A New Working-Class GOP? If “Working-Class” Means $4.3 Million a Year!
So much for a new,
“populist” Republican Party. So much for the GOP as a brave band of
fiscally prudent, anti-deficit hawks. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” is a declaration
of intellectual bankruptcy, policy incoherence, and political vacuousness.
That’s its formal name, by the way, and you’ve already admitted a problem when
you have to sell something that hard.
It’s no wonder that
the only way the BBB passed the House was for one opponent to vote
“present” and for two others to miss the vote. One of the absent
members fell asleep and missed the vote, an entirely appropriate response to an
exercise in philosophical exhaustion. Defending
the bill requires twisting facts into the “alternative” variety and turning the
plain meaning of words upside down.
For example:
The right wingers who demanded more cuts in programs for low-income people are
regularly described as “deficit hawks.” But even if they had gotten all the
changes they sought, the bill would have massively increased the deficit. And
most of them voted for a final product that will add close to $4 trillion to
the nation’s indebtedness.
If these guys
are hawks, I don’t know what a dove looks like.
Trump and his backers
continue to insist that they are building a new working-class Republican
coalition. But the astonishing thing about this bill is not only that it
lavishes tax cuts on the very well-off; it also takes money away from Americans
earning less than $51,000 a year once its cuts in Medicaid, the Affordable Care
Act, SNAP, and student loans are counted for. Republicans who rail against
“income redistribution” are doing an awful lot of redistribution themselves—to those who already have lots of money.
The Penn
Wharton budget model of the near-final version of the bill found that Americans
earning less than $17,000 would lose $1,035 under its terms. Those
earning between $17,000 and $50,999 would lose $705. But the small number of
our fellow citizens who earn more than $4.3 million a year have a lot to cheer
about: They pick up $389,280 annually.
Please explain
to me again why this is a “populist” Republican Party.
It’s imperative
not to miss what’s obvious about this bill—that it ravages lower-income people
to benefit the very privileged—and for progressives and Democrats to act on this.
But it’s also essential to notice what doesn’t
get enough attention: that so much of the commentary about how Trump has
reinvented the GOP with a fresh set of ideas and commitments is poppycock.
Trumpism is certainly dangerous and authoritarian in new ways. It is, well,
innovative when it comes to a vast and unconstitutional expansion of
presidential power.
But it’s also an ideological mess riddled
with contradictions. When you look below the hood, it’s primarily about the interests
of people who can buy their way into Trump’s golf clubs and private
pay-for-play dinners—and, especially, about the enrichment of Trump and his
family.
On the phony
populism side, Democrats in the House did a generally good job of highlighting
the costs of provisions in the bill that hurt so many of Trump’s voters,
particularly the cuts in Medicaid and nutrition assistance, or SNAP. Senate Democrats
have already ramped up similar efforts as that body’s Republican leaders prepare
to grapple with the steaming pile of incongruities the House has sent their
way.
You can tell
that Republicans know how unpopular the Medicaid cuts in the bill are because
they delayed their effectiveness date to minimize their electoral effect,
repeatedly denied they are cutting Medicaid—and don’t want to talk at all about
how slashing subsidies within the Affordable Care Act would take health
coverage away from millions more Americans.
They are
hiding the Medicaid cuts behind “work requirements” that are really
bureaucratic paperwork requirements that would make it much harder for people
with every right to coverage to access it. They would make it more difficult
for others to maintain continuous coverage. And if these rules were not about
“cutting” Medicaid, the GOP couldn’t claim to be “cutting” roughly $700 billion
in Medicaid spending.
But the GOP
thinks it has a winner in its work argument. It’s a tired but tested replay of a
very old (and, yes, offensive) trope about alleged grifters among supposedly
“lazy” poor people. House Speaker Mike Johnson offered a remarkable version of
this defense of the “work” provisions: He said they were aimed at “the young men who need to be out working
instead of playing video games all day.” If ever there was a quote that should go viral, this is it.
Young men, after all, shifted toward the Republicans in 2024. They should know
what the party many of them voted for thinks of them.
More important, progressives need to
take the work argument on directly, not only by showing that the work
provisions aren’t really about work but also by offering amendments replacing
the Medicaid cuts with provisions that actually would expand the availability
of well-paying opportunities for greater self-sufficiency. Restoring the clean
energy tax credits are important not only to battling climate change; they’re also
about preserving and creating well-paying jobs. A package of proposals on affordable
housing, job training, and access to community colleges, particularly in
economically depressed areas, would make a nice contrast to those who deny that
government has the capacity to improve lives.
What the Financial Times’ economics columnist Martin Wolf nicely termed “pluto-populism”
when the GOP passed the 2017 tax cuts that this bill extends is alive and well.
That populist rhetoric is being married to plutocratic policies is still not recognized
widely enough. This is certainly a commentary on the rightward tilt of the
media system the editor of this magazine has called out. But
it also reflects a failure of Democrats to take the argument to the heart of
Trump’s base.
It’s political common sense that
parties focus most of their energy on swing states and swing districts. Yet
there will be no breaking the 50-50 deadlock in our politics without a
concerted effort to change the minds of voters who have drifted to Trump out of
frustration with their own economic circumstances and the condition of their
regions. The fight over Medicaid and SNAP cuts directly implicates these voters
and these places.
And these voters pay more attention
to these issues than either the Republicans who take them for granted or
Democrats who have given up on them believe.
When Andy Beshear won his first race
for governor of Kentucky in 2019, he not only mobilized Democrats in urban
areas; he also flipped many rural counties and cut the Republicans’ margins in
others. Typical was Carter County in eastern Kentucky. The county went for
Beshear even though it had backed his GOP opponent and then-incumbent Republican
Governor Matt Bevin four years earlier and gave Trump 73.8 percent of its ballots in 2016. Breathitt County
in Appalachia also flipped, having gone for Bevin and voted 69.6 percent for Trump.
Fred Cowan, a former Kentucky attorney
general and a shrewd student of his state’s politics, told me then
that these voters understood where their interests lay. “In a lot of these
counties, the school systems or the hospitals—or both—are the biggest
employers,” he said “The Medicaid expansion helped a lot of people over there.”
Sure, it’s easier for Democrats like
Beshear with strong local profiles to make their case. But the national party
needs to learn from these politicians that giving up on whole swaths of voters
is both an electoral and moral mistake.
The emptiness of Republican populism
speaks to the larger problem of mistaking Trump’s ability to create a somewhat new
electoral coalition with intellectual and policy innovation. Some conservative commentators are
honest enough to admit how the BBB demonstrates that the “old Republican Party is
still powerful, the old ideas are still dominant,” as Ross Douthat observed in The
New York Times.
But even Douthat wants to cast the
bill as an exception to a bolder transformation the president has engineered,
particularly around immigration and a “Trumpian culture war.” The problem here
is that none of this is new, either.
The GOP was moving right on
immigration well before Trump—when, for example, it killed George W. Bush’s
immigration bill in 2007 as right-wing media cheered it on. The culture war and
the battle against universities are old hat too. The real innovator here was
the late Irving Kristol, whose columns in the 1970s introduced Wall Street
Journal readers to the dangers posed to business interests by “the new
class” of Hollywood, media, and university types, along with activist lawyers. True,
Trump is taking this fight to extreme places Kristol would never have gone. But,
again, there’s no new thinking here.
And the attack on trans rights is just
the latest front in the LGBTQ+ debates, now that the right has had to abandon
its opposition to same-sex marriage because Americans have come to support it
overwhelmingly.
Even the contradictions aren’t new.
Since the Reagan years, Republicans have always talked about the dangers of
deficits when Democrats were in power but cast those worries aside when they
had the power to cut taxes. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” is the
canonical Dick Cheney quote from 2002
when he was pushing for more tax cuts in W.’s administration. The exception proves
the rule: George H.W. Bush made a deal with Democrats in 1991 that included tax
increases because he really did care about deficits—and conservatives never
forgave him for it.
In an odd way, you have to admire
Cheney’s candor: At least he admitted what he was doing. The Freedom Caucus
members have the gall to yell at the top of their lungs about how they care so very
much about the debt—and then vote in overwhelming numbers to pile on billions
more.
As the debate over the BBB moves to
the Senate, the immediate imperative is to expose the damage the bill does to
millions of Trump’s voters to benefit his Mar-a-Lago and crypto-wealthy
friends. But it’s also an occasion to shatter the illusion that Trump is some
sort of brilliant policy innovator. Extremism and authoritarianism are not new
ideas, and his legislative program would be familiar to Calvin Coolidge.
