Dem Rx is bad medicine – and Joe Biden knows it
https://nypost.com/2021/09/10/…e-joe-biden-knows-it/amp/
President Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, gave up the administration’s game by endorsing a tweet from MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle:
“OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.”
So as with other things — such as the federal eviction moratorium — Biden knows his actions are unconstitutional. He’ll just try to do it anyway with loopholes and gambles that by the time the case winds its way through the courts, it won’t matter.
It’s all so performative and cynical.
Biden isn’t playing to the unvaccinated, who are even less likely to get the shot after being lectured to and insulted by the president.
It’s for smug Democrats who appreciate him lecturing and insulting those people, dividing the nation even more.
Biden could have tried compassion and empathy instead of anger and hectoring. Instead, after his mismanagement of everything from the border to the economy, Biden is trying to lay claim to some moral high ground. Look at those GOP governors, they are “cavalier” with life, he claimed Friday
Biden could have tried compassion and empathy instead of anger and hectoring. Instead, after his mismanagement of everything from the border to the economy, Biden is trying to lay claim to some moral high ground. Look at those GOP governors, they are “cavalier” with life, he claimed Friday
Not as cavalier as Biden was with the 13 service members who died as a result of the president’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, or how cavalier he’s being with the American lives he’s left behind there.
Nor as cavalier as Biden is with his own beliefs: In the last year he has both cast doubt over the efficacy of vaccines (because Trump was still in charge) and vowed he doesn’t believe in vaccine mandates, then reversed himself on both.
But these GOP governors and other opponents of Biden’s dubious mandates do care — about the higher principles the president would trample over.
The vaccine orders are just the latest Democratic Party maneuver to federalize our lives, the Constitution be damned. Election law, abortion, education — all must be dictated by a tiny Democratic majority in Washington, and if that fails, well, there are “work-arounds.”
The Post has campaigned for vaccinations. They work. They are getting us back to normal, even as Democratic governors and mayors keep trying to move the goalposts.
But high-handed contempt for 80 million Americans, while violating laws and norms, is not the answer. Democrats wonder why Biden’s approval rating is plummeting, and 69 percent of those polled say things are going badly in the country. This is why.
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That story tells you why COVID in the US is political. It is a shame. Extraordinary that the two sides can't keep politics where it belongs.
As I see it the Republicans saying the Democrats are trying to control lives and destroy the economy with govt interference, the Democrats saying the republicans are trying to kill people with guns and lack of healthcare. That is all politics. What you expect.
I have some sympathy with the Republican party, enslaved by a set of base voters that are deeply afraid and resentful of societal change, and strongly pro-religion, anti-science. I don't blame the Republican base electorate - their fears are genuine and need to be addressed. I blame the (educated, rich, sophisticated) Republican politicians in Congress and the Senate who are actively promoting anti-democratic and anti-science views, even though they know them to be dangerous, because to do otherwise would be politically painful. More guts and moral fibre from the US right please!
I blame the democrats equally when they do not keep the worst excesses of their extremists in check, but what do they have similar in magnitude to:
- The Republicans (from Trump onwards) are using anti-science messaging to set population against health authorities in a pandemic. That is something else. Morally reprehensible.
- The Republicans are still backing Trump-style mob rule and legislation to ignore the popular vote in the next Presidential election, on the pretext that people do not trust the elections to be fair - after this message was promoted for two years by Trump. This is anti-democratic and exactly what autocrats and wannabe dictators have done (often with success) throughout history. I'm not sure whether trying to stay in power against the will of the electorate is as morally bad as campaigning against health authorities in a pandemic - but I hate it just as much.
You don't have to be a liberal left-wing freak to think this - look at Liz Cheyney.
A left-right neutral political point: in a two party system (US,UK) the only way to gain power long-term is to appeal to a broad coalition of voters. that is how it should be, and it removes the excesses of party activists and allows pragmatic compromise. The US seems to have abandoned this principle.
A fascinating commentary in a possible future route towards reclaiming moderation in US politics.
In recent years, there has emerged a broadly shared sense that political moderation is dying. Joe Biden's victory in the Democratic primary has been widely interpreted as the last gasp of an exhausted tradition, after which he will hand over the reins to the party's left. Meanwhile, moderates have been an endangered species in the Republican Party for going on two decades now.
The decline of political moderates lies at the root of many of our fundamental governing problems. As American political parties have become increasingly captured by their ideological extremes in recent decades, the space for cross-party coalition-building has shrunk. Where moderates were once critical to establishing coalitions across party lines, both parties' leaders today have established a hammerlock over the agenda in Congress, allowing only single-party alliances to form except under very unusual conditions.
The absence of cross-party coalitions means that members of Congress no longer see their colleagues across the aisle as potential resources for advancing their political and policy goals. This is even true of the few remaining moderates in both parties, who, in a less centralized, more entrepreneurial legislative environment, would be allies in creative lawmaking. Negative partisanship — that is, party attachment driven by fear and loathing of the other side more than a positive attachment to one's own party program — has abetted this dynamic, creating a climate in which building bipartisan coalitions is seen as equivalent to trading with the enemy. Because our political institutions make it difficult to pass major policy reforms without support from both parties, the absence of moderates to bridge the divide has generated legislative gridlock.
These now-familiar patterns have led ideological moderates to search for the bug in American institutions responsible for such extreme systemic dysfunction. Some have identified party primaries as the culprit and embrace reforms like California's jungle primary or, more recently, ranked-choice voting. Others blame the ideologically imbalanced structure of legislative districts and call for non-partisan redistricting or judicial supervision of the redistricting process. Whatever desirable effects institutional reforms may bring, they have failed to produce a much higher number of moderate legislators. Our optimism about their potential to do so in the future should thus be limited.
The failure of reform mechanisms to spark a rebirth of moderation has led some to conclude that the real problem lies with the Democratic and Republican parties themselves. Calling for a pox on both their houses, disenchanted moderates have fallen under the sway of one of the great chimeras of American politics: the exciting but ultimately Pollyanna-ish hope of creating a centrist third party to take on the two-party oligopoly.
If we lived in a different country, a third party might be well worth exploring. But as political scientist Patrick Dunleavy has argued, America appears to be the only country in which Duverger's Law — that a single-member-district, first-past-the-post electoral system stymies the creation of third parties — actually holds. Since the two-party system is baked into the cake of the American political system, the pursuit of a third party, whatever sense of smug satisfaction it may generate, is guaranteed to be a sinkhole for money and energy.
THE DILEMMA OF MODERATION
Given the futility of forming a third party, moderates of all sorts can only counter those on the ideological poles by finding leverage within the two major parties. To accomplish this, moderates will need to organize as a coherent bloc, recruit attractive candidates, mobilize moderate voters in each party to participate in partisan politics, and develop ideas to inspire their bases. Without strong, durable, organizationally dense factions, individual moderates or even entire state parties will not be able to distinguish themselves from their respective national brands or fight for leverage in national politics.
But how can they do this when the two parties have been captured so thoroughly by their activist poles? Could moderate factions in the Democratic and Republican parties actually have any significant influence?
The dynamics of contemporary American politics suggest that yes, moderates will have new opportunities to carve footholds within the party system and shape the country's future. That opening will come from deep forces at work within American society that will cause the two parties to become increasingly less cohesive in the coming years than they have been of late.
Polarization is commonly understood as a dynamic in which the two parties move further apart. However, another important feature of polarization is increasing homogeneity within each party's cohort of elected officials. This pattern stifles demand for the kind of intra-party factions that used to provide necessary outlets for the much more varied preferences of elected politicians. Understanding the last two decades through this lens helps explain why there has been such a decline in cross-party lawmaking.
The conditional-party-government theory associated with John Aldrich and David Rhode suggests that ideologically homogeneous members of Congress will support stronger leadership control of the political agenda and legislative procedure. This concentration of power occurs not only because factional structures are absent, but because members have neither the capacity nor the desire to constrain the leadership's power. The last 25 years have borne this out: Except under crisis conditions (such as the pandemic-related bills passed in the spring of 2020), Congress has been characterized by strong leadership that only takes up polarizing issues, which serve to unify the majority caucus and divide it from the opposition.
Conversely, conditional-party-government theory also holds that as party caucuses become more heterogeneous, they transfer less control of the agenda to leaders, preferring instead to vest control in committees and committee chairs. Increasingly diverse members will also demand more organizational structures — that is, institutionalized factions — to coordinate that heterogeneity. Thus, while conditional-party-government theory predicts power flowing toward committees in a heterogeneous Congress, it should also imply that power in such circumstances flows toward organized factions that negotiate both with one another and with factions across party lines.
We may have grown accustomed to homogeneous parties and a leadership-driven system in recent decades, but this system is increasingly coming under strain. For one thing, though the public has become somewhat polarized over the same period, the degree of polarization in the general population is dwarfed by what has occurred within the parties' congressional caucuses. This divergence between the mass public and partisan elites has put increasing pressure on Capitol Hill's status quo, as the Congress the public sees does not reflect the country's actual distribution of opinion, especially for parts of the public that are cross pressured (e.g., those who are economically liberal and socially conservative).
Moderates, by contrast, have largely abandoned the field. Perhaps because they believe the broader public is already on their side, they tend to think control of politics by those mobilized at the ideological poles is illegitimate. Hence, they look for ways to redesign rules to allow the sensible but unmobilized middle to have its preferences govern without needing to do the hard work of organizing for action within the two major parties.
This approach is misguided. The reality is that deep, self-reinforcing dynamics help maintain the disproportionate political influence of those at the ideological extremes. Politics rewards participation and preference intensity, both at the mass and elite levels. The desire of core Democratic Party constituencies to moderate their claims in order to win has, as political scientist Matt Grossman argues, served to constrain the Democrats from becoming as ideologically pure as the Republicans, as Biden's nomination demonstrates. Yet there has been an upsurge in mobilization on the party's progressive wing that has yielded tangible results: Socialist Bernie Sanders (who has always resisted membership in the party itself) was a serious presidential contender in 2016 and 2020, the party has clearly moved left in its core policy positions, and more than a few Democratic incumbents have been knocked out by challengers from their left.
In the past, moderates have relied on three alternatives to durable partisan organization. First, they've looked to the financial resources of moderate donors to pull the parties to the center. This strategy disappeared among Republicans with the death of Nelson Rockefeller and is increasingly running out of steam among Democrats, as indicated by the stigma on high-dollar fundraisers in the presidential primary and the increasing reliance on — and pious rhetoric attached to — small donations.
Second, moderates have counted on their control of relatively insulated parts of government, such as the Federal Reserve and the foreign-policy establishment, to maintain influence. However, the power of both parties' moderate professionals — acutely in the Republican Party and incrementally among Democrats — appears to be diminishing. Strategies for further insulating various domains of government from partisan pressure seem extremely unlikely to succeed in our populist age.
Third, moderates have taken advantage of the power of incumbency, drawing strength from members first elected in a less-polarized era. But with each election cycle, these moderate incumbents are gradually replaced by new, more extreme members. Especially on the Republican side, the absence of collective organization means moderates lack an ability to draw on a recognized national brand distinct from their party's dominant, more extreme brand. As a result, they have to either quit — as most moderates have — or join the herd.
This declining influence has led moderates to search frantically for institutional reforms to amplify the voices of moderate voters. The most desperate indulge the Hail Mary scheme of forming a new, moderate third party. While this search has paid the salary of many an otherwise unemployed political consultant, the dream of a third party is futile. There may exist a large number of voters whose positions on social and economic issues do not line up, but only a small minority of them fit into the Michael Bloomberg/Howard Schultz quadrant of socially liberal and fiscally conservative. In fact, the largest group of cross-pressured voters are in the opposite quadrant, combining support for social insurance and interventionist economic policy with modest social conservatism. That's bad news for dreams of a moderate third party, as no single party could conceivably hold both sets of voters.
SEIZING THE OPPORTUNITY
The return to factional political parties with the potential to re-invigorate moderates in the American political system is a scenario, not a certainty. It will not unfold purely on the basis of mechanical, structural forces; rather, its advent is contingent on creative, intelligent agency on the part of both organizations and individuals. A faction, after all, is composed of a network of organizations, and organizations do not emerge spontaneously. What's more, there is no guarantee these institutions will be well-designed, well-led, sufficiently cunning, or endowed with enough resources flowing toward the right incentives.
The opportunity to build factional parties depends on a core group of activists and donors emerging — one that will provide the leadership and resources to build the structures through which a mobilized faction can surface. Given this requirement, there is significant danger that the very spirit that characterizes moderates — a tendency to eschew party politics — will lead their organization-building and reformist efforts into third-party or non-partisan blind alleys.
Yet some raw materials for developing moderate factions within both parties already exist. Billionaire donors like Kathryn Murdoch and Seth Klarman have expressed interest in supporting moderates in both parties, although their strategy for doing so appears fairly rudimentary thus far. For their resources to have an impact, more donors in both parties will need to shift their political activity to consciously seeding the wide range of electoral, policy, and intellectual organizations that will allow moderates to gain leverage within institutions largely dominated by extremists. New magazines and think tanks catering to Democratic market-liberals and the liberal-conservative faction of the Republican Party will need to emerge, providing an outlet for academics, writers, and policy experts affiliated with moderate elements to develop and share their ideas.
Meanwhile activists, donors, and intellectuals alienated by the polarized direction of their respective parties will need to redirect their activity toward finding a base of support to mobilize and creating organizations to facilitate their pursuit of power. In places where their respective national parties are weak, these moderate factions will have an opportunity to establish a power base for intra-party conflict. They will need to form new coalitions of elected officials — along the lines of what the Democratic Leadership Council established in the 1980s — to create a political identity distinct from that of the national parties for aspiring officeholders. Where they are successful, they will, at least on occasion, need to translate their custody of state government into the election of factional supporters to Congress and use their new institutions to coordinate their legislative efforts. The dominant populist faction of the Republican Party may not even resist the growth of a minority faction, since such a faction will operate in places where the party is nearly extinct; success in those places may be necessary for Republicans to control Congress in the future.
There is no question that on the Republican side, moderates are at a disadvantage in capturing state parties — even in places where the Trump brand is toxic — given that the president holds such a dominant position among members of the party's base. But this doesn't necessarily mean the effort to build a power structure for moderate Republicans in enough states to gain influence is hopeless. Republican governors in blue states have especially powerful sway over their state parties, which they can use to build a strong factional (as opposed to merely personal) base.
In Virginia, for instance, the Trump brand has almost single-handedly destroyed the Republican Party's power, making it uncompetitive in the middle-class suburbs that pave the way to control of Richmond. This suggests there could be demand from office-seekers for a rebranded party capable of differentiating itself from the increasingly toxic national brand by associating itself with a moderate faction. In Kansas, moderate Republicans have openly defected from their more extreme conservative counterparts to reverse the sweeping tax cuts that wrecked the state's finances. More could and should be done to build that group into a durable faction within the state legislature.
Even more broadly, moderate Republicans need to focus on organizing ordinary citizens who agree with them — which, in some places, will include Democrats defecting from a party increasingly controlled by the left — to compete for control of their state parties. This will involve more than a year or two of work, but it is the kind of long-term effort that eventually gave conservatives the whip hand in the party.
This scenario is certainly not the only possibility. But it does suggest that, by cultivating factions within each party, moderates have at least some prospect of re-emerging as a power center in American politics. While they may seem like unicorns in our current polarized moment, intra-party factions used to be the norm in American politics, and the time is ripe for their renewal. For such factions to develop, moderates will have to summon the motivation and the discipline to engage in the kind of intra-party trench warfare they've too often considered unsavory and demeaning, but that their competitors have mastered and put to effective use.
Chasing non-partisan or anti-partisan fantasies may provide psychological comfort, but it won't generate much in the way of tangible results. The best investment of time, energy, and money for those who want a more deliberative, entrepreneurial, and productive political system is to dedicate themselves to the gritty work of building moderate factions within the two major parties.
