Susan B. Glasser: Biden’s Speech Offers an Alternative Vision for Democrats to Love, After Four Years of Trumpian Fantasy

Candidate Joe Biden campaigned as the centrist exemplar of a return to pre-Trump normal, but President Joe Biden has moved swiftly to enlarge the scope of his ambitions far beyond the status quo ante. On Wednesday night, the ninety-ninth of his Presidency, Biden offered a striking vision of a country renewed by an activist government. Harkening back to the early-twentieth-century liberalism of his party forebears, Biden envisioned a new age of “once in a generation” federal investments in everything from child care to electric cars, while promising benefits as varied as free community college and an end to cancer.

In his speech Biden made no mention of culture wars or admiring references to brutal dictators; he did not gaslight the nation about “criminal illegal aliens” or interrupt his speech to give one of the country’s highest honors to a man famous for disparaging “feminazis.” On the eve of his hundredth day in office, Joe Biden never publicly uttered the name Donald Trump, but being the un-Trump means Biden has already accomplished the first and most important promise of his Presidency. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/bidens-speech-offers-an-alternate-reality-for-democrats-to-love-after-four-years-of-trumpian-fantasy

Doyle McManus: Biden never declared war on meat, but Republicans didn’t let truth ruin a good attack

The big story on Fox News last weekend was Joe Biden’s purported “war on meat” — a breathless disclosure that the president plans to limit every American to 4 pounds of steaks a year. Republican politicians jumped on the issue, defiantly promising to defend your right to consume hamburgers. “Not gonna happen in Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott declared.

There was only one problem: The story was nonsense, a work of imagination concocted by a British newspaper after Biden pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sharply. Fox later quietly admitted the story was wrong, but that didn’t stop House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield from repeating it. Biden “wants control of your life,” he charged. “He’s gonna control how much meat you can eat. Can you imagine that?”

Actually, no.

On one level, the GOP’s crusade against fictional meat rationing is just one more sign of Donald Trump’s lasting imprint on his party: Why let the truth get in the way of a good attack?

But it also reflects a serious problem for Republican leaders as they try to organize a coherent opposition to Biden’s ambitious — and largely popular — economic proposals: Some of the loudest voices in their party remain focused on waging a Trump-style “culture war.”

Before the meat scare, they warned that pandemic mask regulations posed a threat to the American way of life.

Before that, the menace was embodied by a publisher’s decision to take certain Dr. Seuss books off the market. And before that, a dispute over the gender of Mr. Potato Head.

None of those controversies appeared to dent Biden’s standing, probably because they just didn’t seem as important to most people as the president’s priorities: ending the pandemic and reviving the economy.

But the GOP’s internal divisions — between pro-Trump militants, an anti-Trump minority and a fence-straddling, can’t-we-all-get-along middle faction — have gotten in the way of Republicans’ ability to articulate a coherent set of policy goals, and that’s left many party members reliant on the Trumpian strategy of ridiculing the opposition.

“We need to create a sense that the party is ready to govern,” a Republican strategist told me. “We haven’t gotten there yet.” https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-05-02/biden-war-meat-republican-attacks

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Stranded on Trump Island, the GOP lets Biden play the long game

Political realignments don’t happen easily. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, gifted politicians in their different ways, plausibly hoped they could create coalitions that would outlast them. The achievement eluded both.

Donald Trump never had a popular majority behind him, but he was the Great Disrupter. By shattering old assumptions, he clarified the battlefield for the future.

Trump sped up two trends that began gathering steam in the 1990s: the steady shift of well-educated and professional voters toward the Democratic Party, and the move of White working-class voters to the GOP. Biden won in 2020 partly because he cut into Trump’s working-class margins a bit, but largely because he swept increasingly diverse suburban areas that were at the heart of the Democrats’ gains in the 2018 midterms.

This raises two questions: Can Republicans begin to claw back some of the upscale, well-educated voters they lost under Trump? And can Democrats expand on the inroads Biden began to make among voters who didn’t attend college?

Democrats hold the initiative, and not just because they control the presidency and narrow congressional majorities. As long as the vast majority of GOP politicians refuse to break with Trump, they will be tethered to his minority coalition. A comeback will be tough if moderate middle- and upper-middle-class professionals continue to associate the party with Trump, far-right extremists and the Jan. 6. attack on the Capitol. It’s why reducing the size of the electorate is the GOP’s most visible initiative.

This creates a vulnerability Biden hopes to exploit. It’s hard to imagine that any Republican will win more of the White, non-college-educated vote than Trump did, so some parts of that electorate are up for grabs. Democrats do not need to carry this group; a shift of five or 10 points among these voters would put the GOP on its heels.

With Republicans stranded on Trump Island, Biden has an opportunity to hold his party’s base and begin poaching the GOP’s core voters. He’s made no secret of his intentions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/02/stranded-trump-island-gop-lets-biden-play-long-game/

Michael Gerson: Elected Republicans are lying with open eyes. Their excuses are disgraceful.

“Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!”  — “Henry IV,” Part 1, Act 5

For the activist base of the Republican Party, affirming that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential contest has become a qualification for membership in good standing. For the party’s elected leaders, accepting the clear result of a fair election is to be a rogue Republican like the indomitable Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) — a target for Trump’s anger, public censure and primary threats.

Nothing about this is normal. The GOP is increasingly defined not by its shared beliefs, but by its shared delusions. To be a loyal Republican, one must be either a sucker or a liar. And because this defining falsehood is so obviously and laughably false, we can safely assume that most Republican leaders who embrace it fall into the second category. Knowingly repeating a lie — an act of immorality — is now the evidence of Republican fidelity.

This kind of determined mendacity requires rolling out the big guns. Said the prophet Isaiah: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.”

The context for Trump’s lies has been particularly damning. When Trump falsely asserted that Barack Obama was born in Africa and thus illegitimate as president, it was permission for racism. When he claimed he saw Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on Sept. 11, 2001, it was a vicious lie to feed a prejudice.

But the lie of a stolen election is the foundational falsehood of a political worldview. Believing it requires Trump’s followers to affirm the existence of a nationwide plot against him and his supporters — a plot led by ruthless Democrats and traitorous Republicans, and ignored or endorsed by useless courts and a complicit media. The claim’s plausibility is not the point. Does it really make sense that Attorney General William P. Barr, who found no evidence of election fraud that could have changed the result, was in on the plot? Were the conservative judges Trump appointed who dismissed his rubbish lawsuits really out to get him?

Such considerations don’t seem to matter. In the 1930s and ’40s, was it plausible that the democratic leaders of Weimar Germany had stabbed their own country in the back and betrayed its people? Or that an international conspiracy of powerful Jews was controlling world events?

The people who accepted this political mythology and stormed the Capitol were not lying about their views. They seemed quite sincere. And who knows what Trump really thinks? When a congenital liar surrounds himself with sycophantic liars, he can easily lose radio contact with reality.

No, it is the elected Republicans who are lying with open eyes, out of fear or cynicism, who have the most to atone for. With the health of U.S. democracy at stake, their excuses are disgraceful.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/03/trump-republicans-big-lie/

Michael Hiltzik: Biden’s American Families Plan would make the social safety net a reality

The scope of President Biden’s American Families Plan, which was formally unveiled in a nationally televised speech to Congress on Wednesday evening, has been described in terms of unalloyed awe.

It’s called “sweeping,” “sprawling” and, more mildly, merely “ambitious.” Democrats call it “big” and “bold,” Republicans label it “radical” (and they don’t mean that as a compliment).

Placing it in historical terms, the plan is all that and more. It’s the first concrete recognition by a president in more than a generation that social programs shouldn’t be classified as spending, but as investing.

The Biden White House says so explicitly, referring in a fact sheet distributed in advance of the speech to a 2016 paper by Jorge Luis Garcia and James J. Heckman of the University of Chicago, along with colleagues at USC, which estimated that every dollar spent on an early childhood education program returned $7.30 in gains.

It’s worthwhile to consider how novel a concept expanding the social safety net is for the vast majority of Americans. Some 70% of the population was born after 1965. That’s the year that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, consisting of Medicare and Medicaid, was enacted in the last major expansion of the safety net.

Since then, conservative critiques of social spending have taken center stage in American politics. In part that was because such spending was seen as an instrument to expand Democratic Party support and therefore opposing it became a partisan imperative. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-04-28/bidens-families-plan-safety-net

Catherine Rampell: Biden upends the Republican ‘unity’ test

Biden has proved a challenging adversary for Republicans to vilify. He’s a generally congenial and empathetic politician, who has a compelling personal story rife with loss. He has working-class bona fides and has resisted conscription into Republican-framed culture wars. Republicans have tried caricaturing him as old and ineffectual — yet also somehow unusually effective at transforming the country into a socialist hellscape. (GOP strategists appear aware that these critiques are somewhat at odds.)

So, Republicans keep returning to a Swift-boat-like attack: Strike at his strength — his compelling message of “unifying” the country — and portray it as a devious ploy to divide Americans instead.

Republicans argue that Biden offered a bait-and-switch, that he ran on healing our divisions but now plans to . . . pass a bunch of social programs benefiting the poor and middle class. If you’re wondering how that latter agenda supposedly contradicts the former, you’re not alone. The connective tissue, according to Republican officials, is that programs redistributing money to help the poor and middle class are somehow inherently divisive (class warfare!), regardless of the polls suggesting their popularity; or, in the GOP telling, only the programs Republican lawmakers vote for should count as unifying.

In other words, Republicans have decided that the test of Biden’s desire to unify the country is whether Republicans themselves defect from the project — and they have made clear their decision to always do so. As Republicans learned during the Obama years, the easiest way to ensure a president fails at achieving promised cooperation is to refuse to cooperate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/29/biden-upends-republican-unity-test/

Eric Levitz: Why the GOP Is Ideologically Lost

Beneath the proximate causes of the GOP’s ideological confusion, there may be this fundamental one: America’s moral traditionalists are wedded to an economic system that is radically anti-traditional. They are too individualistic to countenance a total break with liberal capitalism, but are also repulsed by the social consequences of their own economic customs. And contra Greer, such consequences do not just trouble New Right intellectuals, but also the GOP’s rank-and-file Evangelicals, the Trumpist right’s aggrieved men’s rights activists, and garden-variety right-leaning voters perturbed by the loosening of family ties (which, in some communities, has been supplanted by atomization, not a broader or more freely-chosen collectivity). Given that capitalist development is also the primary force that propels migrants across borders, the nativist right is similarly squeezed between its economic folk wisdom and cultural nostalgia.

These days, when American social conservatives wish to see a model of their desired polity, some turn to the countries of the former Soviet bloc — Russia, Poland, and Hungary — where moral traditionalism appears aberrantly strong. Many have remarked on the irony of this affection, given how large Western chauvinism once loomed in the conservative imaginary. But these post-Soviet states do not appeal to the American right in spite of communism’s influence upon their societies; they appeal to the American right because of that influence.  https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/why-the-republican-party-has-no-agenda.html

Ed Kilgore : Democrats Are Shooting for the Moon in 2021, and That’s Okay

The idea that pulling legislative punches will improve future electoral outcomes may be a vestige of a bygone era of swing-voter hegemony and plausible bipartisanship. It’s not clear exactly who in the electorate will award Democrats for “moderation” in fully pursuing their policy goals. To put it another way, no matter what Biden and congressional Democrats do, McCarthy and the conservative-media machine are going to accuse them of “going so far left.” That was the great lesson of the Obama administration, in which every conciliatory gesture simply gave the GOP incentives to radicalize its demands and ramp up the volume of its protests against alleged Democratic extremism.

It also offers an alternative interpretation of the relative disappointment of Democratic underachievement in 2020. Instead of neurotically looking around to see which “woke” or “socialist” pol gave Republicans the opportunity to shriek about the terrible consequences of Democratic power, as many Democrats are doing now, it may make more sense to recognize that the Donkey Party can do nothing short of surrender that would undermine such messaging. The Republican base is clearly in a state of cultural panic that has little to do with the specter of the Green New Deal or the Iran nuclear pact or anything else Democrats say or do. Sure, Democrats can try to lower the temperature of political conflict as their chill president is doing, but they may as well use their current leverage as not. Joe Manchin will ensure that they don’t go hog wild. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/biden-democrats-ambitious-agenda.html

Ashley Parker and Marianna Sotomayor: For Republicans, fealty to Trump’s election falsehood becomes defining loyalty test

Debra Ell, a Republican organizer in Michigan and fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump, said she has good reason to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified,” she said, referring to Trump’s baseless claims that widespread electoral fraud caused his loss to President Biden in November.

In fact, there is no evidence to support Trump’s false assertions, which culminated in a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But Ell, a Republican precinct delegate in her state, said the 2020 election is one of the reasons she’s working to censure and remove Jason Cabel Roe from his role as the Michigan Republican Party’s executive director — specifically that Roe accepted the 2020 results, telling Politico that “the election wasn’t stolen” and that “there is no one to blame but Trump.”

“He said the election was not rigged, as Donald Trump had said, so we didn’t agree with that, and then he didn’t blame the Democrats for any election fraud,” said Ell, explaining her frustration with Roe. “He said there was no fraud — again, that’s something that doesn’t line up with what we think really happened — and then he said it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.”

Nearly six months after Trump lost to Biden, rejection of the 2020 election results — dubbed the “Big Lie” by many Democrats — has increasingly become an unofficial litmus test for acceptance in the Republican Party. In January, 147 GOP lawmakers — eight senators and 139 House members — voted in support of objections to the election results, and since then, Republicans from Congress to statehouses to local party organizations have fervently embraced the falsehood.

A CNN poll released Friday found that 30 percent of Americans say Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency, including 70 percent of Republicans. Fewer than a quarter of Republicans — 23 percent — believe Biden legitimately won enough votes for the presidency. However, the percentage of Republicans who falsely say there is solid evidence that Biden did not win has dropped by eight percentage points, from 58 percent in January to 50 percent now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-trump-election-falsehood/2021/05/01/7bd380a0-a921-11eb-8c1a-56f0cb4ff3b5_story.html