part 3 https://wolvesandsheep.substack.com/p/changing-of-the-guard-iii
Note, the first article of this series was posted here for discussion yesterday. Apologies for not putting them all up together. https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2024/07/changing-of-guard-i.html
~~ recommended by dreamjoehill2 ~~
Changing of the Guard II
Calling all right-wing billionaires: this is your last stand.
You are at a crossroads. If Joe Biden is permitted another four years in office, you may never again see a tax and regulatory climate like you’ve had since our politics lurched right under Ronald Reagan two generations ago.
It’s been quite a ride.
The top marginal tax rate was 70% on the day Reagan entered the White House. When he left for the last time, it was 28%—the lowest it had been since before the Depression. The broadly-shared prosperity of the era of post-war liberalism may have been sacrificed, but that was a necessary price for the return to Gilded Age levels of wealth and income inequality. By the time Trump took office, the top one percent of the population owned 39% of the wealth. The bottom ninety percent together held only 23%.
Because this imbalance was not enough, Trump and a Republican congress gifted the hyper-wealthy a tax law skewed heavily toward the top one percent at a cost of $1.9 trillion over ten years. But that law is set to expire at the end of next year if Congress doesn’t renew it.
A Democratic congress will allow the provisions most favorable to the rich to sunset and will want to reconfigure the tax code to the benefit of that bottom ninety percent. But the status quo can be preserved by a Republican congress and Donald Trump’s Sharpie.
So the checkbooks opened.
Last month, Timothy Mellon made a $50 million gift to the Make America Great Again PAC. His family wealth is estimated to be in excess of $14 billion.
Richard Uihlein added another $10 million. The Wisconsin-based shipping magnate is a billionaire with a long history of support for right-wing causes.
Hedge fund billionaires Robert Mercer and John Paulson. Oil magnate Harold Hamm. Las Vegas developer Steve Wynn (who actually knows how to run a casino). All are putting money behind Trump to help him close what had been a wide fundraising gap with Biden.
Outsized gifts from billionaires powered Trump to what his campaign claims is its largest monthly fundraising haul of the campaign—$141 million.
And while Biden also receives support from wealthy donors—like Michael Bloomberg, who put up $20 million—his campaign claims 96% of its contributions come from small donations of $200 or less.
That should tell you a lot about Biden’s priorities.
It’s not that business interests are unilaterally behind Trump. To the contrary—plenty of corporate leaders were shaken by the instability of the first Trump administration and worry that his plans for a second would trash the economy. Not a single Fortune 100 executive has donated to his campaign.
The people we’re talking about here are the ones who want to drown government in a bathtub.
And it’s hardly the case that large donations from wealthy right-wing donors are a new thing. But until Trump was convicted in court last month on 34 felony counts, the spigot wasn’t open quite as wide. Trump was having difficulty raising money, and his cash on hand gap with Biden was a looming problem.
That problem now appears to have been solved.
But this emergency cash infusion masks a deeper problem, which no amount of cash can address. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for the American right, and specifically those who have benefitted from the tax and regulatory policies of the Reagan era, because they can see it slipping away.
While some of us concern ourselves with whether democracy can survive the next election, they are staring at the direction Biden has been moving the country and are wondering whether the carried interest loophole will survive.
Often lost in the deluge of political news is how Biden has set the country on a new economic footing that directly repudiates Reaganomics. His rhetoric about building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up is backed by policies designed to do exactly that.
Bidenomics embraces public investment in infrastructure and workers, support for social welfare programs, tax cuts for the working class, and tax increases for the wealthy and large corporations.
As an economic philosophy it is the antithesis of Reaganomics, and as a political position it would have been unthinkable during the Reagan years.
As much as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama may have wanted to attempt it, any effort to advance an economic policy built around higher taxes and increased spending was fraught with political risk.
Those on the right who were determined not to pay the bill could easily besmirch anyone promoting a larger economic role for government as an out-of-touch tax-and-spend liberal. And most of the time it would work. Many years after Reagan repudiated the economic policies of the Carter administration, liberal was still a dirty political word.
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for the American right, and specifically those who have benefitted from the tax and regulatory policies of the Reagan era, because they can see it slipping away.
So while Biden often doesn’t get credit for being a transformational leader, his administration has been as consequential for setting a new economic direction as Ronald Reagan and FDR.
Now imagine what he could do in a second term with a Democratic congress and you can probably see why Biden poses a threat to the entire right-wing economic project.
Those supporting the project no longer have the pull they once did with the country. They need a second Trump administration to put a stop to Biden’s economic liberalism before it takes root and becomes the standard for a new political era.
But even that won’t be enough. They need Republicans to remain in power in perpetuity because they can no longer sell a changing public on the economic benefits of giving the super wealthy everything they want.
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Changing of the Guard III
Part III: Project 2025
Here’s a question: Why would a political party run on a national abortion ban? Or taking away access to emergency contraception? Or stripping healthcare from millions of Americans? Or deporting 15-20 million people? Or undermining workers’ rights? Or making student loans harder to repay?
I mean, even if a party wanted to do these things, you would think they would try to hide it from voters—like in the old days when winning elections meant having a platform that at least looked like it would benefit people.
And why would anyone campaign on the promise to centralize power in the presidency, fire civil servants who could hold the president in check, and dismantle popular agencies in order to undermine popular programs and impose these unpopular policies?
Advocating a hostile agenda like this would be political malpractice in any other year. Yet that’s what Republicans are doing in 2024.
It’s called Project 2025, and it is being run out of the Heritage Foundation with the support of a host of right-wing organizations.
As the progressive Center for American Progress puts it, Project 2025 is “meant to serve as a road map for a far-right presidential administration”—making it the “how to” manual for Trump’s dictatorial longings:
While its policy proposals are sweeping and would affect nearly every facet of American life, its overarching goal is clear: to lay out an authoritarian playbook that would destroy the system of checks and balances our forefathers designed when they sought freedom and popular sovereignty almost 250 years ago. In dissolving the American idea, the plan’s extremist policies would give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.
Most people are unaware of this radical blueprint for permanently implementing Trumpism as a governing philosophy. But it is finally getting some attention. And not a moment too soon.
John Oliver took an in-depth look at the proposal. And its authors—incredibly—are appearing on television to talk openly about it.
Why such a draconian plan? Why be so public about it? And why do it now?
Because just like the right-wing billionaires we talked about on Monday, the culture warriors who have labored for decades to impose their values on the country are watching public opinion turn away from them.
Back in the Reagan days they held the high ground in values debates. They could count on the country to rally behind appeals to “family values” and could depend on pro-life voters to show up for pro-life candidates. That was before they succeeded in overturning Roe, and before demographic changes made their positions anathema to two generations of voters.
The entire right-wing social project could go into eclipse if Joe Biden is re-elected. They have to make sure that doesn’t happen by securing the White House and making sure they never relinquish it.
This is an all-or-nothing moment and Project 2025 acknowledges it.
Like the right-wing billionaires willing to support Trump at any cost, the right-wing social agenda can no longer survive democracy. So democracy has become expendable.
Abortion provides a high-profile case study of what’s happening here.
Abortion wasn’t a polarizing issue until social conservatives intentionally made it into one. When Roe v. Wade was decided, there was no discernible partisan difference between abortion supporters and opponents. Republican First Lady Betty Ford praised the decision.
It wasn’t until right-wing leaders latched on to the divisive nature of the issue to rally support for Republican candidates that the abortion issue landed in the middle of the culture wars.
To attract Catholic and Evangelical voters to the Republican camp, socially conservative activists engaged in a campaign to cast abortion as a fundamental moral issue. Opposition to abortion became a non-negotiable part of the Republican platform, and Republicans went on to win a lot of elections.
Fast-forward to today, and we find ourselves in a country that’s shifted away from the Reagan-era values agenda. Today’s voters are more likely to see abortion as a right that protects women’s reproductive health than view it through the life-centered values prism that was prevalent in the Reagan years.
Although attitudes vary over when abortion should be permitted, there is no doubt that Americans believe it should be legal. Only roughly one in ten voters believe it should be illegal in all circumstances.
Yet making it illegal in all circumstances is the position taken by advocates for Project 2025. And they’re open about it.
The entire right-wing social project could go into eclipse if Joe Biden is re-elected. This is an all-or-nothing moment and Project 2025 acknowledges it.
The authors of Project 2025 are telegraphing their disrespect for the electorate. They don’t care what people think or what they want because public opinion won’t matter once they hold the reins of power.
They are broadcasting their intention to lead the country in their direction regardless of what happens in November. If they can’t win the election the old fashioned way, they will reject any results they don’t like as illegitimate. Because they do not recognize the legitimacy of opinions that don’t align with their objectives.
Having reached a crisis point for their movement, they are no longer holding anything back. They’re telling us what they intend to do, and that they don’t intend to let something trivial like public preferences stand in their way. They see the country moving away from them, and they’ve decided they’re not going to let that happen.
So tomorrow, as we celebrate the 248th birthday of this imperfect experiment of a country, we do so knowing that some of our neighbors are unhappy enough to want to break free of the democracy they’ll be celebrating.
They want to abandon the constitutional mechanisms which have unevenly protected our rights throughout the years— institutions fashioned to require compromise to get things done—because those mechanisms are preventing them from getting what they want.
MAGA is not a majority. But passionate minorities can prevail if they are not met with sufficient opposition. Our system of checks and balances works when countervailing interests are expressed. That’s how the process is designed.
Fortunately, we have a tool to put the brakes on MAGA ambitions. We have an election. And with that election we can provide a check.
We can use the election to say no to autocracy. We can make sure everyone we know will know to say no to autocracy.
We can talk to people about Project 2025. About Donald Trump’s diminished state. About how he is a convicted felon who is running for his life.
We can take comfort in knowing that the Biden campaign is doing what it can to draw out these contrasts, aided by pro-democracy organizations and grassroots organizing efforts. We can take comfort in knowing we are hardly alone.
We can act with the urgency of the moment.
We can make the next four months an exercise in national education so that everyone we know recognizes how their independence is on the line. And we can have confidence that people will reject what Trump and his party are selling once they realize what it is.
Because if people wanted the MAGA agenda, then MAGA wouldn’t need to overturn democracy to get it.
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