What Finally Allowed Me To Understand The GOP

[polymerize-finale]

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Both of this country's parties are corporate-controlled, neither of them have working class interests in mind

 

Except that Trump was very much not part of the Republican Party machine. He was a Democrat until relatively recently. He came in as an outsider and took the nomination in part due to having a pitch which distinguished him from the rest of the field. And part of that was the theory that his policies, being substantially different from standard-issue GOP fare, would actually move the needle for the working/middle class. And of course there was substantial opposition to Trump from more conventional GOP circles, which provided additional confirmation for Trump supporters.

 

It's entirely fair to believe this isn't true, that it really was the same old GOP with a hip new Trump style. However, it feels to me like you just didn't notice this. Like if one didn't know much about the details of politics, the default assumption would be that this was a change of direction. There are plenty of reasons to doubt this (I doubt it myself to some degree). But it's asinine to suggest that there was a shift from euphemistic hostility to the middle class to explicit hostility to the middle class in the same way there was a shift from euphemistic to explicit hostility to Mexicans. If MAGA is hostile to the middle class, it's clearly euphemistically hostile.

 

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I'm not interested in being told I don't know what I'm talking about because I don't simply take people who constantly lie about things at their own word.

 

My complaint wasn't that you didn't take them at their word. You shouldn't take any politician at their word. My complaint was that you appeared to have no idea what their word was, and you confidently assumed it was something wildly different (or even diametrically opposed) from what it actually is.

 

When you're this badly wrong about a subject, I think it's good to recognize that you maybe don't know it as well as you think. This is partly because it's difficult to reconstruct your reasoning around all the things you currently believe, and to what extent those beliefs are supported by other beliefs which were wildly wrong. So it's better to step back and take a more humble view of how much you actually know. Which is totally fine, you don't need to know everything. I don't myself.

 

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it does not take a genius to look at "lower taxes" being implemented as "rich people paying less taxes for social programs that benefit non-rich people" and see that that was always the point.

 

This is kind of a confused point.

 

If you lower taxes, you have to lower spending (or make more debt, but let's pretend you won't so this doesn't become more complicated than it has to). So what do we cut? Well we probably want to cut funding from things which are controlled by enemy constituencies, and not from things controlled by us. So if one of our big constituencies is white working-class people, we probably prefer to cut funding for HUD than USMC, otherwise we expect a backlash. This is just basic political calculus. It doesn't require that we have any principles at all, just a desire to win future elections.

 

From the perspective of the political donor class, lower taxes affect me directly in a way that cutting funding for almost any government program does not (like unless I'm Raytheon exec or something). So unless I have specific beliefs about the value of certain government programs, I don't really care about what you cut funding for, I just want you to cut my taxes and then cut spending in some way you can get away with politically so you can keep cutting my taxes. In other words, from the point of view of my actual direct interests, cutting social programs wasn't the point, cutting taxes was the point. Cutting social programs was just the means.

 

On the other hand, it's also true that lots of people on the right have beliefs about the inherent desirability of cutting taxes for the rich (if they don't have capital, they can't invest it to create good jobs and improve society), and the inherent undesirability of social programs (the more you subsidize not working the less people will work, and people working makes stuff for society). But these are more the sorts of things you'd hear from a right-wing intellectual (like Tom Sowell), not a working politician. For politicians, the Machiavellian considerations dominate the principled considerations of the intellectuals.

 

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Like, when Republicans say "gay marriage should be decided on by individual states", they say it because they know many states would never legalize it on their own

 

That's definitely part of it. However, there's another consideration which is also relevant to abortion: Both were effectively decided by the Supreme Court, not the Federal Legislature. Which is not how SCOTUS is supposed to work. SCOTUS cannot legislate; that's what the Legislature is for. This is obviously much more valid in the case of abortion & Roe; in Obergefell SCOTUS simply ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional, rather than implementing a federal standard for gay marriage. So opponents are left to argue that it was a bad decision (arguable) or that it was somehow analogically the equivalent of legislation from the bench (much less arguable).

 

The thing you have to keep in mind is that states' rights is the default. Where the federal legislature is silent and appellate courts have not screwed the pooch, states just get to make laws. So if you oppose some SCOTUS decision you necessarily think the point should be resolved by the states, because that's who would resolve it if SCOTUS had not foreclosed this possibility. If you think some federal law should be overturned, the result would be the decision on that point devolving to the states.

 

My broader point is that just because there are political tactics and political objectives and unprincipled politicians trying to implement them doesn't mean that there are zero principles involved, or that those principles have zero impact on what happens. You may recall that this thread began on the subject of "Understanding the GOP." I don't think you're going to get there by just looking at political actions. Hence my original point that if you want any kind of understanding of the right, you should read their intellectuals, not the tea leaves of their political activity.

Edited November 19, 2023 by polymerize-finale
quotes (see edit history)

[Shaddy]

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Except that Trump was very much not part of the Republican Party machine. He was a Democrat until relatively recently. He came in as an outsider and took the nomination in part due to having a pitch which distinguished him from the rest of the field. And part of that was the theory that his policies, being substantially different from standard-issue GOP fare, would actually move the needle for the working/middle class. And of course there was substantial opposition to Trump from more conventional GOP circles, which provided additional confirmation for Trump supporters.

 

It's entirely fair to believe this isn't true, that it really was the same old GOP with a hip new Trump style. However, it feels to me like you just didn't notice this. Like if one didn't know much about the details of politics, the default assumption would be that this was a change of direction. There are plenty of reasons to doubt this (I doubt it myself to some degree). But it's asinine to suggest that there was a shift from euphemistic hostility to the middle class to explicit hostility to the middle class in the same way there was a shift from euphemistic to explicit hostility to Mexicans. If MAGA is hostile to the middle class, it's clearly euphemistically hostile.

If you have some idea about a radical new direction Trump brought that conservatives do not have a long history of being sympathetic to, I'd love to hear it. But no, I don't buy that it was in any way for the sake of the working class. Why would it be?

 

And yes, their animosity for poor people is not directly analogous to their animosity for Mexicans, but the point is that the euphemism gets pulled back as they gain power, and it would be extremely inconsistent for the entire rest of their belief system for that to somehow be the breaking point they think is taking things too far.

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My complaint wasn't that you didn't take them at their word. You shouldn't take any politician at their word. My complaint was that you appeared to have no idea what their word was, and you confidently assumed it was something wildly different (or even diametrically opposed) from what it actually is.

 

When you're this badly wrong about a subject, I think it's good to recognize that you maybe don't know it as well as you think. This is partly because it's difficult to reconstruct your reasoning around all the things you currently believe, and to what extent those beliefs are supported by other beliefs which were wildly wrong. So it's better to step back and take a more humble view of how much you actually know. Which is totally fine, you don't need to know everything. I don't myself.

Well see, the issue is that the most incorrect I've been is the exaggeration of "obliterate the middle class". Obviously they haven't said that out loud, which I've already admitted to. But if you think their attacks on welfare and public programs aren't or haven't escalated, that's very silly. I'm never going to act like I know everything, but I know when someone is telling me to stop making obvious connections, and I'm not gonna do that. It's not like you're offering a succinct and cogent worldview yourself, you're essentially just calling people irrational for thinking the best way forward is to not engage with the right.

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If you lower taxes, you have to lower spending (or make more debt, but let's pretend you won't so this doesn't become more complicated than it has to). So what do we cut? Well we probably want to cut funding from things which are controlled by enemy constituencies, and not from things controlled by us. So if one of our big constituencies is white working-class people, we probably prefer to cut funding for HUD than USMC, otherwise we expect a backlash. This is just basic political calculus. It doesn't require that we have any principles at all, just a desire to win future elections.

 

From the perspective of the political donor class, lower taxes affect me directly in a way that cutting funding for almost any government program does not (like unless I'm Raytheon exec or something). So unless I have specific beliefs about the value of certain government programs, I don't really care about what you cut funding for, I just want you to cut my taxes and then cut spending in some way you can get away with politically so you can keep cutting my taxes. In other words, from the point of view of my actual direct interests, cutting social programs wasn't the point, cutting taxes was the point. Cutting social programs was just the means.

 

On the other hand, it's also true that lots of people on the right have beliefs about the inherent desirability of cutting taxes for the rich (if they don't have capital, they can't invest it to create good jobs and improve society), and the inherent undesirability of social programs (the more you subsidize not working the less people will work, and people working makes stuff for society). But these are more the sorts of things you'd hear from a right-wing intellectual (like Tom Sowell), not a working politician. For politicians, the Machiavellian considerations dominate the principled considerations of the intellectuals.

There is functionally very little difference between these things, though frankly I scoff at the idea that the average republican is just a little baby robot lamb who knows not what he does and just follows his programming. The extent to which these people are fascists deep down in their hearts or whatever versus opportunists grasping at power and ramming through policies to make themselves rich is a question for historians, it's worthless in terms of rhetoric for right now unless you're gonna tell me that all anyone needs to do is convince them that human rights are Actually Very Profitable™. They didn't choose their positions in a vacuum. If it were as simple as "well ya gotta gut something", it wouldn't always be welfare, they would have some opposition to the overwhelming amounts of money in the police and military-industrial complex, or any of the other sources of overwhelming violence that get their dicks hard.

 

(note: for clarity, I am making a hyperbolic joke here. I do not believe that police brutality and imperialist warfare is literally sexually pleasurable to the majority of the republican party)

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My broader point is that just because there are political tactics and political objectives and unprincipled politicians trying to implement them doesn't mean that there are zero principles involved, or that those principles have zero impact on what happens. You may recall that this thread began on the subject of "Understanding the GOP." I don't think you're going to get there by just looking at political actions. Hence my original point that if you want any kind of understanding of the right, you should read their intellectuals, not the tea leaves of their political activity.

The dubious implication that anyone on the right even counts as an "intellectual" aside, the entire point here, the larger issue surrounding this entire discussion is that I get the overwhelming implication that you think some of them are actually coherent or well-intentioned thinkers who are worth hearing out. You keep talking about Thomas fucking Sowell like he's supposed to be a cut above the rest, but it's cranks the whole way down. I have absolutely no issue with the anthropological study of such a figure for the purposes of deducing the actual intention behind the words, but it sure seems like you would say that doesn't actually count as getting a real understanding of the right, because you're treating "understanding" as equivalent to forming a connection with the right, and that's a bad idea for everyone.

Edited November 21, 2023 by Shaddy (see edit history)