You will probably get a different answer as to what one major issue keeps Republicans up at night, but scratch the surface of their worst fears, and the demographic shifts that threaten to marginalize the GOP electorate lurk beneath the surface. Older traditionalists wanting MAGA replaced by younger people raised with constant hyper-accelerating change looking to a very different vision of the future. Deeply religious older versus much less reverent young. Rural values voters overwhelmed by urban voters facing dramatically different issues (picture a rural version of gun control against those in a large city with extraordinary murder rates). White Christians versus an America that is mostly not white Christians. Tolerance and diversity vs. “it’s our country” white entitlement. Educated voters (e.g., 59% of Millennials have at least some college) vs. marginalized under-educated blue collar workers replaced by automation and serious changes in consumer demand. We are polarized with a president who seems to delight in exacerbating polarization.
The harsh reality for a populist Republican Party (with powerful rich elitist leanings), now on the verge of passing a “country club set” tax legislation that by any true economic analysis is exceptionally damaging to the nation as a whole, is that their efforts will ramp up our deficit by at least a trillion dollars with absolutely no clear offsetting benefit for “most of us.” There is nothing in that tax reform act that tells companies that their windfall must result in new jobs and capital investment. They can do whatever they want with the money, and trust me the stock market is not soaring because of all those new jobs these companies are supposed to create.
There are more jobs “officially” today, but scrape that statistic and you understand (i) people aren’t really seeing any increase in their real buying power and (ii) those folks whose skillsets have pushed them out of the work force aren’t part of those unemployment numbers. So the sole measurements of Donald Trump’s “success” are misleading unemployment numbers and that soaring stock market, which is based on that expected tax cut… and little else.
The one most basic GOP fact, underscored by the fact that the popular vote for the 2016 election favored the Democratic loser, is that the Republicans can never hold the majority of state legislators, governorships, Congressional districts and the presidency based on a strictly popular vote. Those days are over. America is over 85% urban and dramatically diverse. White traditional Christians are now a distinct minority, but without that constituency, the GOP is toast. For those liberals who believe that the Russia investigation will ultimately result in the impeachment of Donald J Trump, I must remind them that Trump’s base will never believe Trump did anything wrong and will punish any GOP member of Congress who would dare to topple their leader. And today, without thatbase, most Republicans could never be elected remotely to level they now enjoy. They even have to maximize the voting power of that base to keep control.
For that base, twisting and turning our entire legal system, who gets to vote and what that vote means, has become an existential battle. Unless Republicans can cancel out Democratic votes, marginalize diversity away from traditional Christian values, they have no shot of maintaining their current control of America. The vast majority of the X and Y generation want no part of that GOP evangelical vision as the numbers in Democrat Doug Jones’ Senate victory over evangelical racist sexual predator, Roy Moore, reflect… in ruby red Alabama.
That their evangelical constituency is willing to embrace mega untaxed wealth (do camels have to pass through the “eye of a needle”), intolerance (“love thy neighbor” is relegated to four square blocks), child molesters, sitting in judgment of others (and casting the first, second and then the continuing rain of stones), a very wide use of assault weapons to kill (Thou shall stand thy ground and killing is now OK?), cops shooting blacks begging for life is just the way it is, etc., etc. tells you how desperate they are, how much they see keeping Democrats from casting meaningful ballots as essential for their survival. They hold the “right to life” anti-abortion value as their primarily and most powerful religious justification to vote for anyone who embraces that value, regardless of any other hypocritical level of moral turpitude. Anti-LGBT sentiments are just icing on that wedding cake they won’t bake.
Trump-appointee Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is their great white hope to keep the feds out of challenging gerrymandering. Should there ever be a judicial mandate to make voting districts “fair,” literally representing the constituents across each state without political discrimination, the Republican Party plunges in flames. Every attempt by Republican legislatures to impose voter restrictions (from voter IDs to setting up polling places only in white Republican neighborhoods) has been reversed by the courts… but almost every reversal by such courts has resulted in yet another attempt by those same legislatures to re-impose a slightly different version of the same voter restrictions. Oddly, those restrictions only seem to be passed by GOP-controlled legislatures. And if gerrymandering is eliminated… yeah. And they know it.
So we get to the prize, the bastion of fairness built into our entire legal system (requirements mentioned in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution as well as the 14th Amendment): the U.S. Census which by law must be conducted every ten years. The resulting statistics are then the legal basis for virtually every federal policy based on population: demographic segmentation analysis (race, religion, ethnicity, etc.), Congressional districts as well as the number of representatives that each state can elect to the House, allocation of state-population-driven federal benefits and hard dollar payments, etc. And it is an open secret that any fair analysis of the U.S. population will reward diversity, urban centers and Democrats. So the GOP response, whispered in the shadows of both the GOP-controlled Congress and the White House, is that those Census results can never happen.
To reach every nook and cranny of America, even people who do not have a computer, takes an extra effort, and that extra effort to reach everybody costs money… money that Congress refuses to approve. Those distant nooks and crannies are almost all Democrats. The President appoints the head of the Census Bureau, and that executive determines how Census employees do their jobs, their priorities, and how to implement their legal mandate. There is a GOP emphasis for a quick, cheap and less-than-thorough Census. Indicators suggest that what we will see in 2020 will hardly be a fair and accurate demographic accounting. “Preparations for the count already are complicated by a sea change in the census itself: For the first time, it will be conducted largely online instead of by mail.
“But as the Census Bureau ramps up its spending and work force for the 2020 count, it is saddled with problems. Its two top administrative posts are filled by placeholders. Years of underfunding by Congress and cost overruns on the digital transition have forced the agency to pare back its preparations, including abandoning two of the three trial runs of the overhauled census process.
“Civil liberties advocates also fear that the Trump administration is injecting political considerations into the bureau, a rigidly nonpartisan agency whose population count will be the basis for redrawing congressional and state legislative districts in the early 2020s. And there is broad agreement that the administration’s aggressive enforcement of immigration policies will make it even harder to reach minorities, undocumented immigrants and others whose numbers have long been undercounted… Taken together, some experts say, those issues substantially raise the risk that the 2020 count could be flawed, disputed, or both.” New York Times, December 9th.
It is pretty clear that the Trump administration believes it is either above the law or simply doesn’t know when the law actually applies. The U.S. Census Bureau is a part of the executive branch of government (Department of Commerce) under Donald Trump. It is equally clear that the GOP knows that any true and accurate measurement of the U.S. population will erode their voting power to the benefit of Democrats. Put those two concepts together, and guess what you can expect? Even if a Democrat is elected president in 2020, the die will have long since been cast. By law, the President cannot delay that process, so even if the new president wants to make the Census fair, he or she is powerless to do so (they can only impact policies for the 2030 Census).
I’m Peter Dekom, and welcome to the land of the purportedly free but deeply statistically manipulated.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment