Does the GOP have a future?

It will get crazier

Dear Friends - 

Be careful what you wish for. Your enthusiastic response to last week’s email have encouraged my worst instincts to write another email about politics. At any time you can unsubscribe with the link at the bottom of this email. Although previously this was a “closed” list, so many of you have asked if you can add friends and family to it that I have opened it up to allow anyone to sign up for it. That said, I intend to keep it pretty casual and treat it as a friends and family list because the last thing I need is another job (just ask my wife).

As a postscript to my last email, if you’re still absolutely certain of Biden’s victory, then read this Peter Hamby column to the bitter end -- it turns out most voters believe Trump will do a better job on the economy than Biden. Let that sink in. The damage that NBC’s The Apprentice has done to the country is incalculable. It convinced almost every American that Donald J. Trump is an incredible businessman despite all evidence to the contrary. I’m not joking.

But forget Trump (as if that’s possible) and let’s think about the rest of the Republican Party. This morning the following caught my attention: 

“When President Trump took office in January 2017, there were 241 Republicans in the House. Since then, 115 (48%) have either retired, resigned, been defeated or are retiring in 2020.” [source]

“Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?” is a new book by the legendary Harvard professor Tom Patterson. And although I consider Tom a friend, colleague, and mentor, I completely disagree with him. That’s why I highly recommend you purchase the book -- so that we can argue about it. The Republican Party’s potential for long-term rule is stronger than it may look to all you sushi-eating, latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, New-York-Times-reading coastal elites (“...he said while vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard...”).

Why will the GOP survive -- and thrive -- as Trump’s party, long after Trump is gone? Three reasons:

1. Structural advantages: We’ve got a system that is designed to structurally favor the minority in both the Senate and the electoral college**. Now let’s add demographics to it: in about twenty years 70% of Americans will live in 15 states. That’s 30% of the population picking 70 senators. Yes, America is becoming younger and more diverse at a rapid pace (and therefore less likely to vote Republican) -- but that demographic change is only happening in parts of the country that don’t matter in terms of the Democrats’ political power.
   

2. Information pollution: Try this sometime: spend a week where your only news comes from:

   1. The 46 people the President of the United States follows on Twitter.

   2. Fox and Friends (weekdays 6-9 am ET)

   3. Hannity (weekdays 9pm ET)

   4. The Daily Caller, one of the top ten publishers on Facebook. (To put that in perspective, the reach of The Daily Wire's articles is equal to the New York Times and more than the Washington Post. And thanks to Facebook’s algorithms, the homepage of Daily Caller is misleading and doesn’t show you its most popular articles.)

   After a week you’ll begin to get a sense of how our President and a major chunk of the American population experience the “news”, and how it shapes their world view. Why are conspiracy theorists winning Republican primaries (and likely to wind up with at least two seats in the next Congress, probably more)? We breathe, eat, and live in a vast ocean of misinformation and media pollution. You, dear reader, just happen to breath, eat and live in a small, sanctified media puddle full of “smahtees” (as we say in Boston). There is much more to say about this, but the hour is late and I’ve got light pockets.

3. Voter suppression: Add to the structural advantage and the “information pollution” (a term also coined by Tom Patterson), an effort through voter ID laws to suppress the vote of minorities and lower-income Americans, with a healthy (and young) majority on the Supreme Court inclined to support this kind of voter suppression. 

Take these three realities, add a healthy dose of racism, and you’ve got a recipe for long-term success for a myopic and increasingly deranged Republican Party. I see no incentives for any moderation or change. Demographic change will only fuel the imbalance and incentivize further bad behavior. The corruption of information and media diets allow propaganda to obscure the realities of their fiscal policies. 

“But Ah!” you exclaim, “Moderate voters matter!” to which I reply, do they? I’m unconvinced. For decades, the conventional wisdom was that you had to turn out your base and persuade the middle -- with more of an emphasis on persuading the middle. But in a diffuse media landscape with a lot of information pollution, persuading the middle is incredibly hard -- it’s hard to find them, and they’re not actually all that moderate. Meanwhile, in this new media landscape turning out your base -- and creating new converts to your base -- is easier. There may be a “moderate middle” on substantive policy issues, but there isn’t one in terms of identity politics and cultural issues.

Remember those 115 GOP Members of Congress I mentioned above who have either retired, resigned or lost? They’re not being replaced by Democrats. (Well, a few of them are.) They are mostly being replaced by Even Trumpier Republicans. 

I know, you want some good news.  Maybe next week…

Love, nicco

** The founding fathers did not trust the people. Nor did they trust the elite. So they were looking for a way to balance between the monarch and the mob. Their solution: the electoral college and the Senate, where rural states with small populations have disproportionate power compared to states with large urban populations. This story is, of course, more complicated than my abbreviated telling, and I recommend Alex Kessyar’s recent book on the electoral college for the full story, which (unsurprisingly) is rooted in slavery. In terms of how this all affects our current election, I highly recommend this paper - and if you don’t want to read the whole thing just find the graph labeled “Scenario Results, 2020”.