Rip Gop

by Stanley B Greenberg

  However, the precondition for these voters’ return was fundamentally reforming welfare, which provided cash benefits for the poor who were unable to work and their children. That was asking working families to pay taxes to subsidize other working people who chose not to work, and that was explosive. I asked myself, “How do you justify that?” Other liberal academics at the time were asking the same question, but also raising questions about the efficacy of Aid to Families with Dependent Children compared to other social insurance programs.13

  I had written up my thinking in a series of articles in The American Prospect, a new liberal journal, and met with liberal academics who were looking for better ways to help the poor and working poor.14 President Bill Clinton told people he had read three times my review of important books about this juncture by Thomas and Mary Edsall, E. J. Dionne, and Peter Brown. I argued that commentators were underestimating how open the middle class was to vote for a different kind of Democrat.

  This was politically possible because southern Democratic governors, like Governor Clinton in Arkansas, passed their own progressive welfare reform that provided job training and childcare, and conditioned aid on seeking employment. Bill Clinton announced for president with a commitment to “end welfare as we know it.” The goal was to make “work pay” and lift millions out of poverty. It required that the able-bodied seek work, but those jobs would now pay a higher minimum wage and a substantially enhanced earned income tax credit would raise the income of low-wage workers. And all workers had guaranteed health insurance and help with childcare.15

  Bill Clinton could advocate this progressive welfare reform because it was strongly supported by the black clergy who were critical of the current system of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and allies in reforming it. Candidate Clinton underscored the point by giving the same speech in an inner-city black church in Detroit and at Macomb County Community College in the white suburbs.

  The Democrats became a viable national party when Bill Clinton embraced progressive welfare reform that enabled him to close the margin in Macomb County in 1992 and win it in 1996. Democrats carried Macomb in every presidential election outside of 2004, until Donald Trump carried it handily in 2016.

  The Republican Party, as has become clear since 2012, cannot pass immigration reform. Ask former Majority Leader Eric Cantor what price one pays for even speculating about the prospect. Ask President Marco Rubio about the price he paid for being one of the Gang of Eight in the Senate. To be frank, recall Senator John McCain who switched to enforcement first when he ran for president after coming out of the gate slowly due to his authorship of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007.

  But what can save the Republican Party is a Democratic president passing landmark comprehensive immigration reform, with or without Republican votes, that is viewed as a juncture comparable to the passing of the civil rights laws in the 1960s. The immigration law passed by the U.S. Senate in 2013 included major funding for border security and e-verify to guarantee only those here lawfully are employed. It required that the law-abiding, undocumented immigrant pay fines, get at the back of the line to be a legal immigrant, and get on a path to citizenship. It expanded programs for short-term farm employment and visas for those graduating from universities—to greatly diminish the number of undocumented.

  This law would only change the political trajectory of the country if the administration visibly worked to manage and control immigration. Citizens would feel prioritized over non-citizens. The government would have to punish employers who employed people illegally. The number of undocumented would have to fall.

  Or would passage of comprehensive immigration reform simply be a pause button before the numbers of undocumented made their way to America again? Would this look like President Reagan’s amnesty and President George W. Bush’s expansion of legal immigration, which dramatically increased the number of immigrants, undocumented and foreign born? That is what conservatives expect.

  The tentacles of bold, landmark immigration reforms will only go deep into civil society if Fox News supports them, and perhaps even the Koch brothers. That seems like an impossible lift with Lachlan taking over the Murdoch empire and cheering the ultranationalists and fanning anti-immigrant fears and worries about Muslims on its affiliates in the United States, Britain, and Australia. But the Murdoch empire has been extraordinary at adapting to political changes and leveraging elected officials to create a friendly regulatory environment. What happens when Trump’s repudiation leaves them out in the cold? What happens when its own employees rebel? What happens when the network is held accountable for the domestic death toll?16

  They will come under attack within the conservative ecosphere, but it is the only way the GOP can move away from being an anti-immigrant party in an immigrant country. Fox News has to stop amplifying Breitbart News if the party is to change.

  Recall this.

  President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill, or the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), passed by the Gingrich Congress after he had vetoed it twice. It was hardly the progressive version that included an increased minimum wage and universal health care. I was no longer in the White House then but urged Clinton to veto it a third time. The president was able to get some changes in but hardly enough. He signed it to the consternation of many in the administration, though he was able to win important improvements that affected non-citizens the following year. President Clinton felt vindicated. And near full employment covered up a lot of sins.

  Amid all the scrutiny about the impact of the law, one can miss one of the biggest consequences. The issue disappeared. It is hard today to reconstruct how much political energy was devoted to it, but it just disappeared. It was no longer a voting issue.

  The Democrats have to lead if there is any chance of the parties being freed from the polarization on immigration.

  BECOMING RELEVANT AGAIN

  At the heart of the GOP is a large bloc of Evangelicals and observant and conservative Catholics who form about 40 percent of the party and are pro-life; indeed, that is probably why they are Republicans. The fervor, at least of the Evangelicals, has pushed away the moderates in the GOP, who are socially liberal, and the secular conservatives, who don’t like the Evangelical embrace of the Tea Party. This bloc has pushed away millennials and a lot of women.

  The GOP cannot be relevant for these voters until it accepts the sexual revolution and today’s working family, even if it doesn’t become pro-choice. The GOP is still trying to defund Planned Parenthood and to fund abstinence-only sex education. It is battling to limit contraception coverage in the Affordable Care Act. And conservatives have pulled back from ways to pay for childcare because they don’t want to incentivize work over caring for children and the home.17 Donald Trump won strong support in the Evangelical and Tea Party base when he stood up for men and their breadwinner role in the traditional family.

  But you cannot be relevant as a pro-family party if you are still trying to incentivize women to be homemakers and are still contesting the sexual revolution. You just cannot speak to working women who feel as if they are on their own and are demanding government do something about family and sick leave, childcare, and equal pay. Champion tax credits for the youngest children and universal pre-K. Only then would the GOP get a hearing on marriage, children with too little parenting, and young children benefiting from parenting and early socialization programs.

  The Republicans will not get a hearing with millennials in the country unless the post–Donald Trump leaders accept gay marriage, which was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014. The issue is not even a close call or even a brave one among Republicans, since more Republicans now support it than do not.18 A presidential candidate accepting gay marriage as the law of the land and the right thing to do is a larger statement about the sexual revolution and marriage.

  The final crushing Republican defeats were led by women of all classes and race
s, who believe women face discrimination up and down the employment ladder and receive unequal pay compared with men in similar positions. So, when the new Congress convenes in January 2021, the Democrats will reintroduce the Paycheck Fairness Bill and pass it, the same way the victorious Democrats passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first law signed by President Obama in 2009. My wife, Rosa DeLauro, was the principal author of the law, which passed the House three times, including in March 2019. The bill lost by two votes in the Senate in 2010, failing to win the votes of Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. For the sake of the GOP, this time a number of Republican women who are U.S. senators will need to be at the White House to be handed a pen after the president signs the Paycheck Fairness Act into law.

  Now for the hard part.

  The GOP has to break with the oil companies and the fossil fuel industry that puts the party in the implausible position of denying climate change and withdrawing America from the battle to contest it. It associates the party with the past, with dirty coal, while leaving the green economy to the Democrats. It also means the party will get no hearing with millennials and the generation behind them and will perhaps struggle to be relevant in Florida.

  The energy industry is a huge player in GOP campaigns and allied conservative institutions, in order to stop consideration of climate change or a shift to renewable energy. Yet Donald Trump has shown that the GOP can also energize and raise small-dollar donations on a large scale to free up its agenda.

  And the GOP has to follow the lead of many Republican governors who fought for the expansion of Medicaid in their states. The Republican Party since the New Deal has at each point accepted or expanded or introduced market reforms that have sometimes threatened the original intent, but the battle to repeal Obamacare was sui generis and cost the GOP dearly. Health care is now nationalized and politicized, and ironically, the GOP must find ways to make the Affordable Care Act work. They own the dysfunction now, unless they are ready for some form of Medicare for all. A majority of Republicans say they support health insurance for all. Indeed, there is broad support within the GOP for the government doing more about health care, childcare, and spending on the public schools. Deconstructing government has lost its lure, as teacher strikes highlight the need for different spending priorities. Republican governors have committed to spend more on education.

  This means rejecting the Tea Party’s top priority of repealing the Affordable Care Act and escaping that period of the Obama presidency when the GOP set itself against government. It means transcending a period when closing down the federal government was normal.

  After the repudiation of the Trump presidency and its battle against the deep state, the GOP must get back to being a party that can be trusted on national security. That means GOP leaders defending the intelligence agencies and defense department, as well as the multilateral arrangements that make us more secure, like NATO. I see no evidence that the desire to put America first and making sure you have a strong military means wanting to withdraw from America’s alliances in Europe and Asia. This is not Senator Rand Paul’s party.

  At its core, the Republican Party will be a party that is pro-business and wants lower taxes, a party that trusts markets as more than just a “tool,” as Tucker Carlson described them in his Fox News rant against the GOP. That is surely not what America is currently looking for, but its raison d’être. Some conservatives know that markets can threaten communities and family and divide the country, and they will weigh in after the deluge.19

  But Donald Trump and Steve Bannon did open up one area—making global trade, trade agreements, and our relationship with China work for Americans. For the president and Bannon, making America great required a crackdown on immigration and the assertion of “national sovereignty” over multilateralism,20 and they are surely on the defensive on both of those now.21 But it was, readers read in Bob Woodward’s account of White House discussions, among Trump’s very top imperatives: “you are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country.”22 The president believed “US trade agreements allowed cheaper foreign goods to flood into the United States, which took away jobs from American workers.” Everything was “upside down” and “underwater,” as evident in the huge trade deficit. He tried to sign an executive order to resign from NAFTA, until he was blocked by his aides in the White House. His philosophy: “Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Real power is fear.”

  Trump broke through the elite discourse that had ignored the effects of global trade and U.S. trade agreements on manufacturing and working people. That struck a chord with the white working class and the GOP base, who are most skeptical about trade and NAFTA.

  That allowed the Trump-led GOP to make gains in 2016. But as Tucker Carlson’s recent monologue on Fox News points out, this is hardly where the party stands. The congressional chamber wins support for trade agreements from Republican Senate and House members, not Democrats.

  What now for the GOP? Will working people really believe the Republican Party beyond Trump will look out for them? Trump got his opening because both the Democratic and Republican parties embraced globalization and found the domestic costs acceptable. Both supported engagement with China, and promised unbelievably to punish them for currency manipulation or denying market access.

  Donald Trump gave the party an opening on standing up for American manufacturing and jobs, but the Republicans are as fractured on trade as the Democrats.

  Carlson’s monologue on Fox News skewered the Republican Party for fetishizing markets over the development of the family and the building of communal ties. Putting aside the hypocrisy of the rant, he set off a debate among conservatives in which some challenged the austerity the GOP had imposed on the country. Some began thinking about new policies and income supports that could strengthen the working family in a “feminist age.” And most of all, some began to think that it isn’t enough to say, “There are wounds that policy can’t solve.” Republicans too have to be inventive about government. We are not powerless.23

  THE DEATH OF THE GOP AND PROGRESSIVE HEGEMONY

  When Donald Trump took leadership of the GOP counterrevolution, Americans became conscious of every disruptive trend and embraced new norms and an expanded role of government at a breathtaking pace. Donald Trump immediately politicized the New America and more who now understood the stakes. He raised their consciousness of what they believed and what tasks the government must take up with new urgency.

  Democrats captured the House in 2018 and if they learned the lessons on how they let Donald Trump win, they will win the presidency and effective control of the government in 2020. Democratic beliefs have evolved dialectically in reaction to President Trump, and now demand a very different kind of governance consistent with their values.

  Democrats, with near unanimity, and a large majority of the country believe we live in a profoundly unequal country where corporate power calls the shots. They want government to play a much bigger role in offsetting that power and in taking up the unfinished agenda for women and people of color. They want to move even more boldly to tackle climate change. And they want to embrace an America that is an immigrant country, inclusive, and multicultural. The country has faced deepening economic and social problems that more and more want to address and, increasingly, to use government to bring change.

  On some measures, a third or more of Republicans agreed, suggesting a significant proportion of the GOP base is looking for a different kind of country. That is when you know that Democratic hegemony may be a new norm. Fully 60 percent of Democrats, a majority of independents, and a third of Republicans say the GOP is “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”24 It is the Democrats’ time and perhaps their era.

  •  84 percent of Democrats say immigration strengthens the country, but 42 percent of the GOP does as well, suggesting the non-Trump GOP can get an audience.

  •  82 percent of Democrats say the economy favors powerful interests, a
nd the GOP is split on whether that is true.

  •  Over three quarters of Democrats say, “Stricter environmental regulations are worth the cost”; over a third of Republicans do, too. Since Trump’s election, the proportion of Democrats who believe government is doing too little jumped 20 points to 86 percent.

  •  Over 70 percent of Democrats say, and with increasing certainty, “Government should do more to help needy Americans even if it means going into debt,” while less than a quarter of Republicans believe that.

  •  Over three quarters of Democrats—a number that rises every year—believe, “People have hard lives because government benefits don’t go far enough,” while 25 percent of Republicans think that is true.

  •  Over 80 percent of Democrats believe the “country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites,” while over a third of the GOP agrees with that.

  •  Nearly three quarters of Democrats say women face “significant obstacles that still make it harder for them to get ahead of men,” and a third of Republicans believe that.

  The GOP’s shattering losses in 2018 may well create a mandate for reform that could grow into a new era of reform, suppressed until now by the intensity of the conservative counterrevolution.

  Democrats have watched with building frustration a country where jobs don’t pay enough to live on and median income has not budged in decades. The top 1 percent owns as much as the bottom 90 percent. The big money and big corporations have rigged the game.25