to avoid taking "personal responsibility" when one's own behavior is questioned?

The author of that statement, Jesus himself (in Matthew 23) condemns the Pharisees for ignoring important matters while debating trivia like whether to tithe kitchen herbs. He calls them names ("blind guides," and "whitewashed tombs," that look good outside but are full of rot), and condemns them for straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.

It's worth remembering that Pharisees were the plutocrats of their day, serving the army of occupation from Rome. According to economic authority Michael Hudson, Pharisees also conspired to write IOUs for debts so they could not be retired in jubilees, in spite of Leviticus dictating this "clean slate" jubilee activity every so often. Sort of like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton voting to tighten bankruptcy just before a crash.

In short, our current situation appears to be the recurrance of a perennial problem. People want to celebrate "personal responsibility" because it means they can take credit for whatever accomplishments they have, and can look down on those who have not reached their social position, they just don't want any personal responsibility when it's uncomfortable, requires introspection or a change of their own behavior (and, if you look at my first impulses, I'm no different!).

The idea that we deserve what we have is "salvation by works," and is heresy for orthodox Christianity, and what Jesus condemns the Pharisees for doing. The alternative is "salvation by grace [gift]." That means you can't take credit for hitting a triple if you have been born on third base. Salvation by grace is on the road to sanity.

 

 Conclusion

Where our current situation ends up is a little predictable. Delusional people run into the furniture, or plunge off a cliff. We have the coronavirus cliff with us now, but there are many more to come. The climate springs to mind as one that looms over our current circumstances.

Which reminds me: Winston Churchill said he could rely on his friends the Americans to do the right thing. Unfortunately, he continued, it was often after they had tried everything else first.

So one can expect our society to try everything else first, and to lurch from one catastrophe to another. Blaming the other party is going to be part of the ride, but will accomplish precious little. Even the "confessional" style of "regret" about policies like "fiscal responsibility™" plays into the inauthentic, delusional kayfabe of politics as usual. Taking actual "personal responsibility" oneself would require humility. Understanding systemic problems are part of the mix would require widening the narrow window of understanding with which we currently operate.

The early Christians were successful in providing a compassionate alternative to conventional Roman society, and were ultimately successful ... literally centuries after Jesus expired. Waiting for such a thing requires extraordinary patience. I wish such patience for all of us, but don't expect a lot to change for the immediate future.