“For a generation, Republicans have tried to unravel
the activist government under which Americans have lived since the 1930's, when
Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt created a government that regulated
business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure.
From the beginning, that government was enormously popular. Both Republicans
and Democrats believed that the principle behind it—that the country worked
best when government protected and defended ordinary Americans—was permanent.
“But the ideologues who now control the Republican
Party have always wanted to get rid of this New Deal state and go back to the
world of the 1920's, when businessmen ran the government. They believe that
government regulation and taxation is an assault on their liberty, because it
restricts their ability to make money.
“They have won office not by convincing Americans to
give up their own government benefits—most Americans actually like clean water
and Social Security and safe bridges—but by selling a narrative in which ‘Liberals’
are trying to undermine the country by stealing the tax dollars of hardworking
Americans—quietly understood to be white men—and redistributing them to lazy
people who want handouts, not-so-quietly understood to be people of color and feminist
women. According to this narrative, legislation that protects ordinary
Americans simply redistributes wealth. It is ‘socialism,’ or ‘communism.’
“Meanwhile, Republican policies have actually
redistributed wealth upward. When voters began to turn against those policies,
Republicans upped the ante, saying that ‘Liberals’ were simply buying Black
votes with handouts, or, as Carly Fiorina said in a 2016 debate, planning to
butcher babies and sell their body parts. To make sure Republicans stayed in
power, they suppressed voting by people likely to vote Democratic, and
gerrymandered states so that even if Democrats won a majority of votes, they
would have a minority of representatives.
“This system rewarded those who moved to the right,
not to the middle. It gave them Donald Trump as a 2016 candidate, who talked of
Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and treated women not as equals but
as objects either for sex or derision. And, although as a candidate Trump
talked about making taxes fairer, improving health care, and helping those
struggling economically, in fact as president he has done more to bring about
the destruction of the New Deal state than most of his predecessors. He has
slashed regulations, given a huge tax cut to the wealthy, and gutted the
government.
“If the end of the New Deal state is going to usher in a new era
of peace and prosperity, it should be now. Instead, the gutting of our
government destroyed our carefully constructed pandemic response teams and
plans, leaving America vulnerable to the coronavirus. Pressed to take the lead
on combating the virus, the administration refused to use federal power, and
instead relied on ‘public-private partnerships’ which meant states were largely
on their own.
“When
governors tried to take over, the Republican objection to government
regulation, cultivated over a generation, had people refusing to wear masks or
follow government instructions. As the rest of the world watches in horror, we
have suffered more than 4 million infections, and are approaching 150,000
deaths.
“The pandemic also crashed the economy as businesses shut down
to avoid infections. It threw more than 20 million Americans out of work.
Republican ideology says the government has no business supporting ordinary
Americans: they should work to survive, even if that means they have to take
the risk of contracting Covid-19. Schools should open, businesses should get up
and going, and the economy should rebuild. As Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan
Patrick said to Fox News Channel Tucker Carlson in March, grandparents should
be willing to contract coronavirus for the U.S. to ‘get back to work.’
“The coronavirus has brought the Republican
narrative up against reality. Just 32% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling
of the coronavirus, and only 38% of the country think the economy is good.
Americans believe that the government should have done a better job managing
the pandemic, and they do not believe they should risk their lives for the
economy.
“To try to deflect attention from the failure of his
approach to the coronavirus, Trump is once, again, escalating the narrative. He
has launched an offensive against Democratic cities, trying to convince voters
he is protecting them from ‘violent anarchists’ coddled by Democrats. He is using
federal law enforcement officers in unprecedented ways, not to quell protests,
but to escalate them.
“In
Portland, Oregon, as officers have used tear gas, less-than-lethal munitions
(which nonetheless fractured a man’s skull), and batons to attack protesters,
the events, which had fallen to a few hundred attendees, grew again into the
thousands. And now the administration is planning to send in more officers, to
escalate further.
“The Republicans’ ideology is also making it
impossible for them to deal with the economy. We are on the verge of a
catastrophe as the $600 weekly federal bonus attached to state unemployment
benefits runs out this week just as the moratorium on evictions for an
inability to pay rent ends. At the same time, state and local budgets, hammered
by the pandemic, will mean more layoffs.
“The House passed a $3 trillion bill in May to
address these issues, along with providing more money to combat the
coronavirus, but Republicans in the Senate rejected it out of hand. Today on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation,’ Senator Ted Cruz
(R-TX) went back to his ideological roots. ‘The only objective Democrats have
is to defeat Donald Trump, and they've cynically decided the best way to defeat
Donald Trump is shut down every business in America, shut down every school in
America,’ he said. House Speaker ‘Nancy Pelosi talks about working men and
women. What she's proposing is keeping working men and women from working. Her
objectives are shoveling cash at the problem and shutting America down.’
“Instead, both Trump and Cruz want a payroll tax
cut, which will do little to stimulate the economy since the tens of millions
who have lost their jobs would not see any money, and this late in the year
much of the tax has already been paid. But the payroll tax cut is popular among
Republican ideologues because it funds Social Security and Medicare. Cut it,
and those programs take a hit.
“Trump’s
chief of staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took to the Sunday talk
shows to try to reassure people that the Republicans would, in fact, manage to
cobble together a relief bill in the next few days (after not writing one in
the last two months). They are talking about passing piecemeal measures, but,
recognizing that this means Republicans will call all the shots, Pelosi says
no.
“Meadows and Mnuchin
say they want liability protection for businesses and schools if they open and
people get Covid-19. They were also clear they would not agree to extending the
$600 federal addition to state unemployment benefits, arguing that it simply ‘paid
people to stay home.’ They say they want to guarantee people 70% of their
wages, but the reason the earlier bill had a flat $600 payment was because it
appeared impossible for states to administer a complicated program based on a
percentage, so this might well just be a straw argument. The Republican
approach to handling the coronavirus and the economy is apparently not to turn
to our government, but to put our heads down, go on as usual, and hope for a
vaccine...” (Heather Cox Richardson).
Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts. Richardson has authored six books.
Notes:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/11/how-a-payroll-tax-cut-could-impact-social-security-and-medicare.html
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