I'm not sure what the debt ceiling deal teaches us.
But I'm sure it's not what E.J. Dionne says.
This op-ed by E.J. Dionne purports to explain “what the ceiling deal teaches us about politics.” What it “teaches” Dionne is what he’s been saying for decades — that the right “harvest[s] votes from less affluent social conservatives and pursue[s] policies that benefit well-off economic conservatives.”
There’s never been much to this view, and there’s even less to it these days.
Dionne funnels the war on woke into his stale narrative. He sees it as the latest GOP attempt to “emphasize cultural and racial issues that appeal to blue-collar White voters.”
But it wasn’t only — or even primarily — blue-collar voters who pushed back against woke education in Virginia’s public schools and carried Glenn Youngkin to victory after he campaigned on this issue. If anything, that charge was led by suburban moms.
Attacks on CRT (critical race theory) indoctrination, for example, appeal to middle class voters at least as much as to voters in the working class. In fact, one of the more cogent criticisms one hears of Ron DeSantis’ approach to the presidential campaign is that he’s talking past the working class with his emphasis on CRT, DEI, and ESG. This cohort, the argument goes, is much more interested in meat and potatoes economic issues.
I’m not persuaded by this critique except to the extent it complains that DeSantis sometimes speaks too abstractly about wokeism. In my view, most Americans of all classes disfavor having K-12 students taught that American is “systemically” racist and recoil from having their daughters compete with males in sports or share showers with them.
In any case, Dionne’s attempt to characterize the focus on wokeism as an appeal, specifically, to blue-collar whites does not withstand scrutiny.
Neither does his claim that the modern Republican party is all about benefiting well-off economic voters. It cannot be squared with the rise of economic populism in the GOP.
Who benefits the most from mass immigration, especially the illegal kind? Not working-class Americans, who must compete for jobs with the illegals and accept lower wages. Rather, the main beneficiaries are (1) well-off voters who can get their lawns tended to and their children watched at a low cost and (2) businesses that can hire cheap labor.
Yet these days, it’s the Democrats who want mass immigration and the Republican party that, for the most part, opposes it.
Free trade presents benefits and hardships. All classes benefit from paying less for goods and services. The tradeoff is the loss of jobs for some Americans. That hardship falls mostly on the working class.
Yet these days, the Republicans are at least as likely as the Democrats, and probably more so, to support restrictions on free trade.
Dionne trots out another tired liberal talking point when he writes:
The fact that McCarthy made [work requirements] a bottom line [in the debt ceiling negotiations] speaks to the power of the signal they send about who is “worthy” of public help and who is not, with racial stereotypes lurking in the background.
I hope there’s still power behind the notion that those worthy of public help are (1) poor people who are willing to work and (2) poor people who can’t work. Dionne doesn’t explain why those who fall outside of these two categories should receive government support.
Instead, he claims that racial stereotypes lurk behind opposition to providing hand-outs to those who simply don’t want to work. Maybe they are lurking in Dionne’s mind and in the mind of the liberal colleague he cites for support.
But there was a time when even Democrats understood the merit of work requirements (or pretended to). During his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton pledged to reform the welfare system by adding work requirements for recipients. In 1996, he finally delivered on his promise by signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.
I’m not saying that Clinton did this out of any deep conviction. He did it out of an understanding that work requirements are popular because they reflect basic, common sense notions of fairness — notions that have nothing to do with race.
E.J. Dionne writes about what the debt ceiling deal teaches, but he isn’t much of a student. He can’t get past the self-serving stereotypes of Republicans he has served up for decades.
As a result, his analysis of contemporary politics isn’t just flawed. It’s nearly backwards.
Until you mentioned him today, I had forgotten E.J. Dionne existed.
But now that you have refreshed my memory, I think I stopped following his work because I felt he was nothing more than a political hack who spins current events into a democrat political narrative. Throw a rock in DC and you'll hit a dozen just like him.
I think this latest round of the debt ceiling drama teaches us that the basic dynamic of the thing hasn't changed: President in power waits as long as possible, party in power in Congress conditions passage on things it can brag about in the upcoming election cycle, and no significant progress towards debt stabilization or reduction is made.
In this case, I commend McCarthy for doing what I haven't seen any republican Speaker since Newt to: explain in plain English what the debt ceiling is and why it is silly to set spending limits without budget discipline. The analogy he gave to a teenager's credit card resonates.
Washington is the only place in the US where a "cut" is actually an increase in spending, and spending increases year over year no matter what the general economic conditions are and what government revenues look like.
I also commend him for publicizing the types of useless things money is spent on, the gravity of the national debt, and the impact of government spending on inflation and interest rates. The irony is that while "cutting the costs" of American households has been the tag line for the Biden Administration, Crooked Joe has done nothing but find ways to put upward pressure on the costs of food, energy, transportation, and all manufactured goods, and devalue the retirement savings of Americans who don't enjoy the assurance of government pensions.
It was an "A" effort, and though it produced "C" results, it does send a positive message to the financial markets.
It also teaches us that commentators like Dionne don't have a clue. He comments that the GOP champions issues important to blue collar voters (whatever that means anymore), but serves the wealthy. Stipulating that he's right, and that the democrat party has abandoned that same cohort, who in Washington is championing the prosperity and security of working people?
What Dionne writes is what Democrats believe to their core. My Dad still claims that certain friends of his like Trump because they are rich. And all Democrats with just a few exceptions (like the Liberal Patriot for example) believe that cultural issues are ginned up by Republicans to trick the rubes. They will continue to believe this until they lose 4 out of 5 elections by landslides. Or the modern equivalent.