Talking Points Memo (Opinion)
By Josh Marshall
February 27, 2016
Here
is a New York Times article you may have seen. It describes the GOP's
panicked, hyperbolic and yet utterly ineffectual rush to stop the Donald
Trump juggernaut. As
I've said before, the GOP's Trump problem reminds me of the regional
and global powers' efforts to destroy ISIS. Every party sees the
problem, is terrified by the problem. And yet every player has some
other angle or priority that's just a bit more pressing
or important. The Saudis, Iran. The Turks, the Kurds. The US, Assad.
And on and on. Yet, it goes without saying that Trump isn't the real
problem. He didn't bamboozle the heads of the RNC into signing some
one-sided contract they can't live with. The problem
is Republican voters. Look at the polls and you see that in virtually
every state in the country between 30% and 50% of GOP voters currently
back Trump. And only unicorn thinking supports the idea that the 70% to
50% who do not constitute some sort "anti-Trump"
faction. That's the problem, not Trump himself.
When
I read the Times article, observe recent weeks as they've fluttered by
and think about how things got to this point, I come back again and
again to conversations
I have with our chief tech, Matt Wozniak. Matt uses the metaphor of
debt to describe the inevitable trade off we face building and
maintaining the software that runs TPM.
If
we do a project in a rough and ready way, which is often what we can
manage under the time and budget constraints we face, we will build up a
"debt" we'll eventually
have to pay back. Basically, if we do it fast, we'll later have to go
back and rework or even replace the code to make it robust enough for
the long haul, interoperate with other code that runs our site or simply
be truly functional as opposed just barely
doing what we need it to. There's no right or wrong answer; it's simply
a management challenge to know when to lean one way or the other. But
if you build up too much of this debt the problem can start to grow not
in a linear but an exponential fashion, until
the system begins to cave in on itself with internal decay, breakdowns
of interoperability and emergent failures which grow from both.
This
is a fairly good description of what the media is now wrongly defining
as the GOP's 'Trump problem', only in this case the problem isn't
programming debt. It's a
build up of what we might call 'hate debt' and 'nonsense debt' that has
been growing up for years.
This
crystallized for me after the last GOP debate when Trump told Chris
Cuomo in a post-debate interview that the IRS might be coming after him
because he's a "strong
Christian." Set aside for the moment how this unchurched libertine was
able to rebrand himself as a "strong Christian." What about the
preposterous claim that he is being persecuted by the IRS because he is a
devout member of the country's dominant religion?
Republicans simply aren't in any position to criticize this ludicrous
claim because they have spent years telling their voters that this sort
of thing happens all the time - to Christians, conservatives, everyone
the liberals at the IRS hate. And this, of
course, is just one example of hate and nonsense debt coming due. Shift
gears now and they're "RINOs."
Take
Trump's plan to deport 11 million people living in the US illegally or
build the planned Trump Taj MaWall. As John Kasich has futilely tried to
explain in debate
after debate, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, this is simply
never going to happen. Such an effort would be more on the order of a
post-War World II population transfer than anything remotely like a
conventional immigration enforcement action, costing
probably hundreds of billions of dollars and perhaps even constituting
something approaching a war crime. As for the Wall, of course, in the
real world net immigration across the US-Mexico has actually gone into
reverse in recent years. More are leaving than
coming. But in the Republican/Fox news world, hordes of feral Mexicans
are still streaming across the Southern border - them and a layering of
ISIS death squads who fly from Ankara to Belize and then walk to the
Arizona border.
But
this is just the hate and nonsense debt coming due from 2013. You can
either let the status quo go on or you can devise a way to regularize at
least the majority of
people who are here illegally. There's no other option. Unless you just
want to say 'No Amnesty' and pretend the problem will go away with
'self-deportation' or some other such nonsense. And that of course is
precisely what Republican congressional leaders
did. All Trump did was say openly, clearly, more coherently what
Republicans were already saying themselves, while saying out of the
sides of their mouths that somehow they'd get to the mass deportation
later.
The
truth is virtually Trump's entire campaign is built on stuff just like
this, whether it's about mass deportation, race, the persecution of
Christians, Obamacare, the
coming debt crisis and a million other things. At the last debate,
Trump got pressed on his completely ludicrous tax cut plan. He
eventually said growth (which if you calculate it would need to be
something like 20% on average) would take care of the huge
budget shortfall created by his tax plan. But Republicans can't really
dispute this point since all of Republican campaign economics is based
on precisely the same argument. What about Obamacare? Can Marco
"Establishment" Rubio really get traction attacking
Trump for having no specific plan to replace Obamacare when Republicans
have spent the last five years repeatedly voting to repeal Obamacare
without ever specifying a plan to replace it with? On each of these
fronts, the slow accumulation of nonsense and paranoia
- 'debt' to use our metaphor - built into a massive trap door under the
notional GOP leadership with a lever that a canny huckster like Trump
could come in and pull pretty much whenever. This is the downside of
building party identity around a package of calculated
nonsense and comically unrealizable goals.
On
other fronts, Republican party leaders have sanctioned repeated
government shutdowns, threats to default on the national debt and
various other totally crazy things.
But if you notice, it's always in the outyears - not in election years
and never during presidential election years when more is at stake and
the electorate leans more Democratic.
There's
some metaphor or analogy here about a hostile takeover, though hostile
takeovers don't usually take place because of excess debt. They're proxy
battles or stock
purchases. But there are numerous ways that profligate spending and
excess debt can leave a highly leveraged company vulnerable to a
guileful schemer who strangles the ownership and takes the carcass for
himself. And some version of that is the story of Trump
- a raid on a hopelessly leveraged GOP 'establishment' which barely
realized that it scarcely exists.
Having
said all this, I always try to remind people that as observers of
contemporary politics we ascribe far more power to political leaders
than they actually exercise.
They are more like riverine engineers. They can reinforce the banks,
shift a river's direction a bit. In extraordinary cases they can even
dam a river - but even that only regulates the flow of the water. It
seldom stops it entirely. The deeper causes of the
recent trends in the GOP go deep into the society and culture of the
American right and American society generally. But Republican elected
officials have increasingly coddled, exploited and in some cases - yes -
spurred their voters penchant for resentment,
perceived persecution, apocalyptic thinking and generic nonsense.
Until
now GOP elites have managed to maintain a balance or needle-threading
sleight of hand wherein the GOP had become the functional equivalent of a
European rightist
party (UKIP or French National Front) yet masqueraded as a conventional
center-right party (UK Conservatives or French Republicans) - all under
the go-along leadership of the people The Washington Post editorial
page imagines run the GOP. But the set up was
already under extreme strain, as evidenced by the 2011 debt default
drama, the 2013 Cruz shutdown and the end of the Boehner Speakership in
2015. Trump is very little different from the average candidate
Republicans elected in 2010 and 2014, in terms of radical
views and extreme rhetoric. All he's done is take the actual GOP issue
package, turn it up to eleven and put it on a high speed collision
course with RNC headquarters smack in the middle of presidential
election year.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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