News bit 'n semi-bit: Storms in California, clashing GOP ideologies

California deals with high surf, big snow and mudslides:

Note the seagull at the top

Note the snow shoveler in blue jacket at the bottom

Mudslide in Los Angeles

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An analysis of clashing ideologies in the GOP: Ezra Klein writes about this in an interesting opinion piece for the NYT: 

So why has the Republican Party repeatedly turned on itself in a way the Democratic Party hasn’t? There’s no one explanation, so here are three.

Money vs. media (roughly, brass knuckles capitalism vs. angry White Christian nationalist populism): For decades, the Republican Party has been an awkward alliance between a donor class that wants deregulation and corporate tax breaks and entitlement cuts and guest workers and an ethnonationalist grass roots that resents the way the country is diversifying, urbanizing, liberalizing and secularizing. The Republican Party, as an organization, mediates between these two wings, choosing candidates and policies and messages that keep the coalition from blowing apart.

At least, it did. “One way I’ve been thinking about the Republican Party is that it’s outsourced most of its traditional party functions,” Nicole Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” told me. “It outsourced funding to PACS. It outsourced media to the right-wing media.”

Between 2002 and 2014, for example, the share of resources controlled by the Republican Party campaign committees went from 53 percent of the money .... to 30 percent. 

What rose in their place were groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Heritage Action network and the American Legislative Exchange Council — sophisticated, well-financed organizations that began to act as a shadow Republican Party and dragged the G.O.P.’s agenda further toward the wishes of its corporate class.

What were the hallmark Republican economic policies in this era? Social Security privatization. Repeated tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Free trade deals. Repealing Obamacare. Cutting Medicaid. Privatizing Medicare. TARP. Deep spending cuts. “Elected Republicans were following agendas that just weren’t popular, not even with their own voters,” Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, told me.

But what really eroded the party’s legitimacy with its own voters was that the attention to the corporate agenda was paired with inattention, and sometimes opposition, to the ethnonationalist agenda. This was particularly true on immigration, where the George W. Bush administration tried, and failed, to pass a major reform bill in 2007. In 2013, a key group of Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to make another run at it only to see their bill killed by Republicans in the House. There’s a reason immigration was Trump’s driving issue in 2016: It was the point of maximum divergence between the Republican Party’s elite and its grass roots.

The failure of Bush’s 2007 immigration bill is worth revisiting, because it reveals the pincer the Republican Party was caught in even before the Tea Party’s rise. The bill itself was a priority for the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party. The revolt against that bill was centered in talk radio, which was able to channel the fury of grass-roots conservatives into a force capable of turning Republican officeholders against a Republican president.

Klein discusses two other points that have led to the GOP split.

• Virulent anti-institutionalism and climate science denial: Decades ago, most Republicans had faith in corporations and the military. But now Fox News routinely vilifies the “extremely woke” military. The powerful American Conservative Union insists that any Republican seeking leadership in congress must promise to support “a new shared strategy to reprimand corporations that have gone woke.” Woke means anti-climate science and anti-secularism and social tolerance, e.g., anti-LGBQT and anti-CRT. Republicans have lost many of the professional, college-educated voters that used to constitute about half the party. Those people are gone and so is their knowledge, experience and respect for institutions. Now the GOP is anti-institutional but is itself an institution. Klein comments: “And so the logic of anti-institutional politics inevitably consumes it, too, particularly when it [Republican anti-institutionalists] is in the majority.”

• Finding and vilifying an enemy, opens up to extremism: A GOP elite commentator described the GOP like this to Klein: “It’s not the Democratic Party.” In other words, GOP unity is now centered on attacking the Democratic Party and liberalism. Not having political goals other than ruling with power leave the GOP open to extremism. Republican extremism relies on exercising power in anti-democratic, anti-liberal ways. That is fully compatible with the current mainstream GOP mindset. Anti-communism used to be a major unifying issue in the GOP. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, that anti-big government sentiment ‘logically’ morphed into anti-American government sentiment. Really and truly, the GOP needs an enemy to hold itself together. 

So, when I say things like the Republican Party hates government, Democrats, democracy, inconvenient truth and liberalism, there is a lot of evidence and reasoning to support that. The same holds when I say that Republican corporate elites are significantly different from populist the rank and file. Commenting on what he saw as a poor outcome of the 2022 elections, Tucker Carlson recently articulated the mainstream extremist Republican rank and file sentiment that Klein sees:

“That loathing [of liberals] clouded my judgment. I was like, ‘I dislike these people so much. What they’re doing is so wrong. It is helping so few people and hurting so many. It’s so immoral on every level that I just want it to be repudiated.’ And I wanted that so much, not because I like the Republicans — I really dislike them more than I ever have — but I dislike the other side more,” he added, saying, “I did learn that, like, I have no freaking idea what goes on in American politics.”

Carlson being the elite, sophisticated fascist liar that he is, he knows exactly what goes in in American politics. He is prominent in helping to lead it.