Political dysfunction: an exposition

This is a tweet-thread I posted on 22 October 2016. The US presidential election was fast approaching and I (like many) was expecting Hillary Clinton to win. I was watching what I thought was the Republican Party self-destruct in real time and in public. It was tearing itself apart as Trump became the nominee, and campaigned in a way that made clear he didn’t care what damage he did to the GOP or anyone in it along the way.

I wrote about how I thought we’d ended up where we were, what the trends in conservative politics had been that had driven right wing parties to the parlous state they’re in, and — because I expected the Democrats to occupy the White House — what might be the future for centre-left parties as they tackled with their own internal tensions in a hyper-partisan world with barely credible oppositions.

My electoral prediction was obviously wrong, but I think the analysis stands up. Postscript and some further analysis follows after the tweet-thread (only 80 tweets!).

Here goes. Remember, this was October 2016.

The 2016 Thread

1. Going to try to resolve in my head some things about the rise of Trump and the schism in right wing politics, and what it means.
2. I am hardly the first to note that Trump is not sui generis; rather he’s emerged from a long process of evolution in the Republican party
3. (I don’t presume to have brilliant insights on issues of globalism, nativism, populism & racism & their interaction to explain Trumpism.)
4. (Rather, I am interested in what has happened within the key institutional players; political parties, media etc., & implications.)
5. [Retweet from Adam Ozimek of @ModeledBehavior]: “conservatism still isn’t facing up to the fact that there is a massive cultural problem that led to Trump” [link]
6. Major mainstream parties are coalitional in nature; they operate as machines to achieve compromise & consensus within a broad church.
7. Fringe/extreme parties are more rigid, doctrinaire, fundamentalist. Compromise frowned on. Repubs have moved this way, slowly but surely.
8. The rise of the Tea Party movement and identification of RINOs was the real sign of switch from mainstream party to fringe movement.
9. But the evolution to this stage started earlier, back in the days of the southern strategy which sought white votes using coded racism.
10. The next significant step was during the time of GW Bush, identifying a “reality based community” that Repubs would visibly disavow.
11. This is the 1st point where Repubs openly draw line saying facts don’t matter; beliefs do. Faith particularly matters; but more than that…
12. …creating your own narrative is the dominant policy driver; ideology explicitly trumps inconvenient reality.
13. At this point, the Repubs drift towards being an extreme fringe party (albeit large), not a pragmatic coalitional one.
14. If you say it, loudly and often, you create the narrative you desire and carry everyone with you. Thus began right wing postmodernism.
15. Right wing postmodernism has been talked about by the likes of @johnquiggin since the first GWB term: [link]
16. RW PoMo: your narrative shapes your political reality. Fact-based reality is conditional, not constraining.
17. Technical experts are no longer treated as sources of credible advice. It’s OK to trivialize and dismiss advice that’s inconvenient.
18. Meanwhile, the media, confused, act as enablers: must present “balance”, so you get “views on shape of earth differ.”
19. Constantly fact-checking dubious claims by Repubs is exhausting and opens you to claims of bias. So they don’t.[1]
20. Meanwhile Fox News took on role of explicit cheerleader, cherry-picking info and shaping Repub-sympathetic narrative.
21. Stronger view (e.g. @paulkrugman): MSM itself ended up going beyond “false equivalence” to cheerleading e.g. Iraq War.
22. But trying to shape reality purely by language means making promises you can’t keep. Reality eventually intrudes.
23. Middle East wars drag on, finally a financial crash that turns into a recession. Your big promises look hollow.
24. Post GWB, not only electoral loss, but credibility loss too. Your (shrinking) base now loses patience. (A black president?? What? How?)
25. The Tea Party rises, disaffected, resentful & angry. This is (almost) peak Create-Your-Own-Reality. Rational debate, & RINOs, unwelcome.
26. Combination of Tea Party and strategic redistricting mean that “down-ticket” positions at midterms dominated by Repubs.
27. Moreover, there’s almost a race to the extremist bottom, with Tea Party candidates challenging “establishment” Republicans.
28. Note, it’s not pragmatic establishment Repubs vs “fringe” Tea Partiers. The established Rs are trying to look hardcore to the base too.
29. Result? Congressional voting becomes more polarized. Rhetoric is increasingly partisan and hostile. White House = Democratic, isolated.
30. Further results? Basic legislative failures mean that shutdowns, sequesters and fiscal cliffs are in play. Govt dysfunction!
31. All this time, Repub base is a) shrinking and b) becoming more strident. Repub primaries are displays of macho true-believership.
32. Where does this end? With Trump. Making up his own facts. Saying “Wrong” in debates about things he was on record saying.
33. In a bubble where you get to say what you like, he is the apex predator. And where he goes, so do those around him.
34. Trump rep, Michael Cohen, going “Says who?” when told about poor polls. Mike Pence in his one debate, denying Trump’s words.
35. “I reject your reality and substitute my own” is the operating principle. If Trump can bluster, so can they.
36. Divide b/w establishment Repubs & the fringe now maximised with Trump’s candidacy. Some denounce, others openly struggle to endorse him.
37. The broader problem is that this behaviour is grist for the (shrinking) base and pretty much toxic for everyone else.
38. Trumpism has shaken up both the mainstream Repubs and the media. Now, media fact-checking, & openly challenging Trump spokespeople.
39. But the Repub shift into hyper-partisanship still evident. McCain’s threat to never endorse any HRC Supremes nom! Seriously?
40. I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from all this. The US Repubs are in a civil war, with no clear winning/exit strategy.
41. Trump now not even indicating preparedness to accept the election result (unless he wins!). Up = down, black = white.
42. Is there any future for anything resembling a meaningful conservatism in the post-Trump era? This isn’t just a US problem.
43. The UK Tories are split as a result of Brexit, with the mainstream endorsing Remain and a fringe (successfully!) supporting Leave.
44. That battle also involved reality-denial: people have had enough of experts (Michael Gove). Doctors wrong on smoking (Nigel Farage)
45. The right fringe in the UK, like Australia, involves a separate reality-denial party: UKIP in Britain, and One Nation in Australia.
46. Currently a One Nation senator is suggesting climate change is a conspiracy supported by distorted scientific data.
47. In both the UK and Australia, reality-denial populist parties have links to mainstream Right parties. In US, all are inside one party.
48. Despite the Aust Prime Minister being Malcolm Turnbull, @johnquiggin refers to the Abbott-Hanson (mainstream/fringe) government.
49. See here as an example of this: [link], or this [link].
50. In Aust, several govt members are allied or sympathetic to One Nation. In UK, Leave campaigner Boris Johnson now Foreign Secretary.
51. Reality denial movements depend on dishonesty. Brexit campaign won by making stuff up about EU laws and financial obligations.
52. The thing about reality denial is it catches up with you in the end. You may win battles, but not long-term wars.
53. In years gone by, politicians cautious about stoking populist movements, respecting reality sufficiently to govern rationally.
54. Recently, populist movements were seen as means to short term political ends. Win an election or a referendum. Worry later.
55. But when “fixing a broken Washington system” or leaving the EU doesn’t happen smoothly, all you have is disaffected angry people.
56. Reality crowds in on you, and you can’t beat it into submission using confident/insistent rhetoric. Expectation fail.
57. And if “Washington is broken” is the catch-cry in the primaries, the greatest outsider (non-politician) has the obvious advantage.
58. The gulf between playing to base in primaries, and pivoting to middle ground in generals is maximised in this process.
59. In US, electoral map can be sliced & diced by race/gender/urban-rural/education to identify whose sympathies lie strongly where.

60. This is now seriously dangerous. Jo Cox is dead. Trump supporters close to threatening insurrection. The genie’s out of the bottle.

61. (Although, in the US, calm will hopefully prevail.) [link]

62. (Still a problem if GOP go along w/ rigged narrative for short-run gain rather than blaming/rejecting Trump.) [link]

63. (In the UK, racist incidents appear to be on the rise.) [link]

64. So the right wing establishment in multiple countries is rent in twain. What happens from here? Whither conservatism?

65. Max Boot quoted in Slate: Has the GOP “permanently become the party of conspiracy-mongering, authoritarianism, and white power?”

66. Is the left ready to step up to fill the gap and dominate the political landscape? Hardly. It’s had its own major internecine battles.

67. The pragmatic “reformist” centre-left has dominated various countries for decades, over the more idealistic progressive-left.

68. Hawke/Keating (Aust), Blair (UK), Clinton-Obama (US) represented the move of left-of-centre govts to the centre.

69. Emphasis in each case on centrism, pragmatism, middle-of-the-roadism, “Third Way-ism”, and electability.

70. But whither the left? In each case, more progressive/populist parties/candidates have emerged. Corbyn, Sanders, Greens (Aust).

71. US Democrats are uniting around Hillary, and Bernie-ism may have lasting effects, moving her leftwards.

72. @heerjeet argues Left parties will not succumb to non-politician populists. [link]

73. Mike Konczal @rortybomb has a go at considering what Democrat economic policy positions might look like [link]

74. But even as shaken UK Tories struggle to manage the Brexit process, UK Labour is tearing itself apart.

75. In Aust, ALP trying to determine what it stands for, especially relative to emergent Greens (who are doing the same).

76. So, TL;DR: Trump is the almost inevitable end result of what’s happened over decades in the GOP. He’s not an anomaly.

77. Big part of the process is slow-but-sure rejection of reality, and of expertise. Replace with “If I say it enough, it’s true.”

78. Establishment GOP figures are extremists now. Tea-Party/Trumpinistas are beyond extreme. What’s the resolution?

79. On the left, parties also in some turmoil, but in a different space (what makes a left party “electable” now?)

80. What will right and left look like in 5–10 years time, and how do we make mainstream parties less rather than more dysfunctional? /end

Postscript, August 2018

So, as mentioned at the start, I got the outcome wrong. Trump won the election, but narrowly and technically (via the Electoral College), without winning the popular vote. This matters because my contention, then and now, is that the basic elements of contemporary right-wing politics are not actually particularly popular. Trump won on a technicality as it were, and this is actually how US politics has been working for a while: the Republicans have been manipulating the system in their favour via disenfranchisement of minority voters, and redistricting of electoral boundaries. When Tony Abbott won the 2013 election as the ALP combusted (over personalities rather than over political differences), it did not take long for his hardline political positioning to cause his — and his government’s — popularity to plummet. Malcolm Turnbull, beholden to his party’s hard right, and unable to prosecute anything like the pragmatic, forward-looking kind of agenda that had been his political selling point, was never able to recover his party’s fortunes. And so here we are.

I spent some time a couple of months ago noting the ways in which right wing parties around the world had unmoored themselves from anything resembling a coherent ideas base on which to articulate a policy program. All that was left from this unmooring is

• in economic policy: continuing privatisation and deregulation; tax cuts in all circumstances (times are bad? tax cuts are the solution. times are good? we can afford to cut taxes now!); austerity and (pretend) fiscal discipline.
• non-economic: law and order (domestically) and border security (internationally), all fed heavily by race-baiting.
• cultural and social: pushing back against anything that reeks of progressivism, like renewable energy, abortion rights, same sex marriage, trans rights and so on.

Before I finish, I need to stress this again: this agenda is actually not especially electorally popular. On the first, conservative parties have a persistent advantage that they’re “better with money”, independent of evidence. On the second, racism is present in the electorate and able to be exploited, but it’s far from straightforward that the most racist party wins in any and all circumstances. (This is too big a topic to do justice here, but this by John Quiggin — that the Longman by-election showed the limits of racist politics — is consistent with my argument.) Finally, the march of cultural issues is, slowly but more or less inexorably, moving in directions conservatives are opposed to.

The impact of recent electoral losses on mainstream left-liberal parties is another issue again. The centrism that has dominated such parties is under unprecedented challenge, but what that becomes is hard to predict at this point.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.