The Decline of Republican Demonization
Why has opposition to Biden’s plans been so low
energy?
By Paul
Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
March 25,
2021
The
American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief effort, is law.
But it’s only a short-term measure, mainly designed to deal with the Covid-19
pandemic and its immediate aftermath. The long-term stuff — which is expected
to combine large-scale infrastructure spending with tax increases on the rich —
is still being formulated. And everyone says that turning those longer-term
plans into law will be much harder than passing the ARP.
But what if
everyone is wrong?
Just about
every analyst I follow asserted, almost until the last moment, that $1.9
trillion was an opening bid for the rescue plan and that the eventual bill
would be substantially smaller. Instead, Democrats — who, by standard media
convention, are always supposed to be in “disarray” — held together and did
virtually everything they had promised. How did that happen?
Much of the
post-stimulus commentary emphasizes the lessons Democrats learned from the
Obama years, when softening policies in an attempt to win bipartisan support
achieved nothing but a weaker-than-needed economic recovery. But my sense is
that this is only part of the story. There has also been a change on the other
side of the aisle: namely, Republicans have lost their knack for demonizing
progressive policies.
Notice that
I said “policies.” There’s certainly plenty of demonization out there: Vast
numbers of Republican voters believe that Biden is president thanks only to
invisible vote fraud, and some even buy the story that it was masterminded by a
global conspiracy of pedophiles. But the G.O.P. has been spectacularly
unsuccessful in convincing voters that they’ll be hurt by Biden’s spending and
taxing plans.
In fact,
polling on the rescue plan is so positive as to seem almost surreal for those
of us who remember the policy debates of the Obama years: Something like
three-quarters of voters, including a majority of Republicans, support the
plan. For comparison, only a slight majority of voters supported President
Barack Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, even though Obama personally still had
very high approval ratings.
Why the
difference? Part of the answer, surely, is that this time around Republican
politicians and pundits have been remarkably low energy in criticizing Biden’s
policies. Where are the bloodcurdling warnings about runaway inflation and
currency debasement, not to mention death panels? (Concerns about inflation,
such as they are, seem to be mainly coming from some Democratic-leaning
economists.)
True, every
once in a while some G.O.P. legislator mumbles one of the usual catchphrases —
“job-killing left-wing policies,” “budget-busting,” “socialism.” But there has
been no concerted effort to get the message out. In fact, the partisan policy
critique has been so muted that almost a third of the Republican rank and file
believe that the party supports the plan, even though it didn’t receive a
single Republican vote in Congress.
But why
this somnolence? Republicans may realize that an attempt to revive Obama-era
critiques would expose them to ridicule over their record of hypocrisy: After
declaring deficits an existential threat under Obama, then dropping the issue
the minute Donald Trump took office, it’s hard to pull off another 180-degree
turn.
They may
also be inhibited by the utter failure of their past predictions, whether of
inflation under Obama or a vast investment boom unleashed by the Trump tax cut,
to come true — although inconvenient facts haven’t bothered them much in the
past.
And at a
deeper level, Republicans may simply have lost the ability to take policy
seriously.
Jonathan
Cohn, author of “The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for
Universal Coverage,” argues that the most important reason Trump failed to
repeal the Affordable Care Act was that Republicans have largely forgotten how
to govern. They no longer know how to think through hard choices, make the
compromises necessary to build alliances and get things done.
That same
loss of seriousness, I’d suggest, inhibited their ability to effectively oppose
Biden’s rescue plan. They couldn’t do the hard thinking required to settle on a
plausible line of attack. So while Democrats were pushing through tax credits
that will cut child poverty nearly in half and subsidies that will make health
insurance more affordable, Republicans were focused on cancel culture and Dr.
Seuss.
And looking
forward, why should we expect the G.O.P. to do any better in opposing Biden’s
longer-term initiatives?
Bear in
mind that both infrastructure spending and raising taxes on the rich are very
popular. Democrats seem united on at least the principle of an invest-and-tax
plan — and these days they seem pretty good at turning agreement in principle
into actual legislation.
To block
this push, Republicans will have to come up with something beyond boilerplate
denunciations of socialists killing jobs. Will they? Probably not.
In short,
the prospects for a big spend-and-tax bill are quite good, because Democrats know
what they want to achieve and are willing to put in the work to make it happen
— while Republicans don’t and aren’t.
Paul
Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished
Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade
and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
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