IMPress Polly
08-03-2017, 12:22 PM
This thread is just here to summarize my take on the events of the last week(ish), which I'd like to boil down to two key points:
The defeat of the Republicans' so-called health care bill in the Senate seemed to mark the onset of a mini-crisis and reorientation within the White House. The sound and fury and that process aside, the important thing to notice about this reorientation is that it is away from the Republican Party and toward the alt-right. Most of the people Trump has fired since failure of the health care bill have been Republicans (such as former Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus), while the replacements have been generals, billionaires, and alt-right ideologues. Observe the following corresponding shifts in policy direction from White House:
-One week ago: Trump reinstates ban on transgender troops in the military.
-On Friday, Trump "jokingly" calls on police to abuse those whom they arrest.
-On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that it will now redirect its civil rights division's resources toward investigating and suing universities over how white people are being held back from higher education by affirmative action. Perspective: Black people make up 15% of the college-age population, but only 6% of students at the 100 top-tier American colleges and universities. Sure sounds like black privilege to me.
-On Wednesday, Trump announced major legislation to cut the number of people entering the United States (legally, mind you!) in half by allowing only wealthier, highly-educated immigrants in who already speak English the day of their arrival. The proposal was questioned by some Congressional Republicans, but has been universally praised by all sections of the alt-right, from the extreme nativist (e.g. Breitbart News) to the openly racist (e.g. Stormfront).
-On Wednesday, the Secretary of State declared that the U.S.-China relationship has reached a "pivot point" and that "open conflict" was now possible, thus ending several months of detente following China's agreement to put additional pressure on North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program (which it did, albeit unsuccessfully).
All of these developments point toward the White House losing faith in the Republican Party over the health care fiasco and moving toward the extreme, ethnically/culturally-motivated right in response, with this immigration bill being their replacement legislative priority. Oh joy. Back to the culture wars we go! And the best news? This time, the Democrats might not fight this shit!
That brings me to my second observation on recent developments: the Democratic Party's recently-announced Better Deal program. The program is obviously designed to appeal to those white, Midwestern voters who have traditionally voted Democratic, but cast a Trump ballot last year. There is good and bad in that. On the good side, the Better Deal calls for a full $15/hour minimum wage, price ceilings on prescription drugs, seeks to allow Medicare Part D to negotiate drug prices, and calls for a protectionist trade policy, a $1 trillion infrastructure rebuilding program, and a new agency to crack down on monopolies. So this largely represents the Democratic Party getting back to the kind of populist economic ideas that it has traditionally supported, which I view as a good thing. But appealing ONLY to those white, Midwestern voters also has its downside: to be safe, the Better Deal opts for a neutral position in the culture wars, remarkably, having literally nothing to say about the defense of abortion rights, immigrant rights, police brutality, or discrimination against gay and transgender people. Educators too are thrown under the bus (again): the Better Deal calls for public-private partnerships in education (i.e. corporate management of public education) that "gives employers a role in curriculum development...blending classroom learning and work site training."
To cement that these are not just tacit things, Ben Ray Lujan, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on Monday declared the committee's willingness to fund anti-abortion candidates. (Note that the corresponding Republican committee does NOT fund pro-choice candidates.) Likewise, leading (I guess hitherto) neoliberal mouthpieces from the Atlantic's Peter Beinart to CNN's Fareed Zakaria to Clinton aides Mark Penn and Andrew Stein have all published articles calling on the Democratic Party to move closer to the Trump political line on immigration. Zakaria argued that the Democrats "should take a position on immigration that is less absolutist and recognizes both the cultural and economic costs of large-scale immigration", while Penn and Stein wrote in a recent New York Time op-ed that the Democrats lost the 2016 election because voters "feel abandoned" by Democratic support for "policies offering more help to undocumented immigrants than to the heartland." For the Atlantic's latest issue, Beinart has written that "the next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America's undocumented population to zero." So much for liberalism! These are all concentrations of what the Better Deal means for actual Democratic policy. It is indeed marked by movement in Trump's direction on social policy.
What a time for the Democrats to abandon women, teachers, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and civil rights: just as the Trump Administration is embracing the alt-right in earnest and shifting focus back to fighting the culture wars (and perhaps more literal wars as well if not careful)! The Democrats may be taking up a neutral position in the culture wars, but the Administration is not, and that makes for a rather one-sided fight, doesn't it? We will have to defend ourselves.
The defeat of the Republicans' so-called health care bill in the Senate seemed to mark the onset of a mini-crisis and reorientation within the White House. The sound and fury and that process aside, the important thing to notice about this reorientation is that it is away from the Republican Party and toward the alt-right. Most of the people Trump has fired since failure of the health care bill have been Republicans (such as former Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus), while the replacements have been generals, billionaires, and alt-right ideologues. Observe the following corresponding shifts in policy direction from White House:
-One week ago: Trump reinstates ban on transgender troops in the military.
-On Friday, Trump "jokingly" calls on police to abuse those whom they arrest.
-On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that it will now redirect its civil rights division's resources toward investigating and suing universities over how white people are being held back from higher education by affirmative action. Perspective: Black people make up 15% of the college-age population, but only 6% of students at the 100 top-tier American colleges and universities. Sure sounds like black privilege to me.
-On Wednesday, Trump announced major legislation to cut the number of people entering the United States (legally, mind you!) in half by allowing only wealthier, highly-educated immigrants in who already speak English the day of their arrival. The proposal was questioned by some Congressional Republicans, but has been universally praised by all sections of the alt-right, from the extreme nativist (e.g. Breitbart News) to the openly racist (e.g. Stormfront).
-On Wednesday, the Secretary of State declared that the U.S.-China relationship has reached a "pivot point" and that "open conflict" was now possible, thus ending several months of detente following China's agreement to put additional pressure on North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program (which it did, albeit unsuccessfully).
All of these developments point toward the White House losing faith in the Republican Party over the health care fiasco and moving toward the extreme, ethnically/culturally-motivated right in response, with this immigration bill being their replacement legislative priority. Oh joy. Back to the culture wars we go! And the best news? This time, the Democrats might not fight this shit!
That brings me to my second observation on recent developments: the Democratic Party's recently-announced Better Deal program. The program is obviously designed to appeal to those white, Midwestern voters who have traditionally voted Democratic, but cast a Trump ballot last year. There is good and bad in that. On the good side, the Better Deal calls for a full $15/hour minimum wage, price ceilings on prescription drugs, seeks to allow Medicare Part D to negotiate drug prices, and calls for a protectionist trade policy, a $1 trillion infrastructure rebuilding program, and a new agency to crack down on monopolies. So this largely represents the Democratic Party getting back to the kind of populist economic ideas that it has traditionally supported, which I view as a good thing. But appealing ONLY to those white, Midwestern voters also has its downside: to be safe, the Better Deal opts for a neutral position in the culture wars, remarkably, having literally nothing to say about the defense of abortion rights, immigrant rights, police brutality, or discrimination against gay and transgender people. Educators too are thrown under the bus (again): the Better Deal calls for public-private partnerships in education (i.e. corporate management of public education) that "gives employers a role in curriculum development...blending classroom learning and work site training."
To cement that these are not just tacit things, Ben Ray Lujan, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, on Monday declared the committee's willingness to fund anti-abortion candidates. (Note that the corresponding Republican committee does NOT fund pro-choice candidates.) Likewise, leading (I guess hitherto) neoliberal mouthpieces from the Atlantic's Peter Beinart to CNN's Fareed Zakaria to Clinton aides Mark Penn and Andrew Stein have all published articles calling on the Democratic Party to move closer to the Trump political line on immigration. Zakaria argued that the Democrats "should take a position on immigration that is less absolutist and recognizes both the cultural and economic costs of large-scale immigration", while Penn and Stein wrote in a recent New York Time op-ed that the Democrats lost the 2016 election because voters "feel abandoned" by Democratic support for "policies offering more help to undocumented immigrants than to the heartland." For the Atlantic's latest issue, Beinart has written that "the next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America's undocumented population to zero." So much for liberalism! These are all concentrations of what the Better Deal means for actual Democratic policy. It is indeed marked by movement in Trump's direction on social policy.
What a time for the Democrats to abandon women, teachers, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and civil rights: just as the Trump Administration is embracing the alt-right in earnest and shifting focus back to fighting the culture wars (and perhaps more literal wars as well if not careful)! The Democrats may be taking up a neutral position in the culture wars, but the Administration is not, and that makes for a rather one-sided fight, doesn't it? We will have to defend ourselves.