Why We Can't Have Nice Things

One of us, not one of them-- so Pelosi will try to destroy him without blinking

Today is the first day of early voting for Utah and Saturday is the start of early voting for the rest of the Florida counties that didn't start yesterday-- albeit not all that early. But most of the rest of the country is in the throes of it now-- at least in those states that allow it. It started in bluer states like Minnesota, New Jersey and Illinois last month. And people have been voting at unprecedented numbers for a midterm. Turnout virtually everywhere is higher than it was for the 2014 midterm. And some states and counties are reporting numbers that make it look more like a presidential cycle. So this is part of a wave... right? Well that depends if these early voters want to support Trump or put a check on him. Do they want to preserve healthcare for their families or do they want to make healthcare a privilege for the wealthy?

So how do you know who's voting? The excitement about early voting was so high in Miami-Dade that people camped out at the polling places Sunday night! Republican Trump supporters? Not likely. There GOTV rallies in Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville with Andrew Gillum and Joe Biden-- and they brought Bill Nelson or a Bill Nelson dummy along with them-- and they resulted in long, long lines Monday. Republican Trump supporters? That isn't what anyone is saying. Gillum is seemingly everywhere in the state while DeSantis is hiding under his bed licking his deep wounds after being eviscerated in the CNN debate. These are early voters in Miami. Unless they were wearing Gillum shirts to fake out the media, these were not Republican Trump supporters.

North Carolina is also in the midst of early voting and about 431,000 North Carolinians cast their ballots during the first five days of early voting, compared to 410,000 in 2016 and just 298,000 in 2014. And this is despite the fact that this year, only 27 counties had early voting sites open on the first Saturday of early voting, compared to 48 counties in 2016 and over 80 counties in 2014. So are they voting for Trump or against Trump. No way to be certain, but so far around 196,000 ballots have been cast by registered Democrats, compared to 134,000 by registered Republicans and 121,000 by unaffiliated voters.

Early voting in Nevada started Saturday and something like 3 times as many Nevadans cast ballots during the first week of early voting compared to the 2014 midterms. Clark County (Las Vegas), a Democratic stronghold, had turnout that is usually seen in presidential election cycles.

How about this headline from the Houston Chronicle? Shocking turnout for first day of early voting in Houston. "Thousands of people were already camped out at a key early voting location in Houston on Monday morning, hours before voting was even set to begin." But are these Democrats or Republicans?

This was from day one of early voting in Travis County (Austin). As you can see, not only did early voters blow past the 2014 (midterm) number by 40,000 votes (!!!!), they passed the 2016 (presidential) number as well!

• 2018: 47,405

• 2016: 47,109

• 2014: 17,181

And then there was the BETO Effect in hometown El Paso County!

• 2018: 17,294
• 2016: 15,286
• 2014: 2,817

The Tysons Reporter wrote that "In Virginia's Fairfax County interest in this mid-term election is running high-- possibly as high as in a presidential election year. If early ballots are any indication, interest in this mid-term election is running high-- possibly as high as in a presidential election year. As of last Friday, 23,772 ballots had been cast in Fairfax County since early voting began September 15. That’s an increase of 112 percent over the number of early ballots cast at this point in the 2017 election. The figures come from the non-partisan Virginia Public Access Project. In Fairfax City and Falls Church the increase is 115 percent. Statewide, 95,616 ballots have been case for an increase of 97 percent. 'It’s actually quite shocking,' Richard Keech, deputy director of the elections office in Loudoun County told the Washington Post.'This would be the first time without a president on the ballot that we’ve seen this kind of increase.'"

But don't get too excited. Some states are reporting that more Republicans are rushing to vote early than Democrats, including states with pivotal Senate races, like Arizona, Indiana, Montana and Tennessee. In Indiana, fro example, 51% of early voters have been Republicans and just 39% Democrats. That could auger badly for Joe Donnelly, who has done nothing at all to rev up the Democratic base. In fact, his conservative voting record is going to get many Democrats out to the polls. Same in Tennessee. Phil Bredesen--- who was leading in the polls until he said he would have voted for Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation-- deflated his base and only 30% of early voters have been Dems, while 63% have been Republicans.

The hopeful news for Democrats in many states is that women are voting in greater numbers than men and that suburban voters are the ones who are out voting early. Women and suburbanites, regardless of party affiliation, are out to punish the GOP for enabling Trump. Florida, Texas and Georgia, particularly have seen huge upsurges in women voters. And it's suburban voters rather than rural voters who are crushing it in Florida, Georgia and Tennessee.

Honestly though, it's hard to tell which party is benefitting most from this early voting increase. Reporting for New York Magazine, Eric Levitz wrote that Tribalism Isn’t Our Democracy’s Main Problem. The Conservative Movement Is and that the "Democrats and Republicans now provide the electorate with stark choices on health care, taxation, social spending, immigration, racial justice, abortion, environmental regulation, labor rights, and myriad other issues. It has rarely, if ever, been more clear what-- and whom-- each party in the U.S. stands for."

[O]ur republic may be suffering from a variety of disfiguring illnesses, but all trace back to the damage that hyperpartisanship did to its immune system: Our president may be a kleptocratic conspiracy theorist who oozes contempt for America’s highest ideals (and ignorance of high-school civics)-- but only because conservative voters came to despise the Democratic Party more than they loathe self-proclaimed pussy-grabbers. Congress might be barely able to fund its own paychecks, let alone find consensus solutions to policy challenges-- but voters only tolerate such gridlock because they’ve come to see compromise as a synonym for their side’s defeat. And Americans might be losing confidence in public institutions, the integrity of their nation’s elections, and the value of democracy itself-- but this is largely because so many of them have decided that one of their nation’s two political parties poses an existential threat to their bedrock ideals.

University of Maryland political scientist Lilliana Mason writes in her book, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity that contemporary American politics,"our conflicts are largely over who we think we are rather than over reasoned differences of opinion." By this, Mason means that our nation’s partisan divisions are not rooted in the severity of red and blue America’s ideological disagreements, but in the extremity of their social animosities.

In an exhaustive study of the 2016 electorate, Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels found that a majority of Democratic and Republican voters “endorse government efforts to regulate pollution, provide a decent standard of living for people unable to work, and ensure access to good health care.” Those conclusions are buttressed by the past two years of policy polling, which has consistently found Democrats and Republicans seeing eye-to-eye on a wide range of economic issues. To name just a few: At least a plurality of voters in both parties want the government to increase federal spending on health care, preserve the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, guarantee affordable health insurance to people with preexisting conditions, subsidize tuition at public colleges, provide a “public option for the internet”-- and keep taxes on the wealthy and corporations at least as high as they were before the Trump tax cuts passed.

Crucially, the possibilities for consensus legislation are not limited to “bread-and-butter” issues. Even on our culture war’s bloodiest killing fields-- i.e., on the subjects of immigration, guns, and abortion-- there is plenty of room for Republicans and Democrats to find common cause. In August of this year, a Fox News poll found that 69 percent of Republicans favor a pathway to legal status for all law-abiding, undocumented immigrants currently working in the United States (and that finding is consistent with broader polling on the subject). On gun policy, a wide variety of proposals routinely attracts majority support from “red” and “blue” Americans-- while universal background checks and (the substantively bad idea of) barring Americans on the “no-fly list” from purchasing firearms boast the backing of over 75 percent of voters in either camp. On abortion rights, recent surveys have shown that a majority of both parties’ voters want the Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade, and thus, preserve a constitutional right to abortion services. (Of course, there is far less consensus on these issues among the two parties’ most politically engaged elites, activists. and interest groups.)

And yet, these myriad areas of agreement have been no bulwark against hyperpartisanship: Ordinary Republican and Democratic voters don’t disagree about public policy much more than they used to, but they still fear and loathe each other more than at any point in our nation’s modern history.

To see why we all can’t get along, let’s turn to the second half of Mason’s thesis. Drawing on insights from social psychology, Mason argues that human beings are hardwired for tribalism. We compulsively (and unconsciously) divide the social landscape into ingroups and outgroups; selectively process information that affirms the virtues of the former and the vices of the latter; and allow our self-esteem to rise and fall with the status of our team.

...Through an elaborate analysis of survey data, Mason shows that the strongest partisans in the United States today are not the voters with the most conservative or liberal policy opinions-- but rather, those with the strongest attachments to social groups that are uniformly associated with one major political party. As all of one’s social identities “line up behind one party or the other, they all win and lose together,” Mason writes. “The humiliation of loss is amplified. Victory, then, becomes more important than policy outcomes. Even when both sides hold the same policy positions, the priority is often to make sure the dirty shirts don’t win.”

Mason points to the government shutdown of 2013 as a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon. As we’ve seen, a plurality of Republican voters want the federal government to expand Medicaid and protect individuals with preexisting conditions. And yet, a plurality of Republican voters also wanted their elected representatives to shut down the government-- and thus, inflict economic damage on their own country-- on the outside chance that doing so would prevent Barack Obama’s plan to expand Medicaid and protect people with preexisting conditions from ever taking effect.

For Mason, and many other critics of polarization, the fundamental problem with the phenomenon is not that it has made political conflict in the United States bitter and divisive. On many policy questions, America really is bitterly divided; bipartisan comity in this country has typically been built atop a foundation of disregard for the rights of marginalized social groups (African-Americans invariably among them). To the extent that social polarization has enabled such groups to win meaningful representation, it has been a laudable development.

But Mason contends that, in minimizing the overlap-- and thus, personal contact-- between Democratic and Republican voters, social polarization has also amplified our tribal biases, and thus, led partisans to exaggerate the severity of their genuine divisions; overlook the myriad areas where consensus policymaking is possible; and tolerate substantive betrayals from their own party’s leadership. “When individuals participate in politics driven by team spirit or anger, the responsiveness of the electorate is impaired,” Mason argues. “If their own party-- linked with their race and religion-- does something undesirable, they are less likely to seriously consider changing their vote in the ballot booth.”

This analysis is persuasive. But as an account of why the United States lacks responsive government, it is deeply inadequate. Partisan prejudice might give legislators greater freedom to betray their constituents’ substantive aims-- but it does not explain why so many of our elected officials choose to exercise that liberty. Social polarization, therefore, is not the cause of unresponsive government in the U.S., so much as a condition that facilitates it.

This distinction has important, practical implications. If the fundamental obstacle to popular sovereignty in America isn’t hyperpartisanship, then reducing the latter will not necessarily bring us closer to the former; in fact, it is possible to imagine conditions in which “depolarizing” American politics could lead us even farther from that ideal.

To see why this is, consider one of Mason’s prescriptions for how our republic can be healed:

If the parties themselves had any interest in reducing levels of partisan prejudice, they could likely do so simply by encouraging the prominent flag-bearers of the party to loudly and freely discuss partisan opponents in an unprejudiced way…What if the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties decided to take on a tolerant rhetoric toward the opposing team? What if party prototypes started discussing real differences rather than demonizing their opponents? What if party opinion leaders (of both parties) started talking about politics by commending compromise and acknowledging the humanity and validity of the opposing team?

Mason is no naïf; she stipulates that there is “no reason to believe that this will occur in the near term, particularly in the Republican Party.” But the trouble with her proposal goes beyond its implausibility. The reciprocal, rhetorical disarmament she describes would likely reduce partisan hostilities-- but whether it would make government more responsive depends entirely on the terms of the two parties’ reconciliation.

For example, if Democratic elected officials and opinion leaders had commended compromise during last year’s health-care debate; acknowledged the validity of the Republican Party’s attempt to throw millions of low-income Americans off of Medicaid to finance tax cuts for the rich; and supplied the votes necessary for gutting federal health-care spending (in defiance of the wishes of a majority of both parties’ voters), then our politics would have become less polarized-- and less responsive to the popular will-- at the same time.

And this is not all-that fanciful a hypothetical. More than a few times in recent decades, Democrats have sought bipartisan compromise by acquiescing to unpopular (and unwise) conservative policy goals. It wasn’t wrenching social divisions that led the government to cut the capital gains tax rate in the 1990s, in defiance of a majoritarian preference for higher taxes on the wealthy-- it was Bill Clinton. Similarly, it was Barack Obama, not partisan prejudice, that brought Congress to the cusp of passing unpopular cuts to Social Security in 2011; in fact, partisan prejudice arguably prevented those cuts from passing.

Which is to say: Even in our hyperpartisan times, the two major parties can sometimes unite behind a policy that a broad, bipartisan majority of the public opposes. Social polarization cannot explain such failures of popular government; but the immense political power of reactionary elites in an economically polarized society can.

American Gothic, Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

The biggest barrier to popular sovereignty has always been economic inequality.

In truth, the most formidable obstacle to responsive government in the U.S. is-- and always has been-- the disproportionate power that economic elites wield over its political system. Influencing elections and legislative processes requires investments of time, money, and attention. Wealthy individuals and corporations can easily shoulder such expenses; ordinary voters can’t. This simple reality-- that economic power is easily converted into the political variety-- is an inherent constraint on popular sovereignty in all (capitalist) democracies. But it’s a constraint that can be more or less restrictive, depending on how unequally wealth is distributed, how easily large masses of ordinary people can organize politically, and how effectively outsize political spending is regulated or socially stigmatized. More concretely, policymaking tends to be more responsive to popular concerns in nations with strong labor unions, as such institutions help secure workers a larger share of economic growth, while also enabling working-class voters to collectivize the costs of political engagement.

In the contemporary United States, however, unions are on the verge of extinction; the richest 0.1 percent of the population commands as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and legal restrictions on political spending are effectively nonexistent. The Koch Network plans to spend $400 million electing its preferred Congress this November; corporate America is poised to spend upwards of $2 billion lobbying it next year. Given these conditions, one wouldn’t be expect policymaking to reflect popular preferences, no matter the social makeup of the nation’s two political parties.

After all, the last time organized labor was this weak and wealth, this concentrated, it was the Gilded Age. And that era was plagued by governance so unresponsive to public needs, the average height and life expectancy of ordinary Americans declined during it, even as their nation grew immensely wealthier. It is true that Democratic and Republican voters were bitterly divided and socially isolated in this period. But few would cite a dearth of “cross-pressured” voters as the principal reason why the federal government did not provide more relief to the unemployed during the Panic of 1893; or immiserated small farmers with deflationationary monetary policies throughout the late 19th century; or routinely massacred striking workers. The disparate economic power-- and political organization-- of corporate elites and ordinary workers is a much more intuitive explanation for the government’s failures in that period. It remains so in ours.

Political tribalism is bad. But government by and for the rich is worse.

Now, there is reason to believe that social polarization contributes to such disparities. Countering the inherent imbalance of political power between the superrich and working people requires the latter to organize around their class interests. And a population that is bitterly divided by Colin Kaepernick and the phrase “Happy Holidays”-- or, in the Gilded Age context, a recent Civil War and a de jure racial caste system-- is going to have hard time making common cause.

But if social polarization abets the power of reactionary plutocrats in the United States, reactionary plutocrats return the favor. In the industrial Midwest, labor unions once functioned as a (modestly) effective bulwark against racial polarization-- unionized white workers were far more likely to remain Democrats (which is to say, in a political coalition with a majority of the African-American electorate) than their non-unionized peers, amid the white backlash of the late 1960s.

But over the ensuing decades, a political movement bankrolled by conservative elites implemented a variety of policies that weakened organized labor-- and consciously worked to increase the political salience of America’s racial and and cultural divisions.

...[T]he GOP, and its associated institutions, have spent much of the past half-century actively trying to polarize the electorate along racial lines, and mobilize the Christian right through appeals to its most paranoid, millenarian instincts. This is no partisan conspiracy theory; it is basic political history. In the late 1960s, Republican operatives realized that an America in which the electorate was split along racial lines would be one in which the party least dependent on African-Americans would thrive. Some spelled out this theory explicitly, in best-selling books. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s top domestic aide, summarized the spirit of his boss’s 1968 campaign as, “We’ll go after the racists”-- adding, in his memoir, “The subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.” And that appeal has been a fixture of Republican political rhetoric in the United States ever since. (Anyone who doubts that the conservative movement still seeks to exacerbate social polarization would do well to spend an evening with Fox News’s prime-time lineup.)

One major appeal of “polarization” (or “hyperpartisanship”) as a framework for understanding our democracy’s dysfunction is that it does not implicate any one party or political movement: We are all subject to cognitive biases; impersonal, sociological forces have strengthened those biases; and thus, we have lost our collective capacity to find common ground.

...Tribalism may be a threat to democracy; but the tribe that the poorest 99 percent of Americans do not belong to is a bigger one.

OK, so in 20 words or less, why can't we have nice things? Is anyone watching season 3 of Versailles? And silly me, I've been urging people to vote for any shit Democrap no matter how bad, just to preserve us from Trump. I had a bad feeling about that advice. I need to think about it more closely. Mitch McConnell to Bloomberg News October 16: "I think it would be safe to say that the single biggest disappointment of my time in Congress has been our failure to address the entitlement issue [Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid], and it's a shame, because now the Democrats are promising Medicare-for-All... There's been a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity of those programs. Hopefully at some point here we'll get serious about this. We haven't been yet." McConnell was making the point that cutting these popular programs can only be done in a bipartisan way so both parties share the ire. That's why I oppose Blue Dogs and New Dems so vehemently. They're the ones willing-- eager-- to share the ire.