When Republicans Cared: Foundation For A Re-Birth?
That time when Nixon sounded like a Harris trainee
A hammer is coming down on the Republican party and it’s all Trump’s fault.
A new Reuters poll put the split at 47% for Harris, 40% for Trump. The betting pool I mentioned the other day had Harris in a 12-point lead. The Democrats are likely to have majorities in the House and the Senate. There are polls that point towards a more even split, but their science is flawed and they usually omit the one issue that will decide the election: women’s rights. The same thing happened in the flawed polling in 2022. You’d think they would have learned.
In order to keep up the fiction that Trump has a chance, the mainstream media pays attention to silo areas where Trump has a lead, like the economy, although even here they concede that his edge is dropping. But they still get confused and call it the ‘leading issue’. It is not. People are conceding that the economy is getting better. Access to abortion is the only issue. These polls are made up by the same White Males who screwed up in the last polls.
Ominously for Trump, his popularity in his own party is dropping like a wounded falcon. This started as early as two years ago, when 37% of Republicans did not want him to run again. In the Republican primaries this year, his opponent Nikki Haley actually beat him in one state – Vermont – and came close in New Hampshire with 43% of the vote. This is an unheard-of strength for a challenger who does not display the central Republican virtue (she is not a White Male).
The public obviously wants something very different from what Trump is promising to deliver. To break through the Democratic shield – which has kept that party in power for two-thirds of the presidential campaigns from Obama onwards – they have to deliver the kind of win pioneered by their predecessors Eisenhower and Nixon. They each won the popular vote by an average of a dozen points over the Democrats in their two consecutive periods in office.
Eisenhower had military popularity going into office, but he kept office by going down the compassionate path.
In the eight years of the Eisenhower administration the wealthiest people paid an income tax rate of 91%. (The top income tax under Trump, established in 2018, was 37%).
Eisenhower also boosted infrastructure spending on highways, provided affordable education (to GI’s), and expanded social security to cover an additional 10 million Americans. He told the Democrats that no additional funding was needed for the military (and who would argue with General Eisenhower?), and triggered a one-third increase in consumer spending power. At the end of it all, he had a balanced budget.
Other liberal-economy Republicans could include Theodore Roosevelt, so compassion is not a foreign trait in the Republican ethos.
Then, 50 years ago Eisenhower’s understudy Richard Nixon tackled social issues like public housing, which he said had left people isolated in “monstrous, depressing places — run down, overcrowded, crime-ridden, falling apart…And because so many poor people are so heavily concentrated in these projects, they often feel cut off from the mainstream of American life.”
He referred to the system as “life in a federal slum”.
He called for Federal cash payments to help people afford better places.
Note: he did not call for housing vouchers. He wanted people to get cash, so they could make decisions on where to live: ”Places they could choose on their own.
“The payment would be carefully scaled to make up the difference between what a family could afford on its own for housing and the cost of safe and sanitary housing in that geographic area. This plan would give the poor the freedom and responsibility to make their own choices about housing--and it would eventually get the Federal Government out of the housing business.”
He recognized that “the ability of our economy to provide vastly expanded housing has been one of the strongest indications of its fundamental vitality.”
He placed the blame on the capitalist system, though not in so many words; he attacked fluctuating interest rates that made it more difficult for an American family to buy or sell a home.
No doubt he would have been a bit surprised if he were able to jump forward five decades to meet today’s presidential candidate who is also running on compassion: “Mr. Nixon this is President Kamala Harris, she’s an Asian Black woman from India and Jamaica…” – but he would have been comfortable with her policies.
Now, I am not holding Nixon up as a moral exemplar – he did some bent and crazy things - but at least he did not try to capture the Capitol Building with a rioting mob.
There is a functional home for the Republicans to return to, once they ditch the Orange Aberration.
They have been desperately fending off this decision for years. For years, knowing that they were pushing unpopular policies that keep Americans poor and boost Americans who are rich, they have tried to warp the voting system with gerrymandering and voter suppression. They acknowledge that they can’t return to power legitimately with their current platforms.
The problem with their current gerrymandering plan is that it is temporary (unless you declare an outright despotic Republican Republic…”The Republican State of Republica…”). Eventually you will run out of warp-ability, and have to let the real votes shine through – in which case you will be turfed out and all your warp maneuvers will be dust-binned.
Today the Republican Party is being shredded. Even Ted Cruz in Red Texas is likely to lose. Most of the voters in Georgia are optimistic about the economy. No recent polls forecast a Trump win.
This is what happens when a party deviates from democracy within its own ranks, and is taken over by militant wing-nuts who set goals aimed at cult beliefs.
Now many leaders of the party are quietly agreeing that it needs to be re-furbished to make it electable. In essence, to get rid of the stench of Trump, you have come up with an entirely new party. The house has to be torn down to the foundation. Politico put it well: “The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly.”
To weed out Trump you also have to weed out his entire cadre of Trump clones. They are all below the quality needed to engage their Democratic opponents. They under-performed in 2022 and they are heading for a drubbing in 2024. Candidates made for the Trump platform are doomed.
Liz Cheney has pointed this out. A virulent enemy of Donald Trump, she recently endorsed Harris:
“It’s hard for me to see how the Republican Party, given what it has done, can make the argument convincingly or credibly that people ought to vote for Republican candidates until it really recognizes what it’s done…We’re going to have to have some entity that actually can be making the case for the kind of conservative causes that I believe in.”
Her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, also endorsed Harris.
This is something Nixon knew very well. If he hadn’t tripped on a few other issues, he might have gone down as a remarkable president. But no one is perfect.
That said, since 1949 the economy has performed better under Democrats than Republicans; GDP growth was an average of 1% higher, 2.4-million more jobs were created annually under Democrats, inflation was lower and the bottom one-fifth of Americans experienced income growth that was almost 200% faster under Democrats.
The Republicans are obviously better at spinning their story, though, because a substantial number of people thank that they are better at doing “economy” than Democrats.
So if you’re a Republican campaign planning in a post-Trump world, what course would you advise your party to take to move ahead?
You might want to emulate the popular and progressive Republican leaders who moved the party ahead so well.
The planner of a new party might want to take a starter hint from Nixon’s moves on housing:
“Our best information to date indicates that direct cash assistance will in the long run be the most equitable, least expensive approach to achieving our goal of a decent home for all Americans…”
The planner of a new Republican party could extend that beyond housing to encompass a direct cash assistance plan for all economic circumstances.
Promote a Universal Basic Income.
Call it a Republican Universal Basic Income -- a RUBI. Has a certain caché
Republican planners can send their check directly to me.
The UBI has been used before and seems to work. In 1970 the Congress authorized housing allowance experiments involving over 18,000 families and costing over $150 million that involved direct cash payments, so America has a fifty-year history of experience with direct cash payments. The results of the experiment were submerged under the voucher program, but the results were encouraging enough to prompt a re-visit in today’s market.
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining traction. Entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang campaigned on a platform built around a basic income for Americans. His signature policy is a monthly UBI payment of $1,000, to offset job displacement by automation. Yang called it the "Freedom Dividend".
Recently some 50 municipalities have tried the UBI model and several states continue to support them in one way or another. One of the better-known examples is the Denver Basic Income Project, a non-profit run in partnership with the University of Denver's Center for Housing and Homelessness Research. Since January 2021 and it has provided over $9.4 million in varying levels of support to more than 800 people.
This reaches more people than the homeless. Aubrey Wilde, who represented the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, said employment isn’t always enough to help impoverished or homeless people:
“It’s important to remember that about 40% of folks who are experiencing homelessness do have jobs, so getting connected with employment isn’t always enough. What we saw amongst our participants who came in to re-enroll for the extension was really exciting: People started their own businesses and they got good jobs.”
When it started one in five participants reported that their housing was stable; after 10 months this soared fivefold to some 50% reporting that their housing situation was stable. Other needs were met, including transportation, hygiene, groceries, clothes, bills, rent, debt, healthcare, and car repair.
The Mayor of Denver has just announced that the program is being shut down. No doubt a voucher program appeals more to bureaucrats who like to feel that they are in control, and business people, blind to their own interests, have lobbied against it.
But this is an opportunity for the Republicans to get in at the grass-roots citizen level with a program endorsed by an entrepreneur that boosts communities and gives real results.
It is no more “socialist” or leftist than Eisenhower or Nixon.
It exists at a universal level that would attract Democratic voters who might be fed up with slow progress, like the ones who defected to Eisenhower.
It is bold enough to dominate headlines and differentiate candidates. The crowds would be intense.
Yet I believe it is so daring, that mainstream Democrats will not reach for this stick. Today’s Democrats are only “Left-wing” in America…in other parts of the world they would be seen as Right-Wing.
The Republicans need a booster - a campaign that can promise jobs and homes. Right now, they are being crushed by the Dems in the jobs-created measurement:
Of course, Covid had a hand in the lower Republicans job count, but Biden had to deal with it as well, and his numbers are substantially better.
And the reality is that presidents do no create jobs…their policies do. If the Republicans have a UBI platform, they would be on a rocket-launcher for continuing success.
How would they square this with the current Republican base?
There are two comparisons they can make to have people feel comfortable with the new party. Both involved equivalencies.
First, point out that the US military pays out on essentially a UBI basis, and no one is calling them ‘socialist’.
Second, point out that Congress actually runs on a UBI program for itself: all the health services and so on are covered, and salaries are relatively even across the board. A Congressperson makes about $175,000 a year, and the President makes $400,000. The top executive only makes about two times what the average working Congressperson makes. In the private sector, executives make more than 340 times the salary of the workers. Congress is a socialist paradise.
The new slogan could be “Salute America and live like Congress.”
Maybe needs some tuning.
But the idea is to make the new party look like something America has always strived to achieve.
The current MAGA supporters will be instructed to think of this not as an anti-Trump position, but as a post-Trump position. Trump’s self-inflicted wounds might make this easier to sell. He can’t square the circle on abortion rights, for example, and his ‘I’m responsible for the overthrow of Roe but the decision is up to the states’ weaseling is fooling no one. The evangelical supporters have stopped backing him. The military has been insulted for the last time.
Trump will not go quietly. He needs to be beaten by a majority so big that there can be no confusion about ‘fraud’. The ‘fraud’ would have to take place on a scale involving dump trucks full of Dem votes arriving at polling stations. Even so, he will claim fraud…it’s the only line he knows. He is already saying that he “probably” won’t run in 2028 if he loses. “Probably”. You can take that to the bank, or any of the three casinos he bankrupted in his sterling business career.
On the other hand, he has few friends. His gestalt is hatred, and his interactions are born from bullying and control. Just a few days ago the Haitian community in Springfield launched a private-citizen suit against Trump and Vance, for spreading messages that they knew to be false about immigrants in the town. Interestingly, it was inaction by the local prosecutor that made the private-citizens suit necessary. Those in power cannot protect Trump forever.
Trump and Vance are charged with disrupting public services, making false alarms, telecommunications harassment, aggravated menacing and complicity. If the Clark County Municipal Court affirms that there is probable cause, it can issue arrest warrants against Trump and Vance.
I bet this is not what Vance signed up for. But welcome to the Donald Ride.
Both of them could be in jail over lies about pets.
So fitting.
His family name – Drumpf – means someone who is bent or mishappen.
Hopefully, for its sake, the Republican party can quickly re-focus and offer a new path for the American people. The current base of White Uneducated Males is declining anyway, so this is a good reset for them.
I do not say this out of love for the Republican Party, but because America needs a second party in order to run. If the Republicans can’t get it together, a new party will arise from its ashes. It will inevitably have to occupy the traditional Republican ‘challenge’ spot, on the Left.
There will probably be an effort from the very small group of multi-billionaires to create a party focused on their own wealth preservation and advancement. That’s fair, and of no use whatsoever. The walls are closing in on the dozen or so uber-wealthy, because they have been so unremittingly selfish that they have run over Trump’s cliff – they have no friends. The hired help can only get you so far. Besides, Warren Buffet says that if the very wealthy paid their fare share, no one making $400,000 or less would have to pay any taxes. I would qualify; you might as well. There is a lot of wiggle room for new Republican policies.
How many people would vote for a policy saying that you get all the benefits of the American support system and do not have to pay taxes? I think there is a good voting appeal here.
The change in leadership is coming none too soon. Trump is now saying that Iran should be blown up. He is the one who torpedoed Obama’s nuclear disbarment deal – a deal that the Iranians desperately want to return to. It’s not like America just went through a 20-year $2-trillion war in Afghanistan – when the Taliban offered to turn over OBL at the very start of the war – or a $1-trillion war in Vietnam. Now he is trying to get America into a new war in the Middle East, against a country with roughly the same population as Vietnam. Genius.
I confess I enjoy imagining him instead safely isolated from his ability to harm American, in a jail cell somewhere. Sadly for him it would be away from a golf course, his usual habitat. I know it’s petty. But he has earned it every step of the way down…
And we deserve every step of the new way up. It’s been a while coming.
Go RUBI!
As much as I like what you've done here, Barry, the one fly in the ointment is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Even if you take out the extremism of Trump, you cannot go back to the Eisenhower / Nixon years without first confronting Reagan's nostrum that the government is the problem. I think that notion is so embedded in the DNA of Republicans that any platform that relies on a major government program such as RUBI is doomed. Reagan's 'government is the problem' was a safe way for whites to express their superiority over blacks and other peoples of color, since in Reagan's view whites didn't need government and everyone else was a 'welfare queen' (of course, the rich loved government, but accessed it quietly behind Reagan's back - with his full knowledge and support). So, it still comes back around to white supremacy for the GOP and it will likely take a couple of generations for the demographics to reduce whites to a minority status as the majority will be multi-racial.