Daily Archives: April 20, 2022

Yascha Mounk is a premier commentator on the crises faced by liberal democracy and the threats posed by far-right populism. Born in Germany and now a dual-U.S. citizen, hes a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, an associate professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, and founded the heterodox commentary website Persuasion.

Hes also the author of four books, the latest of which, The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure, is released this week.

Mounk spoke by phone with The Daily Beast's senior opinion editor, Anthony Fisher, about the steady backsliding of democratic states in Central and Eastern Europe, the conundrum posed by racial categorization in multiethnic democracies, and why despite all the bad news, he remains optimistic about global democracys future.

(This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.)

The past few weeks havent been great for liberal democracy. Hungarys authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban won re-election, as did Serbian President Aleksandar Vui. In France, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen is neck and neck with Emmanuel Macron in the presidential runoff.

This is all disturbing, but it seems like pretty auspicious timing for a book like yours to come out! What do you make of the immediate state of democracy?

The fight against far right-populism and the fight against dictatorship is going [to] be a marathon. We scored a big win pushing Donald Trump out of office. But its become pretty clear over the course of the last 18 months that thats not the end of him. And were being reminded of how potent outright dictators, Vladimir Putin, remain on the world stage and how able they are to impose tremendous suffering.

And were seeing the internal threat for democracy from people like Viktor Orban, who use fears about demographic changes as one of their core arguments to remain in power. And [the threat] from people like Marine Le Pen, who focus very heavily on immigration in order to arouse opposition to the basic structures of our political systems remains incredibly important.

A torn poster in support of Marine Le Pen, leader of French far-right National Rally party and candidate for the 2022 French presidential election, is pictured on a billboard in Cambrai, France, April 15, 2022.

Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

Can you just explain what the great experiment is in a couple of sentences?

Yeah. Most democracies in the history of the world have been very homogenous and have prided themselves on their ethnic purity. Those democracies that have been highly diverse since they were founded, like the United States, have often been based on very cruel and extreme forms of exclusion and dominationmost notably in the form of chattel slavery in America. So what we're trying to do now in the U.S. but also in many other democracies around the world, is to build multiethnic, multireligious democracies that truly treat their members as equals.

And there's no precedent for that. There isnt any great example we can point to and say, They made it work, lets copy their rules and habits, and that will tell us what to do. We are now embarking on a great experiment in the same sort of sense in which the U.S. founders embarked on a great experiment in the late 18th century, when they tried to build a large self-governing republic at a time when similar attempts throughout history had failed.

In your book, you cited George Orwell and the idea of cultural patriotism, A lot of left-of-center readers might think of the words like patriotism and nationalism in terms of exclusionary ideas or otherizing, people that are not in the in group.

Can you expand a little bit about cultural patriotism and why that can be a good thing for democracies?

Yeah, Im a German Jew, so patriotism does not come easily or naturally to me. But over the last decades, Ive become convinced that its very important for us to try and claim an inclusive form of patriotism. Because, otherwise, the worst kinds of peoplepeople like Orban and Trumpare going to use [patriotisms] enormous emotional residue for their own purposes.

Were seeing today in Ukraine that patriotismfor all its dangerscan also be a force which inspires millions of people to risk their lives to resist a dictator and fight for their independence, fight for their ability to self-govern.

The question then obviously becomes, what kind of form should that positive, inclusive patriotism take? In many countries, the historically most powerful [form] is an ethnic one, one which tries to define the true people by racial criteria, by criteria of descent, saying that immigrants and minority groups don't fully belong. That clearly is unacceptable. Its unacceptable normatively because it excludes people who have a right to be full members. And it falls empirically, because it doesnt reflect how most people now think about membership in those countries.

When philosophers are pushed to embrace some form of patriotism, they usually resort to a second kind of notionthat of civic patriotism. And I am very sympathetic to elements of that.

If Ive chosen to take up American citizenship five years ago, it is in good part because of my love of the Constitution and the basic political values that it represents. And we should certainly encourage people to identify with those ideas more strongly. [But] even so, civic patriotism fails to capture what most people actually think and feel when they think about their own country. And, in particular, it puts political ideals and values at the center of a sentiment which, for most people who are not all that interested in politics, is much more about everyday things. So I think we should add a third kind of component to civic patriotism, which is cultural patriotism.

When people say that they love the country, they say that they love its cities and landscapes. It sounds and smells. Its everyday customsand even its TikTok stars. There will always be a traditional element in that culture. There will always be some traditional costumes or some grand moments of a countrys past that people may make reference tobut what people mostly have in mind is the ever-changing, dynamic, and already incredibly diverse present.

So I think that this kind of cultural patriotism can actually reflect the diversity of our society and look towards a better future, rather than exclusively being rooted in some idealized past.

Related to cultural patriotism is whats commonly known as cultural appropriation. In the chapter, Can We Build a Meaningfully Shared Life, you kind of flipped the script on this and described it as the virtue of mutual influence. Explain why you think people who consider cultural appropriation a form of colonization might stand to look at it through a different prism.

Theres a very long tradition of people worrying that some form of cultural purity might be endangered by cultural change. Traditionally, its arrived from the far right, which [for example, in France] worried about the influence over French language. Or [the far right in Germany] worrying about the purity of the German language. Today, those fears persist on the far right, but a version of them is also increasingly, put forward by parts of the left. [Some] people have generalized the principle that any form of mutual cultural influenceespecially when it is minority groups or less-powerful groups influencing the majority of societyshould be inherently seen as suspect.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

This, to me, misses [the fact] that all the great achievements of human history have always had multiple cultural influences. That it is actually the norm rather than the exception for the things that we prize in any culture in the world to be a result of what today might be called appropriation.

The apparent plausibility of this term stems from the fact that it sometimes applied to situations [which] really are unjust. That it is applied, for example, to certain white musicians in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S. who stole the songs of Black musicians and were able to profit from themwhile the Black musicians barely were able to have a career because of racist structures in [American] society. But, to me, nearly every plausible instance of when cultural appropriation really is bad can much more easily be explained in different language.

So in this case, it is obviously extremely unjust that the intellectual property of these Black singers was violated. It is obviously extremely unjust that because of how racist America was at the time, many Black singers never had the opportunities and the record deals that they deserved. But none of this would be solved by some blanket suspicion of any instance when cultures influence each other.

You wrote about a woman in Brazil, who identifies as a Pardowhich basically means shes somewhere between white and Black in Brazilian culture. And you describe a situation where shes applying for a job or a scholarship (I forget which), and she's basically made to sit in a bureaucratic office and, in her words, be examined like a zoo animal to determine whether or not shes committed racial fraud on her application.

I think a lot of Americans would be surprised that this is such an issue in Brazil, or anywhere in Latin America. But a lot of democracies are putting a premium on categorizing people by race to right past wrongs. What kind of challenges does this strategy to achieve racial justice pose for diverse democracies?

What were dealing with in a country like the U.S. are the after-effects of centuries of discrimination, which obviously continue to structure society in significant ways. That makes it very tempting to reserve certain opportunities for members of a historically oppressed group, or even for public authorities to use, racial categorizations as a decision-making lens.

At the same time, this obviously comes with a number of significant dangers. Theres the danger that a politics in which different groups are explicitly allotted certain sets of opportunities will ultimately favor the majority group, or the most powerful group, rather than the minority groups that the system is originally set up to serve.

Theres the danger that the constant use of those kinds of racial classifications actually makes them deeper, more inflexible, and perhaps more conflictual, than they otherwise might have been. And there is, of course, the danger that it does violence to the way that a large number of individualsand our society has a rapidly growing number of mixed race peoplesort of feel like they have to fit themselves into some box that doesn't actually adequately describe who they are.

I'm generally skeptical of a way in which every difficult moral question in America is framed around how something relates to some key phrase in the Constitution. I dont, for example, think that the morality of capital punishment turns on whether or not its sensible to describe it as cruel and unusual punishment. But in this particular case, I actually think the Constitution gives us a very helpful framework for how to think through this question. And that is that we should start from the equal protection clause and the idea that the government, in general, should not take race into account when it determines how it should treat particular individuals.

But, like all other rights, there can be exceptions to that under two conditionsthe first being that there needs to be a really compelling state interest for why it might become necessary to deviate from that general principle. And the second being that any use of such criteria has to be very narrowly tailored to serve that compelling state interest. That if there are acceptable alternatives which could also accomplish the same goal, which do not violate the fundamental principle of equal protection the same way, then that must always be chosen. This a basic framework on which everybody from Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Antonin Scalia agrees. I think its one that we should continue to embrace.

But, of course, the question of whether or not particular affirmative action policies would pass master under thisor whether or not particular so-called race-conscious policies pass master under thisbecomes a separate controversy.

Near the end of the book, you talk about how Democratsand the pundit classjust completely got it wrong when it came to the demography is destiny thesis, which held that the demographic shifts in the U.S. would lead to a permanent Democratic majority. Obviously, thats been disproven in many ways, not just with Trump's win, but how even in defeat, his numbers with Latinos rose.

But you described this as a dangerous idea. Can you expand on that?

There's virtually nothing that Democrats and Republicans now agree on in American politics. Depressingly, the one large, ambitious theory about the social world which they do seem to agree is empirically wrong and normatively dangerous. And that is the idea of a rising demographic majority, in which the white groups that are currently voting for Republicans in greater numbers are shrinking, [while] the non-white groups which have historically verted for Democrats in greater numbers are rapidly rising.

So you can fast-forward the situation in the U.S. about two or three decades and know that so-called people of color will be the majority, and therefore Democrats and perhaps progressives are going to find it much easier to win elections.

President Donald Trump speaks during the annual Latino Coalition Legislative Summit on March 4, 2020 in Washington, DC.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

This is dangerous because it drives a form of demographic panic on the right, in which [people] like Michael Anton [later, a Trump White House adviser], who wrote an influential essay in 2016, arguing for conservatives to embrace [Trumps] candidacy because America is doomed because ofand I quotethe ceaseless importation of third world foreigners.

But its also dangerous because it can lead to a form of naive triumphalism among Democratsparticularly among progressivesin which they say we dont need to convince people of our arguments, and we dont need to recalibrate when we see that a lot of voters dont like us. We simply have to mobilize our core electorate and await for victory to fall into our lap. As we saw in 2020, as a matter of political strategy, this is naive. The only reason Donald Trump was competitive in 2020 was that he significantly improved his share of the vote among basically every single group of non-white votersincluding African Americans and Asian Americans, and especially including Latinos. Conversely the only reason why Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States is that he did much better among white voters than Hillary Clinton had done four years earlier.

But the most important point here is actually normative, rather than empirical. What many of my friends and colleagues seem to think of as some kind of utopia actually sounds deeply dystopian to me. I do not want to live in a world in which I can walk down the streetand predict with a high degree of accuracy by looking at some of the color of somebody's skinwho they just voted for. And I dont think that America is going to be a particularly pleasant society to live in for anybody, whatever the ethnicity, if a newly ascendant coalition of demographic groups ekes out a bare majority at every electionwhile a little less than half of the population with a lot of resources, a lot of wealth, and by the way, a lot of guns feels deeply excluded.

We need to build a political system that is less polarized along racial lines. That must be the goal for what our politics looks like in a few decades, even if it seems sort of aspirational now.

What are you optimistic about, when it comes to diverse democracies surviving and thriving in the future?

Well, Im pessimistic about the politics. Im pessimistic about the cultural, civil war elite that were seeing. I'm pessimistic every time I switch on cable news.

But Im actually quite optimistic about developments in society, more broadly. Im quite optimistic about what our society looks like on questions of diversity on the ground. Thirty or 40 years ago, a majority of Americans still thought that the idea of interracial marriage was morally bad. That number is thankfully down to the single digits. We know that this isnt just people telling pollsters what they want to hear, because theres been a huge increase in the number of interracial marriages and in the number of mixed race children. Thirty or 40 years ago, the top echelons of society were nearly exclusively white. Whether youre looking at Hollywood, politics, business, or the nonprofit sectorthat simply is no longer the case today.

The strange thing about this moment is that two different kinds of pessimisms overlap. Theres the pessimism of the ultranationalist far right which says that immigrants or minority groups are somehow inferior, that they dont really want to integrate, and that they are therefore doing terribly. Donald Trump infamously said in 2016 that African Americans should vote for him because they had nothing to lose.

At the same time, many of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances on the left tend to fear that many of the immigrants that are coming to the United States nowwho arent whitesimply will not get a chance to integrate and to succeed in our society because of the extent of racism discrimination.

People from a total of 27 nations participate in a Naturalization Ceremony in Brooklyn on June 14, 2019 in New York City.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Now there are of course real problems, and there is of course, real racism and real discrimination in our society, and its very important to emphasize and acknowledge that. But, thankfully, that pessimism is just as wrong. The best studies indicate that immigrants who come to today from El Salvador and Mexico and Zimbabwe are rising on the educational and economic ladders just as quickly as Italian Americans and Irish Americans did a hundred years ago.

Its also true that modern immigrants to the U.S. learn English at roughly the same levels as they have in the pastboth in the first generation and subsequent generations.

Absolutely. With language, there's a very clear model. Obviously, a lot of people who come to the countryespecially from places where they haven't had as good an education, or if they come to [the U.S.] when theyre already a little bit olderstruggle to learn English, and often live in the U.S. for decades without learning very good English. But the children, in the great majority of cases, speak the language of their parents but prefer to speak English with their friends, siblings, and others. And the grandchildren barely speak the language of origin at all anymorewhich is a shame in certain ways, by the way.

What all of this shows is that these two pessimisms are, thankfully, wrong.

These immigrants are not somehow inferior to native Americans or to previous generations of Americans. But also, despite the discrimination and racism which truly does exist, they are capable of succeeding. Our society is not as impermeable. Its worth noting, by the way, that [polls show] Latinos and African Americans are actually more optimistic about Americas future, than the average white person is today.

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Don't PanicDemocracy's in Trouble, but It's Not Dying. Author Yascha Mounk on Populism, Diversity, and Hope. - The Daily Beast

The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti (Basic Books, 496 pp., $28)

You cant judge a book by its release date. Coming at a time when the direction of right-wing politics in America is the subject of fierce intellectual, institutional, and personal dispute, Matthew Continettis latest book would certainly be an opportune occasion for a sustained argument via historical analogy: this or that faction in todays internecine right-wing warfare is doomed to failure or destined for success, just as their forebears once were. But Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Washington Free Beacon columnist, has written a book that succeeds more straightforwardly as a definitive work of intellectual historyframing the American Rights current situation as the latest stage in a long process during which conservatism went from being a default condition of American political life to the rehabilitative project of a counter-elite of intellectuals to a mass movement that united both alienated voters and alienated elites.

The choices he makes in the construction of that history suggest certain arguments. Continetti begins not in the aftermath of World War II, when National Review and attendant institutions organized around opposition to Rockefeller Republicanism and began to define a package of ideas that one could call conservative, but in the 1920s, when Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge paired a hands-off approach to business with protection for domestic institutions and patriotism with foreign policy restraint. When its political leaders took those positions, and when its intellectuals expressed skepticism of the utility of democracy, the American Right of the 1920s resembled the national populism of today. When those leaders defended their conservatism as a continuation of normal American life with temperate and persuasive rhetoric, it didnt. Undone by events in any case, conservatism found itself in the intellectual wilderness between the Great Depression and the New Deal, its politicians too out of touch with the popular mood and its intellectuals too self-consciously marginal to command mass support. But the ideas circulating on the American Right in the 1920s shaped the movement that would come afteran important adjustment to the canonical mythology of the conservative movement that tends to begin after World War II.

Continetti makes another modification to this narrative when he shows that the rise of the conservative movement did not owe simply to the development and dissemination of ideas. Postwar movement conservatism began as a renegade project of intellectuals seeking to unwind the New Deal and purge the Republican Party of its Rockefeller moderates; it would become an ideological factory for Ronald Reagan, the most popular American president since FDR. It could do this because its principal figures actively engaged in politics and events. The movement, however, has long privileged the force of its ideas, which allegedly drive history and explain Republican political success. Such a view can do little to explain contingencies like the 1962 hotel meeting called by the American Enterprise Institutes then-president Bill Baroody, in which William F. Buckley, Jr., Barry Goldwater, and Russell Kirk agreed to take on the John Birch Societys Robert Welch and helped clear the way for Goldwaters presidential run. Ideas certainly matter, but they cant always explain why things happen as they do.

Continettis book weaves together major events in American political history with portraits of various intellectual and political figures. It offers a compelling analysis of the past failures and enduring difficulties of the Right on racial issues. Lacking a systematic account of why historical events happen, it sometimes leaves unexplained the reasons certain factions waxed and waned. But a persistent conflict drives Continettis narrative: that between populism and elitism.

Perpetually sensitive to charges of being insufficiently right-wing, elite factions often policed their rightward flank by attacking it on grounds not of morality but of tactics. Richard Nixon preserved his credentials on the right in a 1954 speech by reframing the dispute about Joseph McCarthy, who had the right enemies but was making it easier on the rats he sought to destroy. Goldwater advocated against George Wallaces 1972 presidential candidacy not because Wallace was odious but because a vote for him would aid the Left. And Continetti himself engages in this maneuver, writing that while one populist surge reinforced the sense among conservatives that they were participating in an embattled counterrevolution, these figures had actually embraced demagogy [that] pushed the political system to its limit, endangering their cause by associating it with crackpot theories and embarrassing theatrics. Name that culprit.

The tension between populism and elitism becomes more urgent as the book proceeds. In the 1960s, National Reviews Frank Meyer and Brent Bozell sparred over whether freedom was worth defending on its own terms, or only inasmuch as it served the cause of virtue. (Not only Bozell but George W. Bush anticipated todays call for a politics of the common good, with the 43rd president advancing before the Iraq debacle a fleshed-out philosophy of government activism in the service of moral ideals informed by religion.) By the 1970s, the fight had moved to the domain of mass politics. Conservatism was becoming more political, more topical, more journalistic, less philosophical, and above all more populist, Continetti observes, led by a network of activists who called themselves the New Right and opposed compromise, gradualism, and acquiescence in a corrupt system. Phyllis Schlafly and Richard Viguerie questioned the alignment between elite conservative organs and their alleged constituents, who were motivated by social, moral, and religious causes.

If these groups had anything in common, it was the feeling that they were besieged on all sides. When Buckley founded National Review, he attacked the intellectual establishment that ran just about everything. When journalists and academics united with the Democratic Party to portray Goldwater as a dangerous extremist, Meyer lamented the formidable opposition of the mass communication network. Talk of a distributed conspiracy perpetrated unconsciously by the organs of academia, entertainment, and media is popular on todays dissident Right, but the idea is far from original.

Yet a stable synthesis between elite and populist right-wing politics remained elusive. Since 1920, factions on the right have sought to embody true conservatism by defining themselves against their enemies, who are deemed unfit to carry the banner. Consider the battle between traditionalists and neoconservatives, which intensified in the 1980s. Having once identified as anti-Stalinist socialists but moved to the right as the country was dragged to the left, neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol brought the political skills they learned from old scraps, the credibility that came with their association with mainstream institutions, and a degree of policy sophistication rooted in emerging methods of social science. Traditionalists such as Patrick J. Buchanan criticized them as impostors who had accommodated themselves to the state and embraced an interventionist foreign policy, perhaps because their loyalties lay elsewhere (in, say, Tel Aviv).

Neoconservatives believed that they were defending liberalism, not negating it as more traditional conservatives sought to do, Continetti writes. Paleoconservatives such as Sam Francis, meantime, saw the expansion of the state as a world-historical revolution of mass and scale that threatened, in Franciss words, to challenge, discredit, and erode the moral, intellectual, and institutional fabric of traditional society. A conservatism that seeks to conserve onlythe liberal institutions erected by the Founders, in this view, is unprepared toreverse the relentless leftward march of American society and doomed to play court jester forever.

Today, the populistelite conflict breaks down along slightly different lines. Figures from both camps agree that progressive control of major institutions is pathologizing dissent and irrevocably transforming the national culture. But populists view elite conservatives as complicit in enabling this transformation and regard the muscular use of state power as the best possible way to resist it, while those elites who still retain an affiliation with conservative causes lament the loss of skepticism about state power and the tactically counterproductive measures undertaken to arrest progressive gains.

Nevertheless, after retelling Donald Trumps stunning rise and disastrous fallall while doing more than most populists to give populism its due and establish its importance to the American RightContinetti seems finally to declare his affiliation with populisms critics in a way that will likely earn him their rebuke. Trump, he argues, exposed a mismatch between elite priorities and mass concerns for which the elites are certainly culpable, but his dominance of the Republican Party and the conservative movement must be stopped. A conservatism anchored to Trump the man will face insurmountable obstacles in attaining policy coherence, government competence and intellectual credibility, Continetti writes. Citing Buckley, George F. Will, Friedrich Hayek, and Harvey Mansfield, Continetti concludes that what makes American conservatism distinctly American is its preservation of the American idea of liberty and the familial, communal, religious, and political institutions that incarnate and sustain it.

Is such a restoration possible? Continetti is too astute a historian to be optimistic. Conservatives alienation from mainstream institutions makes the rare opportunities to feel renewed pride in themselves and their country all the more attractive. History indicates that any attempts to criticize figures such as Trump on moral grounds or for insufficient ideological rigor will be self-defeating. Still, Continettis structural account of conservative power also suggests another possibility. American conservatism receives its political potency from median Americans sick of progressive overreach. It endures as a necessary corrective, a stubborn expression of democratic sentiment that erupts every time a faction gains institutional dominance and wields it irresponsibly. Trumps chaotic, narcissistic behaviorand the continuing dedication of Republican and conservative factions to him and his obsessionsconstitutes its own kind of overreach, one that risks alienating the broad middle of Americans with whom the party would otherwise find much affinity. Trump may continue to exert an influence on the right for years to come, but his growing disconnection from the concerns of such ordinary Americans provides reason to believe that a more sober conservative politics can one day emerge.

Theodore Kupfer is an associate editor of City Journal.

Photo:Prostock-Studio/iStock

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Review of 'The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism' - City Journal

I recently wrote about how international trade has made some Western nations Germany in particular unwilling to confront autocracy. Germany hasnt just been weak-kneed in its response to Vladimir Putin; it and other European nations have stood by and even continued to provide economic aid to Hungary while Viktor Orban dismantles democracy.

In response, I received mail from Europeans to the effect that American democracy is also under threat and that some of our right-wing politicians are every bit as bad as Orban. Agreed! But that wasnt the point of my argument. And while Im quite willing to believe, for example, that Ron DeSantis would be Floridas Orban if he could, state governors dont have as much repressive power as rulers of sovereign nations.

Still, the comparison of European and U.S. ethnonationalists raises some interesting questions. In particular, as the G.O.P. has become a full-on antidemocratic party, why has it also remained the party of plutocrats and the enemy of any policy that might help its many working-class supporters?

To understand the puzzle, consider the policy positions of Marine Le Pen, who has a serious chance of becoming Frances next president. Her party, National Rally previously called the National Front is often described as right-wing. And on social issues it is; in particular, the party is largely defined by its hostility to immigrants and the alleged threat they pose to Frances national identity. On economic policy, however, Le Pen is if anything to the left of President Emmanuel Macron.

Now, its important to understand the context. France provides social benefits on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: universal health care, huge family benefits and more. Macron isnt challenging the fundamentals of that system. He is, however, trying to trim some benefits, notably by raising the retirement age. Le Pen, by contrast, actually wants to reduce the retirement age for some workers.

I am not making a case for Le Pen. If she wins, the consequences for France, Europe and the world will be terrifying. But there is some genuine populism advocacy of policies that might actually help workers in her platform.

Compare that with the positions taken by prominent U.S. Republicans. I cant tell you what the official Republican economic program is, because the party doesnt have one in fact, it has made a point of not saying what it will do if it regains power.

We do, however, know what the party did when it was last in power: It gave huge tax cuts to the wealthy, while almost succeeding in repealing the Affordable Care Act, which would have caused tens of millions of Americans to lose health insurance. Theres no reason to believe it wont once again pursue anti-worker, pro-plutocrat policies if it regains control.

At the state level, the debacle in Kansas has apparently done nothing to shake Republicans faith in the magical power of tax cuts for the affluent. Mississippi Americas poorest state, with the lowest life expectancy and facing a collapse of its rural hospitals is slashing income taxes.

And recently Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who heads the Republican senatorial campaign, released a Rescue America plan that called for tax increases on the half of Americans whose incomes are low enough that they dont pay income taxes (even though they pay payroll taxes, sales taxes and so on). He also warned, falsely, that Social Security and Medicare are headed for bankruptcy, without offering any suggestions about how to preserve them.

Senior Republicans have said that they dont support Scotts agenda, but havent explained what their actual agenda is and have left Scott in his key campaign position, suggesting that his views have wide support within the party.

So everything suggests that the Republican Party is as pro-wealthy, anti-worker as ever. Unlike right-wing European parties, it hasnt made any gestures toward actual populism. Why?

The answer, presumably, is that the G.O.P. caters to plutocrats, even as it attacks elites, because it thinks it can. After all, being nice to plutocrats and crony capitalists can yield tangible rewards, not just in the form of campaign contributions but also in the form of personal enrichment.

And the Republican Party doesnt believe that it will pay any price for pursuing these rewards. It believes that its supporters will focus on denunciations of critical race theory and buy into conspiracy theories almost half of Republicans agree that top Democrats are involved in child sex-trafficking while not even being aware of what the party is doing for the very rich. After The Times revealed Jared Kushners highly questionable $2 billion deal with the Saudis, Fox News simply ignored the report, while harping endlessly on Hunter Biden.

I wish I could say with any confidence that this cynicism will backfire. But I cant. In particular, Democrats who want to campaign on bread-and-butter issues are assuming that voters will understand whos actually buttering their bread. And that doesnt look at all like a safe assumption.

Link:

Opinion | The G.O.P. Is Still the Party of Plutocrats - The New York Times