Daily Archives: August 6, 2021

The debate centers on what lessons to draw from Donald Trump, who talked like a populist but governed with the exception of trade policy more like a Reaganite. The divide doesnt quite fall along pro- and anti-Trump lines. The pro-Trump former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, for example, has emerged as a leading champion of traditional free-market policies in opposition to other pro-Trumpers like Vance and Hawley. The battle is likely to play out in the 2024 presidential primary, and shape the future of Republican politics long after Trump exits stage left.

The emergence of the new economic counterculture is loosely connected to the two-year-old think tank, American Compass, whose founder, the Harvard-trained lawyer and former Bain consultant Oren Cass, routinely derides his adversaries as market fundamentalists peddling stale pieties from the 1980s. Cass left the free-market Manhattan Institute in 2019 to launch American Compass, the first right-of-center think tank dedicated to pushing the government to get more, rather than less, involved in national economic policy in order to help advance a certain set of social and cultural goals a view Cass and his ilk have termed common good capitalism. The groups mission: To restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nations liberty and prosperity.

Oren Cass at a conference in New Orleans in 2017. | Stephen McCarthy/Collision/Sportsfile via Flickr

In order to become the party of the working class, Cass has argued, the GOP must abandon its doctrinaire attachment to free-market principles in favor of traditionally Democratic causes like organized labor, the minimum wage and an industrial policy in which the government boosts particular industries over others. He also favors a stricter immigration policy with an eye toward migrants impact on the wages of American workers, arguments echoed by Vance and Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Its a very different set of things to put together and support, certainly from Republicans, Cass told me recently, describing his position as in all respects antithetical to the Chamber of Commerce view.

Cass critics say he is merely a more intellectual version of the crass political opportunists looking to capitalize on the Trump legacy. Why else would the 2012 Romney campaign adviser turn his back on the free-market principles he once championed? Why else would the populist agitators of the previous decade, including the Tea Party darling Marco Rubio and his chief of staff, the former Heritage Action enfant terrible Michael Needham, shift their focus from restraining government and controlling spending to finding new ways for the feds to meddle in the economy, or the onetime Trump critic Vance transform himself into an avatar of populist economics?

A lot of people have tried to assign meaning to the Trump phenomenon, and a lot of that meaning is self-serving, says Michael Strain, director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute. President Trump did not expose some deep problem in American society that requires a rethinking of the economic system, Strain adds, arguing that the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed led to the sorts of populist uprisings around the globe that have historically followed economic cataclysms.

Others, including the political scientist Richard Hanania, say Cass is drawing the wrong lessons from Trumps political success, which Hanania believes had more to do with culture than economics. In an essay published after the 2020 election and titled, unsubtly, The National Populist Illusion, Hanania called out Cass and Rubio by name, arguing that attitudes toward issues like political correctness and immigration were more closely linked to Trump votes than economic status.

Hedge funds, private equity firms and venture capitalists, many of them longtime Republican donors, have been on the receiving end of many of Cass barbs, and the titans of industry, broadly speaking, argue that Cass has no more business charting the countrys economic policy than any other Ivy League consultant. See last months nasty Twitter tangle between Cass and the hedge fund billionaire Clifford Asness, a top GOP donor, that began when Cass argued that Asness firm hasnt been good at delivering results for its own investors. Describing American Compass as a blood and soil organization, Asness urged his followers to familiarize themselves with Cass work: Its every populist piece of utter nonsense all in one place. Very convenient, he wrote.

Twitter battles notwithstanding, Cass cites as his chief intellectual adversaries Haley, the former U.N. ambassador, as well as the outgoing Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey, who has been a leading voice on economic policy, and the members of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley is, along with Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, one of the leading opponents of the emerging movement of Republican economic populism. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Toomey delivered a speech last year titled In Defense of Capitalism that took aim not at the old threat that comes from the left but rather at the hyphenated capitalism trending on the right. When I look at this and I look at where this is coming from, he said in the speech, it strikes me as maybe the most serious threat to economic freedom and prosperity in a long time, because its coming from our allies. It is meant to be a dagger thrust into the heart of the traditional center-right consensus that maximizing economic growth is all about.

Haley, a likely 2024 presidential candidate, made the debate the subject of her own remarks at the conservative Hudson Institute last February and later in a Wall Street Journal op-ed slamming those who are pushing a watered-down or hyphenated capitalism.

Other 2024 prospects among them, Mike Pompeo, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and Rick Scott havent yet staked out strong positions on the GOPs intraparty economics debate, but they will inevitably need to do so. The one thing on which both groups agree is that an economic brawl on the right is likely to play out in the next Republican primary. Cass predicts a fight for the future of right of center between his allies, like Rubio and Hawley, and those he describes as pre-Trump, including Haley.

Just as Trump disrupted the political consensus on China, the outcome of this debate is likely to shape the consensus economic views of a party in tumult. One of the practical questions stemming from this debate is how voters respond to the rhetoric of a watered-down capitalism, and whether it produces results electorally. Opponents argue it might be good short-term politics, but that voters ultimately punish politicians who preside over periods of economic contraction precisely what those like Toomey say the populists are likely to produce.

Those of us who think as I do need to constantly remind people that capitalism serves the common good, Toomey said in an interview. This whole notion of common-good capitalism betrays the flawed premise on which its based, which is that capitalism somehow does not serve the common good.

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A Big Policy Fight Is Brewing on the Right. And Its Not All About Trump. - POLITICO

ORBETELLO, Italy On Friday, the first day that Italians needed to present a nationwide health passport for access to indoor dining, museums, gyms, theaters and a wide range of social activities, Margherita Catenuto, 18, from Sicily, proudly showed a bar code at the Capitoline Museum in Rome certifying that she was vaccinated.

Its like showing you have a conscience, said Ms. Catenuto as she walked in. You do it for yourself, and you do it for others. Its very sensible.

Similar measures to stem the coronavirus pandemic have prompted large protests in France and bitterly split Americans between cities that will require vaccine passes, like New York, and entire parts of the country that consider even masks an affront to their rights. But Italians have mostly greeted their new Green Pass with widespread acceptance and, after some compromises, near political consensus.

After a long populist period that prized anti-establishment fervor and viral propaganda over pragmatism and expertise, Italians are suddenly enjoying a high season of rationality.

For things to get better, get vaccinated and respect the rules, Prime Minister Mario Draghi, the most unapologetically establishment prime minister in Europe, told reporters on Friday before Parliaments summer recess.

On Friday, signs outside movie theaters reminded patrons to bring their Green Passes proof of a vaccination, a negative test swab taken in recent days or proof of a past virus infection which they can download or print out. Restaurant workers checked certificates along with temperatures and reservations. Tourists can provide proof of vaccination with a vaccine accepted by European Medicines Agency.

Do you have a Green Pass, a hostess at an Orbetello sushi restaurant asked Laura Novelli as she showed up for lunch with a friend. She didnt, nor did she have a negative swab test result or proof that she had recovered from Covid. I didnt even think about it, the 26-year-old waitress told the hostess who turned her away with a shrug.

The notion that Italy under Mr. Draghi is doing reasonable things to help bring Italy out of the pandemic and into recovery has translated into broad support for what is now Europes most expansive measure in countering the spread of the Delta variant.

A recent poll published in Italys largest newspaper, Corriere della Sera, showed that 66 percent of Italians support the Green Pass, and populist leaders who once cast doubt on vaccines have largely gotten with the program.

Having a reasonable leader helps, but I think Italians were reasonable in this crisis from the very beginning, said Ferruccio De Bortoli, a columnist and former editor of the newspaper. He added that this goes against the myth of irrational Italians.

On Thursday night, the government announced that starting in September, the pass will also be required for schoolteachers, school administrators and university students. Teachers who dont get the pass wont be allowed into school. After five absences, teachers will stop receiving salaries.

Mr. Draghi has called returning to in-school learning a fundamental objective.

In September the pass will also be required to board ferries and buses traveling between more than two regions and on planes and high-speed trains. People who enter restricted areas without the pass, and business owners who let them in, face a fine of up to 1,000 euros more than $1,180. A business that violates the rule can be closed for one to 10 days.

Aug. 6, 2021, 7:54 p.m. ET

That did not stop the hostess at the sushi restaurant, who said the pass was wreaking havoc on reservations and business on its first day, from offering to look the other way for two teenage boys who did not have certifications. They declined and stepped back onto the street.

I like to travel and wherever you go you need this freaking pass, said one of the teenagers, Giovanni Galatolo, 18. Im getting vaccinated on Tuesday.

The government argues that the pass will increase economic activity, not least by allowing more of normal life to resume. For example, seating capacity on the national high-speed train network will be increased from 50 percent to 80 percent, meaning more business travel and economic activity.

But it is also clearly intended to push Italians like Mr. Galatolo to get vaccinated.

Mr. Draghi, whose government consists of a grand coalition of parties, has exhibited a flair for putting populist politicians who traffic in spreading unreasonable doubts in their place. That includes Matteo Salvini, the leader of the nationalist League party and once the most powerful politician in Italy, who has struggled for relevance under the plain-spoken Mr. Draghi.

Mr. Salvini has staked out an ambiguous, have-it-both-ways position on the vaccine. One day he dips back into the populism that once made him Italys most popular politician, saying that those opposed to vaccinations should be listened to, that vaccines are useless for young people, and that the Green Pass should not be required to enter restaurants and bars. The next he declares support for Mr. Draghi and his policies.

Last month, when he suggested that a broader Green Pass would deprive half of Italians of their right to life, Mr. Draghi would have none of it.

The appeal to not getting vaccinated is an appeal to die, Mr. Draghi said in response to Mr. Salvinis remarks. You dont get a vaccine, you get sick, you die. The refusal to get vaccinated, he added, would make people die.

Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S.

The next morning, Mr. Salvini got vaccinated.

Mr. Salvini said he had already booked his vaccination, and that he did it not based on what Mr. Draghi said but as a free choice and not because someone imposed it on me.

But its now clear who is calling the shots, especially since the pro-business base of Mr. Salvinis own party supports Mr. Draghi in the hopes of getting the economy moving again.

Mr. Draghi has obviously robbed populism of its voice, said Sergio Fabbrini, a professor of politics and international relations and dean of the Political Science Department at Luiss, a university in Rome.

The Green Pass is by no means a panacea to the pandemic, and there are still major hurdles for the government to overcome. Younger Italians have proved more resistant to getting vaccinated, but some Italian regions have mobilized inoculation campaigns at their beaches, nightclubs and bars. In Sicily officials offered vaccines in ice cream shops and pizzerias.

More troubling, especially given the awful toll of the virus on older Italians during the first waves of the pandemic, is that about 11 percent of Italians over the age of 60 are still not vaccinated.

Sporadic protests by anti-vaccination activists, who were encouraged during the anti-establishment political campaigns of Five Star and the League, have broken out.

While the government considers about 7 to 8 percent of Italians as strongly opposed to vaccines, it sees an equal percentage as reachable, but they just havent gotten around to it or dont see the point. The Green Pass, they argue, has already prompted a spike in vaccination bookings, and the government is confident a broader use of the pass will prompt even more inoculations.

Ms. Novelli, who was turned away from the sushi restaurant for not having a Green Pass, said she wasnt ideologically opposed to inoculation, but had hesitated for fear of missing work with side effects from a fever. She said she understood the rationale of the pass, and said if it became necessary to work, Ill have to do it, but she said she wouldnt get vaccinated just to eat in a sushi restaurant.

I did, said her friend Laura Cretu, who had recently been vaccinated and added that she also needed it to go to university classes in September. Without the Green Pass, she said, you cant do anything.

Reporting was contributed by Emma Bubola in Rome, Gaia Pianigiani in Siena and Elisabetta Povoledo in Pallanza, Italy.

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Italians (Mostly) Embrace a Green Pass to Prove Vaccination on Its First Day - The New York Times

Puducherry awash with posters, portraying CM as the hero of films Sarpatta Parambarai and Kabali, ahead of his birthday on Wednesday

For those accustomed to the poster mania that surfaces in the city during the run-up to the birthday celebrations of N. Rangasamy, who turns 71 on Wednesday in his record fourth stint as Puducherry Chief Minister, the appearance of a reference to filmmaker Pa. Ranjiths OTT release Sarpatta Parambarai this year was a no-brainer.

Sure enough, one of the posters features Mr. Rangasamy in a boxing ring in the place of the hero of the film, played by Arya, alongside his mentor and inspiration, K. Kamaraj, former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.

Over the years, more so when he occupied the Chief Ministers chair, leaders and cadres of the AINRC, a party he founded, have gone to great lengths to display their loyalty in the form of huge banners, cut-outs and hoardings.

In the past, the wall-life version of the man they call Makkal Mudhalvar has featured him in the league of Barack Obama, Roger Federer (a nod to Mr. Rangasamys routine of playing a set or two at the Gorimedu grounds) or in the avatar of films such as Baahubali and Kabali. This time, the larger-than-life avatars also include that of Krishna in the iconic moment in the Kurukshetra battleground from the Mahabharata. In fact, over-zealous loyalists have not spared the Bay of Bengal either putting up posters on wooden pillars off-shore.

Citizens are hardly amused at the scale of hero worship and the attendant disfigurement of public spaces in flagrant violation of the Puducherry Open Places (Prevention of Disfigurement) Act, 2000.

As a responsible Chief Minister, as I am sure he is, we expect him to honour the ban on posters, said Sunaina Mandeen, a resident of Kurussukuppam.

The minimum thing required in any society is implementation of the rule of law. Whether it is disfigurement of public spaces or implementing the ban on plastic, the will has to come right from the top, she said.

Puducherry Municipality officials say that the rules had been framed granting exemptions with clearance from the civic body but concede that violations are common.

Any move from our side to crack down on the violations can potentially trigger a law and order issue. From the perspective of finding a sustainable solution, we are mooting an all-party meeting to sensitise stakeholders on the issue and evolve a consensus on voluntarily ending this practice that mars the dignity and the beauty of the city, an official said.

Observers say it will be amiss to dismiss the phenomena as a product of astroturfing as the veteran is one of the few to enjoy a cult status among followers, especially in the Thattanchavady-Indira Nagar belt.This celebration overdrive is disconnected from the image of simplicity and austerity around Mr. Rangasamys demeanour and lifestyle, said V. Selvam, social scientist.

The very fact that he enjoys such popularity and stature also bestows on him a special responsibility to set an example for his followers. Given the circumstances of the pandemic and a tottering local economy, we would have expected him to instruct his followers to scale back celebrations, he said.

Meanwhile, AINRC Secretary N.S.J. Jayabal on Monday issued an appeal to followers to not to visit Mr. Rangasamys house on his birthday as he would not be in town. The appeal was made to prevent crowding in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Rangasamy remains Puducherrys poster boy of competitive populism - The Hindu

Tucker Carlson. Illustrated | Getty Images, Library of Congress, iStock

Tucker Carlson has become the latest and highest-profile figure on the American right to make a pilgrimage to Hungary.

Fans of Carlson's top-rated prime time show on Fox News learned Monday that he would be broadcasting all week from Budapest, where he would also be delivering a speech next weekend at MCC Feszt a conference sponsored by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a think tank recently granted $1.7 billion (about 1 percent of Hungary's GDP) by Prime Minister Viktor Orban in order to help foster the kind of nationalistic conservatism favored by his government. That includes kicking Central European University out of the country, banning the academic study of gender from colleges, allowing the ruling Fidesz Party to gobble up 90 percent of media in the country, and demonizing George Soros for cultural trends the prime minister's supporters dislike.

Carlson is unlikely to be the last conservative to pay hommage to Orban. John O'Sullivan, a one-time Thatcherite conservative who served as an editor of National Review through most of the 1990s, has been president of the Danube Institute in Budapest since 2017, bringing in a long list of American conservatives for conferences on right-wing populism and the threat of cancel culture.

In addition to a speech by Carlson, the MCC Feszt will include remarks by such prominent figures on the American right as Dennis Prager and Rod Dreher, the latter of whom has been living in Hungary and blogging effusively for The American Conservative about the Orban government for months. Dreher was joined a few months ago by Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen, author of surprise bestseller Why Liberalism Failed, for a lengthy discussion at MCC of the transnational conservative future.

All of which means that Hungary looks to be for populist conservatives in the 2020s what the Soviet Union was for the international left a century ago: a foreign model of a morally and politically edifying future. That doesn't mean or imply a moral equivalence between Orban's nationalism and Soviet communism. But it does point to a similarly transactional relationship. In return for providing earnest intellectuals with hope, a government often treated as an international pariah gets to enjoy a flood of fawning coverage when those ideologically engaged writers and talkers start sharing their carefully curated experiences with the world.

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Time will tell if today's pilgrims turn out to be genuine prophets of the political future or just the latest band of useful idiots for a discredited and unsavory regime.

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Tucker Carlson joins the right-wing pilgrimage to Budapest - Yahoo News