#OccupyTea

It’s hard to find a political entity in worse shape right now than the Democratic Party, who somehow managed to lose a presidential election to Donald freaking Trump, the least-liked and least-appealing presidential candidate in recent memory. Trump was good at exactly one thing – making grandiose speeches to cheering crowds – yet against the milquetoast Hillary Clinton, who projected an image of a condescending schoolmarm at best faking real humanity and generally projecting the perfect image of a droning wonky politician, that was more than enough to attract the attention of enough voters to win the electoral college. Even considering voting for Trump was enough to get you branded a racist bigot to be lumped into the “basket of deplorables” (never mind that when Hillary used that term she was warning against that mindset) with little to no consideration for the reasons why one might consider voting for Trump, which only served to make those voters think the Democrats were actively dismissing their concerns and thus pushed them further into the Trump camp. The Hillary campaign, and the left in general, seemed to assume that Trump was so obviously boorish and unfit for office that they didn’t even need to bother winning over voters, even though they had trouble keeping parts of their own base from defecting and casting counterproductive votes for Jill Stein.

The results of the election sent the party into a deep identity crisis, not helped by the fact that the misdeeds of Trump and the Republicans don’t seem to be helping the Democrats that much. The party has found itself split between the old-guard centrist establishment and a wing of former Bernie Sanders supporters who believe the party’s path back to relevance lies in energizing the base with a hard-left message of economic populism to serve as an antidote to Trumpism, a strategy whose focus on the “white working class” the establishment fears would amount to abandoning the party’s focus on helping the disenfranchised and discriminated-against in favor of accepting and appealing to bigotry. Indeed, the “resistance” sometimes seems to be as much against the left’s own party as the Republicans, calling out any Democrat that doesn’t engage in every bit of obstruction and no-voting the Republicans would have and did pull against Obama. Even that wing of the party isn’t necessarily improving the party’s image; in recent polls, the majority of Americans disapprove of Trump and over 40 percent want him impeached, but a majority of Americans also don’t think the Democrats stand for anything other than opposing Trump, including some of the very people the establishment is afraid of losing.

It’s clear to me that any attempt to craft a firm message, one that can confront the uphill battle the Democrats have to take even one house of Congress in 2018, will need to provide a real alternative to Trumpism in some way. Think of it in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: it’s easier for people to support things that don’t benefit them directly, like curbing racism, sexism, and homophobia, when they have the basics taken care of, having a job that allows them to feed and shelter their family, feeling protected from terrorist attacks or the government, and generally feeling well-enough off that they feel they have a stake in the well-being of others in society rather than feeling threatened by everyone except them getting a piece of the pie. The cosmopolitan urban base of the party, and the tech workers in the Pacific Northwest and Silicon Valley, may feel this is the case, but for many used to jobs in traditional manufacturing fields in the Rust Belt, the modern economy has left them behind.

So it was that last week, the Democrats rolled out their agenda they intend to use to appeal to voters in the 2018 midterms. It’s off to a good start with its title, “A Better Deal”, which invokes populist programs of the past, especially FDR’s New Deal. But is it a deal that can actually appeal to the voters the Democrats are trying to win over?

In his New York Times op-ed, Chuck Schumer says that Democrats are promising “three simple things. First, we’re going to increase people’s pay. Second, we’re going to reduce their everyday expenses. And third, we’re going to provide workers with the tools they need for the 21st-century economy.” These are all fine things, but they’re more goals to achieve than actual tools to achieve them, and Schumer admits in the next sentence that it will take several months to roll out all the policies the Democrats have to achieve these goals. The implication is that the “better deal” will involve throwing out a bunch of policies and expecting them all to stick to voters, the same wonky approach that has backfired on Democrats in the past. Both Trump and Sanders stunned the establishment by simplifying their message and proposing a few key, concrete policies that directly appealed to voters that felt left behind by the establishment. By putting out nice-sounding platitudes without focusing on core proposals, the Democrats are presenting themselves as more of the same establishment politicians the 2016 election season was all about rejecting.

The proposals the Democrats have already floated – a $15 minimum wage, paid family and sick leave, and an infrastructure plan – go some distance towards achieving the first two goals (not necessarily the third), though whether they appeal to average voters is more mixed. Unfortunately, Schumer only gives them a sentence before focusing the rest of the op-ed on “three new policies”. These are also worthy policies, though the first, fighting to curb the cost of prescription drugs, is rather specific and mostly appeals to specific demographics, and won’t win over those segments of the party’s base clamoring to adopt a full-fledged single-payer health care system. The second, beefing up antitrust laws to make it easier to break up big companies and harder for them to merge, is broad-based and appealing enough to win over voters, and the third, “a large tax credit to train workers for unfilled jobs”, at least starts to address the party’s third goal, but again might not do enough to win over the base.

The problem the party faces with the third goal, though, is that a lot of the reason for continued unemployment despite a supposedly booming economy for most of the Obama years has increasingly been chalked up to automation: jobs taken not by immigrants or outsourcing, but not replaced at all and instead filled by robots. One of the oldest problems in American politics is that voters reward politicians that tell them what they want to hear, not what they need to hear, and telling people that spent their whole lives in the coal mines or in manufacturing jobs that those jobs aren’t coming back no matter what they do won’t go over well (though Obama seemed to at least try in his farewell address). The Democrats’ “tax credit” idea assumes that there are enough other jobs out there that these people can be “retrained” for. For older people, especially those for whom mining and manufacturing are part of their identity, such talk could end up ringing hollow, while younger people may see more appeal in Sanders-like policies to reduce the cost of college itself, or even with the idea of a universal basic income (as is becoming increasingly popular in Europe) to make work more of a choice than a necessity.

Schumer promises that among the future ideas to be presented will be “fundamentally changing our trade laws to benefit workers, not multinational corporations”, tackling another source of Trump’s and Sanders’ popularity. Unfortunately, many of the ideas presented on that front may engender skepticism as to whether they would actually work. The first two bullet points are about creating new bureaucratic positions, a “trade prosecutor” to go after “unfair trade practices” by foreign countries, and a “jobs security council” that would supposedly stop acquisitions of American companies by foreign ones that could cost American jobs. Color me skeptical that any measures to ensure the transparency and openness of the “security council” will really succeed in insulating it from regulatory capture in the long term, turning it into just another rubber stamp big mergers need to get, nor am I optimistic that the “trade prosecutor” will be particularly successful in anything not supported by big corporations, even if Democrats have the best of intentions. Leading their trade proposals with these two things is not getting off on the right foot, and proposing reforming NAFTA when many people want to junk it won’t do much to win back the crowd – especially when that’s the only entry on the list directly addressing trade agreements, which need to be addressed more generally. Many of the later proposals to punish outsourcing could be appealing, although I saw Hillary Clinton’s “exit tax” ads enough times to be skeptical that they’ll really work.

I don’t mean to denigrate the wonky or specific proposals, only that they shouldn’t be treated the same as the firm, broad-based, bold proposals that can rally Americans. Democrats need to settle on a small list of front-line proposals to hammer home in the minds of the American people and shove everything else onto their web site for the wonks to pour over. Here’s my list: a $15 minimum wage; transparent negotiation of trade deals; penalizing outsourcing; breaking up mega-corporations; maybe paid leave; plus some Sanders proposals not on the Better Deal web site, namely free college tuition and raising taxes on and removing deductions and loopholes for the wealthy. Or to boil it all down to a slogan: let’s give every American the chance to prepare for and obtain 21st-century jobs paying a living wage that won’t be taken away capriciously at the whim of huge mega-corporations. Or to lengthen it a bit again so as not to be as vague as the Democrats’ goals: tax the rich and break up the corporations to pay for free college to prepare for good, stable, fulfilling, $15/hour jobs and protect them from being outsourced to or undermined by other countries.

Reaction to the “Better Deal” agenda seemed to be largely unimpressed, chalking it up to the same timid, incrementalist proposals that put the Democrats in this predicament in the first place. Some of these things could have been fixed before rollout, such as the aforementioned tax reform, education reform, a single-payer health care system, and halting and reversing the decline of unions, all of which would have done more to energize the left and convince working-class Americans that Democrats were really offering real solutions. Others are rooted in distrust that Democrats could overcome their fealty to wealthy donors and powerful special interests – and given their reputation for big government, Democrats have more of a need for a proposal to “drain the swamp” than the Republicans do. Such a proposal, coupled with the more radical proposals mentioned earlier, is probably the only real way to address the criticism that the “Better Deal” is basically the same Obama agenda the Republicans obstructed, raising doubts about whether the Democrats could pass it even with control of the White House and both houses of Congress. (Remember, Democrats’ control of the Senate was cloture-proof and Obamacare still ended up heavily watered down to appeal to centrists like Joe Lieberman.) Some of the problems can’t really be fixed, namely that talk of “retraining” and “education” won’t excite working-class Americans as much as “we’re going to bring the jobs back”, even if the latter isn’t actually possible, and telling them such won’t go over well.

Perhaps the biggest and most telling problem that Schumer and the Democrats can’t fix themselves has nothing to do with what the message is or how it’s delivered, but who’s delivering it. Progressives and swing voters alike don’t trust that the same establishment Democratic leadership that threw away the considerable political capital given them in 2008 and managed to lose to Trump can really learn from their mistakes and present a real response to Trumpism. In the end, the only thing that can really revitalize the Democratic Party might be a Tea Party-esque movement from the Sanders wing to replace such anodyne establishment politicians with true believers that will stand for the courage of their convictions and present a message that can actually win over middle America and get my generation energized enough to actually show up for the midterms. If the Democratic establishment insists on holding on to their prerogatives and taking control of the shape of the “resistance” and “better deal”, it may already be too late to save them.

Our long national nightmare is, one might hope, almost over. Hopefully it does not prove to be just beginning… and hopefully it does not prove to be a precursor of bigger and longer nightmares to come.

We are, at long last, coming to the end of one of the most bitter, divisive, and depressing presidential elections in recent memory, between the two most disliked candidates on record, and it would be fruitful at this time to stop and figure out how we got here. What does Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican party mean for the party and the nation? How is it that one of the two major parties’ nominees for President came to be a bloviating gasbag with policy proposals that thinking people almost unanimously agree portend disaster and who showed every sign of being the closest America has come to electing Hitler himself, how did the Republican elites show so much impotence in the face of his movement, and how did the prospect of his election prove to be a terrifyingly real, if somewhat distant, possibility even in the weekend before the election? Is it a party’s base wresting control of the party away from the elites and going against every modicum of common sense the elites try to warn them about? Is it the natural conclusion of those same elites feeding that same base a steady diet of racism and xenophobia, creating a monster they don’t deserve any sympathy for losing control over? Is it the result of a bipartisan revolt over the influence of money in politics that’s attracted Republicans to a man rich enough not to need to be bought and Democrats to the people-powered campaign of a Bernie Sanders, or is it simply a group of Americans falling in love with a charismatic strongman?

The truth is, as completely unexpected as the rise of Donald Trump may have been at the time, in many ways it is but the culmination of the trends rendering our democracy increasingly dysfunctional over the past decade and a half. It is the result of the increasing polarization of the country during the Bush era, creating two sides increasingly unable to speak to one another and increasingly punishing their own respective parties for not being sufficiently devoted to the cause, rendering it increasingly impossible to get elected as anything other than a complete ideologue, resulting in the complete gridlock of the Obama era, where it takes control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and 60% of the Senate to get anything done, and as proven by the fate of Obamacare, even that might not be enough if one house is only barely in control, and without it America lurches to the edge of crisis after crisis before Congress finally agrees to do the bare minimum to keep the country afloat (or in some cases, the President unilaterally sidesteps Congress and issues executive orders to get his way). Our Constitution and the Founding Fathers’ vision suffers as all sides look to exploit every loophole they can to get their way or prevent the other side from getting theirs. The only way for anything to change is if one has the resources to push it through by brute force, meaning monied interests’ control over the system has only deepened, and the Presidency gains more and more power as presidents use executive orders to do what Congress won’t do for them. Whether Donald Trump is the ultimate expression of the Republican base’s desires, or simply the result of people demanding a commanding presence to break through the gridlock, it is the natural evolution of this state of affairs, and it suggests that Trump is not necessarily a unique phenomenon but something that will only get worse if nothing is done to stop it.

In a way, what we’re seeing is the realization of a major flaw inherent in our Constitution, one foreseen by the Founding Fathers and whose escape from being quite so obvious as now is nothing short of miraculous (and partly rooted in some of the darker ghosts of American history). The Founding Fathers did not intend for political parties to form at all. They distrusted political parties and “factionalism” as a destabilizing force and believed people should vote for the person, not the party. As political science was almost nonexistent at the time, though, they had no real grasp of the forces that lead to the creation of parties and ended up forming parties almost literally before the ink was dry on the Constitution, over, somewhat ironically, the adoption of the Constitution itself.

The Founders were also, somewhat surprisingly, distrustful of too much democracy, fearing that it would lead to the outbreak of “mob rule” of the sort the French Revolution would soon seem to provide. At the time, most states restricted the right to vote to white male landowners, and partly out of a desire to keep the states primary to the federal government, the Founders restricted even their participation in the workings of the federal government. Only the House of Representatives was directly elected by the people; for over a century Senators were chosen by state legislatures, who also determined for themselves how members of the Electoral College to select the President would be chosen. Our modern-day commitment to democracy uber alles for as much of the adult population as possible is at odds with the values underlying the Constitution. The system of checks and balances underlying our government doesn’t work as the Founders intended when the President, the House, and the Senate are all chosen by the people.

That shift has direct consequences for our current malaise. Yale political scientist Juan Linz spent much of his career arguing that the great difference between dysfunctional Latin American democracies and relatively stable European ones had nothing to do with any cultural differences between them and everything to do with the form their respective governments took. European nations tend to have parliamentary systems where the prime minister is elected by the Parliament and so must have Parliament’s support; if the prime minister loses that support, the governing coalition either elects a new prime minister, forms a new coalition, or potentially holds a new election. Latin American systems, by contrast, tend to be modeled on the American system of a directly elected President separate from the Congress, meaning when the President and Congress disagree they can both claim to have the backing of the people and there is no obvious principle with which to resolve the dispute that would be terribly convincing. (Not for nothing were the democracies set up following and since World War II, often installed by America itself, usually parliamentary systems.)

The obvious exception to Linz’s analysis was the United States itself, which seemed to be a model of stability with its presidential system, but Linz’s theory was that America’s success could be chalked up to the diffuse, “big-tent” nature of American political parties that could accommodate many different ideologies under the same roof, something that frustrated many political scientists for many years as they looked wistfully at Britain’s ideologically-coherent parties without recognizing what a disaster it would be in America’s system of checks, balances, and separation of powers. In the American context, though, ideologically diffuse parties meant individual congressmen and Senators could vote their conscience and control of any branch of government by either party didn’t actually mean much – parties were themselves coalitions, and each caucus in each house had enough of a diversity of ideologies that coalitions could form that could keep the government more or less stable and moving in a single direction across the legislative and executive branches. This is no longer the case, and the result is providing chilling evidence for Linz’s theories.

That it was the case for so long, preventing the Founders’ fears about the impact of political parties from being realized, can be chalked up to three dark undercurrents of American history: corruption, race, and voter apathy. The party system that emerged after the Founding generation left power, by the time Electoral College members became largely determined by popular vote, was centered more around people’s feelings about Andrew Jackson than any actual issues, and the main issue dominating American politics was the slavery issue and the main fault line was the Mason-Dixon Line, and both parties tried to appeal to voters on both sides of the line. Although the Republican Party was founded around opposition to slavery, by the time Reconstruction was over both parties were increasingly dominated by the spoils system Jackson had started, and American politics was dominated by political machines who turned out the vote for their respective parties, whose ranks were mostly filled by people hoping to gain patronage positions if their side won. In other words, for most of the nineteenth century American politics had little to do with ideology; both sides may have stuck close by their own team, but actual issues were all but irrelevant in the post-Reconstruction era. It also helped that until Woodrow Wilson and World War I came along, the power of the Presidency was rather limited, and Congress was arguably more powerful; as in a parliamentary system, Congress could act on behalf of the people without conflict, especially once the Seventeenth Amendment provided for the direct election of Senators.

After World War II, race again began muddying the boundaries between the parties as the civil rights movement rose to prominence. The one constant of post-Civil War politics was Southern whites’ distrust of the party of Lincoln, but as integrationists became more and more prominent in the Democratic Party, it became increasingly fragmented, to the point that Southerners twice ran rival presidential tickets upon deciding the official Democratic nominee wasn’t sufficiently pro-segregation. Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy in 1968 created the final break between the South and the Democrats, turning the “Solid South” into today’s Republican stronghold. At about the same time, the modern primary system began to take shape, as the people, having already taken control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress, proceeded to wrench control over the selection of nominees for President away from party bosses. Before small cabals in “smoke-filled rooms” decided amongst themselves who the best candidate would be that could strike a balance between serving their interests and getting elected, meaning even after the post-Wilson expansion of presidential power the President still operated at some level of remove from pure popular will. Now the President had to appeal to a subset of the people from the very start – and more, the people were now engaged in every level of the process, becoming the underlying force behind the parties themselves rather than simply taking what the parties gave them, and pressuring parties and politicians to adopt their favored positions. The thorough democratization of American politics was complete, and the parties inevitably became levers for two different factions of the popular will, utterly ideologically opposed to one another, trying to pull the country in opposite directions.

In the popular imagination, our problems have obvious, commonsense solutions that don’t get enacted solely because corrupt politicians don’t enact them. Democrats think they’re in fealty to big business and other rich contributors; Republicans think they’re too addicted to power and big government. It escapes partisans on both sides that one side’s “commonsense solution” is another’s unacceptable giveaway to special interests. Democrats dismiss Republicans’ concerns as the result of being misled by big corporations and blinded by the culture war and a relentless message of patriotism, too stupid to realize that Republican policies are only keeping them down; Republicans dismiss Democrats’ concerns as being misled by the “liberal media” and ivory-tower elites and looking for a handout, too selfish to realize that Democratic policies only hold the country back. Only on Capitol Hill do people from each side of each issue meet and understand where each side is coming from, or even acknowledge that the other side exists. (Theoretically, the same could happen for party bases on the Internet, but it hasn’t happened and human psychology makes it unlikely to happen, and believe me I’ve tried.) Once they come down from the hill and present the result to the partisans back in the cave, they risk being accused of “selling out their principles” and replaced with someone less “corrupt”. It’s a truism that people don’t like Congress but like their own congressperson. What’s not as recognized is that the inverse is true: a congressperson that tries to do what’s necessary to improve the working of Congress as a whole finds their constituents turning against them. People agree that Congress does nothing, but don’t agree on what they should be doing – and prefer doing nothing to doing anything that the other side wants. The hard truth is that getting what you want means throwing some bones to what the other side wants, but people don’t believe there’s anyone legitimate or worth appeasing on the other side at all.

The result is that gridlock is now entrenched in our system. No longer torn between the party on one hand and the base on the other, today they are one and the same. Further fueled by cable news, talk radio, and ideological web sites, and increasingly distant from those on the other side as the parties increasingly reflect racial and urban-vs-rural divides and as congressmen get fewer opportunities to form relationships across the aisle, each side sees their positions as the only acceptable, even the only American positions, and that the other side is corrupt and their followers are deluded. For each side, compromise is unacceptable, and anyone who dares to vote for anything floated by the other side is a traitor – meaning any position that doesn’t conform to the two great forces doesn’t even get any sort of hearing to begin with, because any moderate gets swiftly weeded out, doomed to defeat in the primaries. If either side has any power to stop the other from getting their way, even a mere 40 votes in the Senate, then nothing whatsoever will get done as both sides dig in. The problem is compounded by the loss of the tools once used by party elites to compel votes, the earmarks, patronage, and lack of transparency so dismissed as hallmarks of corruption but which haven’t been replaced by any mechanism to stop small groups of congressmen, or even a single Senator, to grandstand for the sake of impressing their base or furthering their own political advancement. If there were a multitude of parties this might not be so big a problem – any ideology that might have relevant ideas would have a seat at the table, and without two parties on exact opposite ends of one another it would be easier to find common ground – but our system effectively precludes that, for reasons obvious to anyone who followed the 2000 election. So our democracy lurches ever forward to the brink, and if nothing is done to correct its course the result will either be the election of a Trump-esque strongman, one who will set out to push whatever their side wants no matter who gets trampled underfoot in the process, or all-out civil war, if not both – and either would likely be the death of the Republic.

All this would play out exactly as the Founders feared – the rise of factions resulting in the dissolution of the Republic – and we would do well to recall their wisdom. We no longer believe there is such a thing as “too much” democracy and have come to accept the advent of parties as inevitable, things our Constitution is not designed for. If we are to keep our democracy from plunging into the abyss, we must remember their wisdom while reflecting today’s values.

I urge my fellow Americans concerned about the direction of the country to call for a constitutional convention to update the structure of our government to reclaim the Founders’ wisdom while reflecting our values – crafting a government designed from the start under the assumption that the people will determine as many of its members as possible and recognizing the inevitability of parties, encouraging compromise between factions while strengthening the system of checks and balances for today’s society – or short of that, to form a movement to demand reforms to our democracy within the Constitution to better encourage compromise and finding the best ideas to move the country forward.

I don’t know what shape such a revitalized government would take, and I’m not confident that anyone selected to attend the convention would have anywhere near as much wisdom as the Founders, especially considering the concerning likelihood that anyone with such wisdom would be cast aside in favor of groups with axes to grind hoping to engrave their favored positions in the Constitution, but the necessity to at least confront the problem is undeniable, and I hope that by stating the issue in this way I can invite concerned Americans on both sides of the aisle, all of which consider themselves concerned about America’s well-being, to confront the issue and work together to start working towards a solution. Over the next few days and weeks I will present some specific ideas about flaws in the system and ways to resolve them – even without a convention, though some modification to the Constitution may still be warranted in order for those changes to be as effective as one would hope.

In 1787 the Founders saw an America in crisis – disrespected by the great world powers, unable to raise money to pay its debts, unable to do anything to ease squabbling between the states – and realized that large-scale reform would be needed for the republic to survive, for the Revolution to prove to be more than a Pyrrhic victory. We now find ourselves facing a crisis that may be every bit as big a threat to the survival of the Republic as what the Founders faced, and however we choose to solve it, we need people from left, right, center, and elsewhere to rise to the occasion and find solutions to the great challenge of our time, no matter what that might entail.

I probably shouldn’t get my hopes up, because it’s looked like it before, but I’m starting to wonder if the 2012 election may mark the start of us climbing out of our long national delusion.

A common post-mortem from all sides of the aisle in the aftermath of the election, starting even on election night, has been hand-wringing over the future of the Republican Party. I’m not going to read too much into the Republican Party’s inability to defeat President Obama with the worst unemployment to get a president re-elected since FDR; this just so happens to be the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and people still pin the blame for it on the Republicans. Still, it’s incredible to follow the arc of the Republican Party over the last decade-plus.

Back in 2008, I suggested that the abuses of the Bush administration had so tainted the image of the Republicans that an Obama administration would either pave the way for a serious third-party or independent run in 2012, or give the Democrats a blank check for a generation. What I didn’t anticipate was the complete re-brand of the Republican party that the Tea Party constituted, as the complete antithesis of everything the Bush administration amounted to, whether or not it actually practiced what it preached. Nor did I anticipate that the Tea Party would completely hollow out the Republican Party before flaming out, effectively forcing it into a substandard candidate – running as a moderate four years after running as the conservative – because he was the least crazy of the bunch. (Meanwhile, the Tea Party’s godfather, Ron Paul, for some reason barely did better than in 2008, which probably says a lot about the honesty of the Tea Party’s position.)

Nor did I anticipate that by the time it was through, the Tea Party would leave the Republican party in shambles anyway, the last flameout of a group of old, crusty baby-boomers unwilling to face up to the fact that their power is inexorably waning. Now it’s hard to see where the party’s future realistically lies. They’ve spent years antagonizing minorities when the country is soon to become a majority-minority nation, including the Hispanic community that might have otherwise seemed to be their future base, not to mention women, who are only half the country’s population, and the cities, where the population will continue to concentrate, and when everyone lives in global-warming-induced hell they’ll remember that it was the Republicans who closed people’s eyes to it even as it was happening. Perhaps most worryingly, while the last four years have hardly been sufficient to give the Democrats a blank check for a generation, no one in my generation will ever in their right mind identify as a Republican. It’s entirely possible that going forward, 300 electoral votes will be the bare minimum for a Democratic presidential candidate against a Republican opponent.

This isn’t a recipe for good government. It’s a recipe for some pretty bad people ending up in positions of high government and, were it not for the Democratic propensity for hand-wringing even when they have the numbers to ramrod any bill they want through Congress, the remaking of the country to fit a particular political agenda, even when that agenda might be wrong. The Republican party has been a force in politics for over 150 years, longer than any other opposition party to the Democrats and indeed well over half the entire history of the two-party system, but now it may well be in bad enough shape that it’s in the twilight of its power and influence. The two-party system is bad enough, but the country cannot long stand as a one-party system. If the Republicans are falling away, we’re going to need a new party as a replacement.

What is needed is a political party that can defend the principles of small government and the free market while still being rooted in reality, that isn’t blinded by ideology but can actually propose sensible solutions that doesn’t increase reliance on government or strangle the economy, taking over for Republicans as they wane and standing up to Democrats where they’re strong. To the Tea Party, it can position itself as the true defender of small government, abstaining from blindly throwing several times more money at defense than we actually need; to the Occupiers, it can position itself as the true defender of the people, making sure that corporate oppression isn’t merely replaced by government dependence. Perhaps that can involve a takeover of an existing political party, though as above I don’t see anyone of my generation swallowing their pride and becoming a Republican anytime soon. Perhaps people can flock to a third party, though those tend to be filled with extremists once you dig far enough into their positions, since all the sensible people are working within the two-party system, and they’re not likely to compromise their principles. Or perhaps it’s time for a brand-new political party that can bring balance and common sense into politics.

Whatever the case, if we are witnessing the twilight of the Republican Party, it’s imperative that we get to work building its replacement, and building its rise through the halls of power, in the hope that a reset political landscape can bring the American political discourse back to sanity and reality.

It’s not hard to figure out why the government has so much trouble balancing the budget and why the national debt keeps ballooning. Americans like their taxes low and their government services high. Democrats fancy themselves Robin Hood, taxing the rich to play for government services for the poor; Republicans want to cut services so they can lower taxes, and both parties are generally only successful at making things worse for the government, but not before wasting a lot of time arguing about it.

The debt ceiling, last year’s “crisis” should have made clear, is wholly ineffective at forcing the government to keep spending down. A balanced budget amendment isn’t the answer; states have balanced budget requirements and lose massive amounts of money anyway because of the use of Stupid Accounting Tricks to hide gazillions of dollars in expenditures off-budget, and in any case such an amendment would rob the government of flexibility during war or recession. What’s needed is to encourage the government not to overspend or undertax during the strong years.

We had a surplus during the Clinton years, when a Democratic president, a Republican Congress, and a strong economy collided to wipe out the budget as a problem. We’ve seen some elements of the solution – bringing defense spending more in line with what America actually needs, for example, and if health care reform works it should actually increase government revenues as health care’s drag on the economy is reduced and the government recoups savings from waste – and we’ll examine more specific points of spending in future posts. In this post, however, we’ll look at more general principles of budget management and taxation.

First, let’s consider how the Republicans claim they can have their cake and eat it too, the Laffer Curve. It seems simple, even obvious: If the government collects tax at a rate of 0%, obviously, they won’t collect anything. On the flip side, if it collects tax at a rate of 100%, no one will be left with any reason to do anything, and the government still won’t collect tax. Hence, it is possible to actually increase government revenues by lowering taxes.

But it doesn’t take long to find problems with it. For one, it seems to rely on an overly rational view of human nature. The Laffer Curve came to prominence during the Reagan years and the 100% tax rate was said to represent what happened in the Soviet Union… except the Soviet Union seemed to work just fine for around 70 years. Most people will do things for reasons other than monetary gain, whether because they’re forced to or they just like the work; I’ve been working on Da Blog for over five and a half years and have barely seen a dime from it.

On the flip side, both the theory and practice of capitalism suggest that people will attempt to squeeze out every last penny they can for themselves. I can’t imagine why the sort of person basic economics proposes, living under a 99% tax rate, wouldn’t still try to do as much work as they could in order to squeeze out that one percent. Granted, this wouldn’t leave people with much money to spend on keeping the economy (and themselves) running, but the government itself could still contribute at least a little to the economy, even if not very well (as in the Soviet case), and both of these still seem to suggest a peak in the Laffer curve somewhere greater than 50%, possibly substantially greater. Right now, the highest marginal income tax rate the United States government levies is a measly 35%.

Until the Reagan years the highest marginal tax rate was 70%. During much of the 50s and until 1965 it was as high as 90%. From the 50s until the Reagan years the top 1% represented less than 10% of all income before taxes, probably closer to 5%; now it’s upwards of 20%. You think maybe there might be a connection there? What if I told you that the lowest marginal tax rate was 10%, not much lower than 35%?

The Tea Party’s counterargument to this is to question the premise of taxing the rich more than the poor at all, which smacks of penalizing the rich for success, stealing their presumably-legitimately-earned money, and implicitly demonizing them. For all that they attack them, after all, the vast majority of “the 99%” would trade places with the 1% in a heartbeat. Many Tea Partiers would rather do away with the progressive income tax entirely, in favor of one of a number of flat tax schemes, and cut back heavily on government services for the poor that provide less incentive to advance to a higher class, and thus less incentive to work. The left, they argue, think that the rich shouldn’t have any advantages over the poor, when that would defeat the purpose of work in the first place. There’s not really any reason for the government to be in the business of redistributing the wealth, and it’s not clear that there’s much economic benefit either; in fact, the rich are more likely to invest their money because the poor have to spend it on their needs, and the former is ultimately better for the economy, since it actually builds the engine instead of just running it.

It’s not an argument that should be dismissed out of hand, though the answers to the questions raised by the “Horatio Alger argument” are mostly out of the scope of this post. We should first mention, however, that to my knowledge, in our tax system no one ends up with less money by making more money. I referred to marginal tax rates earlier; that means that those tax rates only apply to the next dollar you spend. All the income you make within a previous tax bracket is taxed at the rate of that tax bracket. There is no “jumping” from the government taking 10% of your money at one level to 15% of it on the next. By the same token, no one would dare take 80% of a poor person’s money, even if a rich person is also being taxed at 80%.

For now, let’s shift our focus away from communistic “he has more than me and that’s wrong” questions and focus on the question of whether people have enough. Let’s shift the discussion away from “the 99%” and “the 1%” and towards “the 15%” of people that met the Census Bureau’s definition of poverty in 2010 (incidentally, the highest rate since Clinton took office). This could simply refer to people with a lot less money than the super-rich. Or it could refer to people who spend all their money on keeping themselves alive with nothing to spend on anything else, and not necessarily doing a good job of that, so that they end up spending a lot of money on junk food. It could refer to people who live in poorly-constructed houses or apartments, possibly in intense filth and squalor and near sites of pollution, if they have a home at all. It could refer to places where people have so little that gangs arise to protect what they do have and drugs become rampant to take one’s mind off their condition, leading to mass imprisonment.

It may not be clear that redistributing the wealth is within government’s purview, but reducing poverty surely is, at least indirectly, allowing the government to spend less on prisons, the health system, police, and the drug war. If nothing else I could argue for the provision of basic income or negative income tax, a compromise whereby the Tea Party gets their flat income tax (perhaps in the 20-50% range), but the government also pays a flat amount to every citizen in the United States. This wouldn’t be enough to allow or encourage people to stop working en masse, but it would be enough to keep people alive and give them a place to live; I’d imagine it would be at least as much as a part-time minimum wage job, perhaps the amount of the federal poverty level. That might allow for the dismantling of most welfare programs, as well as cuts in other programs such as Social Security, which might mean the government comes out ahead in the long run.

(The FairTax proposal advanced by some within the Tea Party contains elements of this, replacing the income tax component with a sales tax that has the added effect of encouraging investment, though relative to current tax policies it would hit the middle class harder than the wealthy, and such a tax (probably more than double current state sales taxes, close to triple) could result in massive evasion.)

We’ll see in later posts how, Horatio Alger aside, the rich tend to have advantages that mean their children are far more likely to stay rich than poorer children are to become rich; for example, investment is not only better for the economy, but it also ends up returning money back to the investor, allowing the rich to get even richer. There are probably better ways to correct this imbalance than simply taxing the rich more, but I do have a problem with lowering or repealing the capital gains tax, as it smacks of opening a loophole in the income tax system (I’d support making the capital gains tax equivalent to the income tax), and I’m actually a bit mystified as to why anyone who supposedly believes in the ideal of Horatio Alger would oppose the estate tax, as it lessens the “Paris Hilton effect” of simply having daddy’s fortune plop into someone’s lap without doing any work. Since land isn’t something you actually work for, but rather is something that’s just there, I could also see the argument for a Georgist tax on land value, which could also have environmental benefits.

By raising taxes on the wealthy and/or reforming and simplifying the tax code, combined with finding a way to curb pork, unnecessary and harmful subsidies, and wasteful spending, and enacting reforms in other areas of government, we can create a streamlined, efficient government that works for everyone and still makes headway on the national debt. That’s a vision of the government that everyone can get behind.

Economics quiz: What is the best response the government should have to a recession? Is it:

• A) To hand out a bunch of tax cuts?
• B) To spend money on public works projects?
• C) To do nothing?

Most economists would probably answer B. To see why B is a better answer than A, consider this scenario: Suppose there are two governments. One decides to give $1000 to the wealthy, the other spends $1000 on public works projects. Ultimately, all the money the second government spends on public works projects is going to make their way into the hands of people, whether construction workers, contractors, extractors of natural resources, you name it. So both governments are giving $1000 to various people, but the first government is handing it out for free while the second government is actually getting something for their money – and that something might benefit people who won’t directly receive any of the money, for example, the construction of roads.

A sizable chunk of the 2009 stimulus, on the other hand, went to tax cuts and maintaining the status quo for various government programs; arguably less than half went towards actual things the government could get for its money, and several economists voiced concerns that the whole thing wasn’t big enough to make enough of a dent in the recession. What’s more, the Congressional Budget Office raised concerns that the stimulus could actually be bad for the economy in the long term by adding to the nation’s debt and potentially crowding out private investment.

In any case, faced with this apparent recommendation against free markets and for bigger government from a field they normally depend on to recommend the opposite, the Tea Party would probably recommend C, do nothing – in fact, maybe even go in the opposite direction by loosening restrictions they see as holding the economy back. (Mainstream Republicans, on the other hand, seem to want to answer A.) Despite the prevalence of Keynesianism, there are certainly enough economists willing to argue that any government interference in the marketplace is bad no matter how bad the economy gets. It’s worth noting that no projections seem to indicate that the stimulus would actually shorten the recession, in terms of a return to baseline GDP, only make it less severe. There is evidence that the stimulus has created jobs that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and any failure to meet the unemployment targets projected at the time is more because the recession itself was even worse than thought at the time, but it’s not clear that that alone should be the goal. On the other hand, most Keynesians would argue that the government should depress the economy when it starts riding too high, to prevent it from crashing and causing a far worse recession.

What this gets at is the question of what the government’s policy towards the economy should be: whether it should take an active role in creating optimum conditions for the economy to function, or whether that sort of thing just causes recessions in the first place? Even the people who are supposed to be experts can’t quite agree, so I sure as hell won’t even try to resolve the debate, and should someone like Ron Paul become president they would probably attempt to get the government to take a more hands-off approach. In turn, that debate is even further bound up in the debate about the government’s role in everything else, as opposed to the free market, and the appropriate level of taxation, raising a whole other set of issues.

That said, Keynesianism is mainstream enough that my introductory macroeconomics text seemingly presented it uncritically, and its most well-known critics, the Austrian School espoused by Ron Paul, are mostly rejected by most mainstream economists, since we haven’t had anything resembling even the depressions of the 19th century since the government took a more active role in the economy starting in the 30s (though the present recession has come close). Besides, the truth is that the government isn’t likely to take its hands off the economy, or anything else, anytime soon. Thus, I would tentatively support the stimulus, a larger stimulus, and a more spending-focused stimulus. As much as I don’t want to give more power to government, ultimately a lack of jobs are what’s at the heart of the Occupy movement, and if the stimulus can provide them, and it’s not clear anything else would, more power to it. Besides, many of the things the stimulus pays for are things the government, for good or ill, essentially has a monopoly on, things the free market ultimately relies on even if it might do better at it were it forced to take over.

What this touches on, though, is the central disagreement in American politics between the right and the left. The right believes the government should be as small as possible and not go meddling in people’s lives; the left believes the government has a duty to create good lives for everyone. If the government were wholly committed to one or the other it would probably produce the optimum effects each approach suggests, better than the compromise-enforced status quo, but since there remains disagreement over which approach is really best we end up with a mix of both worlds. Is there a way to get the best of both worlds, allow people to live their lives as they choose without the negative consequences that implies? I’ll attempt to answer that question as this series continues, starting with quite possibly the biggest and most telling example.