The charts above reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between December 12th and 15th of a nationwide sample of 1,632 adults (including 1,453 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.2 points for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters.
I also understand that most American voters are moderates. They want to solve the country's problems, but they want to do that in moderate steps. They are afraid of the extremism of both the right and the left.
For most of our history, we have had two parties that were willing to debate and compromise for the good of the country. Each of the parties has offered a counter-balance to keep the other party from becoming to extreme - and the voters liked that, using the electoral process to punish a party that became too extreme.
Unfortunately, the system is now out-of-balance. The Republican Party is now controlled by the radical right, and the racists, misogynists, homophobes, and xenophobes have seized control of it. They want to take the country backwards to a time when the white patriarchy ruled (and others had only partial or no rights). They are unwilling to compromise, and interested only in seizing an authoritarian power. They have become a danger to our democratic system.
This has resulted in a stalemate in our government. They refuse to compromise and Democrats refuse to let them make all the rules without compromising. And the country suffers.
We need to return to our two party system - two parties willing to debate and compromise for the good of the country. But how can we get there?
Some say that a Republican defeat will do that. I agree, but believe it must be a crushing and humiliating defeat. There must be no doubt that Americans reject the MAGA radical extremism.
If it is only a small defeat (with MAGA politicians retaining enough power to block all progress), it will not save the Republican Party. They will continue to follow their MAGA demagogue - Donald Trump. And will continue to hear about "stolen elections", and likely face the same thing again in 2028 (led by Trump or someone just like him).
Only a massive turnout and a crushing defeat has a chance to bring most Republicans to their senses - making them opponents and not enemies (willing to once again debate and compromise to solve problems). America needs both Democrats and Republicans, but it doesn't need an extremist version of either.
There is a small extremist element in the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives who seem to enjoy creating chaos and using trouble. Although far from a majority in the GOP caucus, they were able to oust their own Speaker. They were able to do that because the Republicans have only a slim majority in the House, and knowing that Democrats would naturally vote against a GOP Speaker, they only needed a few GOP votes.
The result was weeks of chaos as Republicans could not agree on who the new Speaker should be. They finally settled on right-winger Mike Johnson. The extremists thought Johnson would go along with them. For the most part, he did. But to avoid a government shutdown, he negotiated a deal with Democrats. Now he has negotiated with Democrats again - this time to provide aid to Ukraine.
The extremists, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG), are not happy. They did not want Ukraine to get any new aid, and have been parroting Russian propaganda. Now MTG has filed a motion to vacate the Speakership, and is threatening to ask for a floor vote.
Democrats should not participate in this latest bit of crazy political theater.
I'm not saying the Democrats should vote for Speaker Johnson. He's not a good Speaker, and should not be celebrated for negotiating with Dems on a government shutdown avoidance or on aid to Ukraine. He was forced into doing both.
But Democrats shouldn't vote against him either. This is a Republican problem, and they should make the Republicans handle it.
Kicking the Speaker out would just result in more chaos, and it could be weeks before the House could do any business.
Democrats should just vote "present". If they do that, I expect most Republicans would vote against ousting the Speaker, and business could continue. It would also show the extremist wing of the GOP just how little power they actually have, and that would be good for both parties.
That system began to go wrong in the mid-1960s. As a Democratic president signed several civil rights bills into law, southern racists abandoned the party and became Republicans. The Republicans were happy to have them. They thought they could use them while controlling them, and that worked - for a while.
Then the evangelicals began to flex their muscle through the "Moral Majority" movement, and their leaders cast their lot with the Republican Party. The GOP wooed them by siding with them on the abortion issue, homophobia, and the curtailing of women's rights. Once again, the GOP thought they could use them to retain power while keeping them in check, and that worked - for a while.
As jobs fled rural America, another disgruntled group showed itself. And this grew into the "Tea Party". Since the nation had a Democratic president (Barack Obama), this new group of discounted voters allied themselves with the Republican Party. Once again, Republican leaders thought they could use them and control them, and that also worked - for a while.
Then Donald Trump decided to enter the political arena. And he was shrewd enough to see what was happening in the Republican Party. He ascended to power by cobbling together the groups that were unhappy - the racists, the fundamentalists, and the discontented tea-partiers. He used this loose coalition (under the MAGA banner) to overpower the party leadership (and actually drive out of the party any moderates who opposed him).
After Trump came to be the party's leader, he placed the malcontents in power in the party - on both the national and state level. Now the malcontents that Republicans once thought they could control are controlling the party. Now the party has replaced mainstream conservative values with new values - racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny. And Trump is in control.
But Trump is getting old. He won't be around much longer. What is going to happen with the Republican Party once he is gone?
Does it return to the conservative business-oriented party of the past? Unlikely. The extremists are now in control, and it's not likely they will want to give up the power Trump helped them get.
Will a new leader take over the coalition known a MAGA? Also unlikely. No one has been able to appeal to these extremists like Trump did.
MAGA is a coalition of extremists and haters, and I don't see a way for more moderate politicians to kick them out of power. I think the hate and extremism is here to stay in the GOP. And that's bad news for them, since the majority of Americans don't like that.
It is very possible that after Trump, MAGA extremism will be the death of the party.
When the Whig Party lost the faith of the American people, they ceased to exist, and were replaced by the Republican Party. Today's GOP might suffer that same fate. If the GOP can't heal itself, then it needs to be replaced - and soon. We need a two-party system.
There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.
In fact, Johnson is more extreme than most people, I think even political reporters, fully realize.
Much of the reporting on Johnson has, understandably, focused on his role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Let me say, by the way, that the widely used term “election denial” is a euphemism that softens and blurs what we’re really talking about. Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.
There has also been considerable coverage of Johnson’s right-wing social views, but I’m not sure how many people grasp the depth of his intolerance. Johnson isn’t just someone who wants to legalize discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and ban gay marriage; he’s on record as defending the criminalization of gay sex.
But Johnson’s extremism, and that of the party that chose him, goes beyond rejecting democracy and trying to turn back the clock on decades of social progress. He has also espoused a startlingly reactionary economic agenda.
Until his sudden elevation to speaker, Johnson was a relatively little-known figure. But he did serve for a time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group that devises policy proposals. And now that Johnson has become the face of his party, people really should look at the budget proposal the committee released for 2020 under his chairmanship.
For if you read that proposal carefully, getting past the often mealy-mouthed language, you realize that it calls for the evisceration of the U.S. social safety net — not just programs for the poor, but also policies that form the bedrock of financial stability for the American middle class.
Start with Social Security, where the budget calls for raising the retirement age — already set to rise to 67 — to 69 or 70, with possible further increases as life expectancy rises.
On the surface, this might sound plausible. Until Covid produced a huge drop, average U.S. life expectancy at age 65 was steadily rising over time. But there is a huge and growing gap between the number of years affluent Americans can expect to live and life expectancy for lower-income groups, including not just the poor but also much of the working class. So raising the retirement age would fall hard on less fortunate Americans — precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.
Then there’s Medicare, for which the budget proposes increasing the eligibility age “so it is aligned with the normal retirement age for Social Security and then indexing this age to life expectancy.” Translation: Raise the Medicare age from 65 to 70, then keep raising it.
Wait, there’s more. Most nonelderly Americans receive health insurance through their employers. But this system depends greatly on policies that the study committee proposed eliminating. You see, benefits don’t count as taxable income — but in order to maintain this tax advantage, companies (roughly speaking) must cover all their employees, as opposed to offering benefits only to highly compensated individuals.
The committee budget would eliminate this incentive for broad coverage by limiting the tax deduction for employer benefits and offering the same deduction for insurance purchased by individuals. As a result, some employers would probably just give their top earners cash, which they could use to buy expensive individual plans, while dropping coverage for the rest of their workers.
Oh, and it goes almost without saying that the budget would impose savage cuts — $3 trillion over a decade — on Medicaid, children’s health coverage and subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
How many Americans would lose health insurance under these proposals? Back in 2017 the Congressional Budget Office estimatedthat Donald Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage. The Republican Study Committee’s proposals are far more draconian and far-reaching, so the losses would presumably be much bigger.
So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas I don’t have space to get into, like food stamps, that would basically end American society as we know it. We would become a vastly crueler and less secure nation, with far more sheer misery.
I think it’s safe to say that these proposals would be hugely unpopular — if voters knew about them. But will they?
Actually, I’d like to see some focus groups asking what Americans think of Johnson’s policy positions. Here’s my guess, based on previous experience: Many voters will simply refuse to believe that prominent Republicans, let alone the speaker of the House, are really advocating such terrible things.
But they are and he is. The G.O.P. has gone full-on extremist, on economic as well as social issues. The question now is whether the American public will notice.
When Hamas attacked Israel, Republicans knew whom to blame: President Biden. Donald Trump asserted that the attack wouldn’t have happened if he were still in the White House; Mike Pence, while condemning Trump for praising Hezbollah and Hamas, asserted that Biden was somehow endangering U.S. interests by “projecting weakness.”
Like much of what the American right says these days, these smears were both vile and infantile. No, the U.S. president isn’t like the Green Lantern, able to shape world events through sheer force of will. And Biden has in fact taken remarkably tough positions on foreign affairs, much more so than his predecessor.
More generally, it’s striking how both the far left, which has no significant influence on the Democratic Party, and the far right, which largely runs the G.O.P., are American solipsists. They blame U.S. leaders for everything bad that happens in the world, denying foreigners any agency.
That said, even serious students of international affairs are noting that the world seems to be becoming more dangerous, with many local cold wars turning hot, and suggesting that we may be witnessing the end of the Pax Americana, the long era in which U.S. economic and military dominance limited the potential for wars of conquest.
But why is the Pax Americana in decline?
You might be tempted to engage in economic determinism, saying that the United States has lost influence because it doesn’t dominate the world economy the way it once did. But while there was a big decline in America’s share of world G.D.P. between 1960 and 1980, since then that share hasn’t had a clear downward trend, although it has fluctuated with the foreign exchange value of the dollar.
Indeed, our strong recovery from the Covid recession, combined with the stumbles of some geopolitical rivals, makes U.S. economic dominance look more durable than it has for a long time. Notably, many observers are now suggesting that China’s G.D.P., measured in dollars, may never overtake America’s. (China’s economy is already larger in terms of domestic purchasing power, but this is less relevant for global influence.)
Oh, and despite all the hype about de-dollarization, the U.S. dollar seems, if anything, to be more central to the world economy than ever.
Furthermore, changes in the world economy have arguably given the United States new ways to exercise economic power. The international relations experts Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman recently published “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” a revelatory book that describes how modern globalization — which creates far more complex forms of interdependence than traditional international trade — has put America “at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control.”
And the Biden administration hasn’t been at all shy about using U.S. power. Aid to Ukraine, while fairly minor relative to the U.S. budget, has been a major factor in frustrating Russian aggression; America has also aggressively deployed both its financial and its technological power to apply sanctions against the Putin regime. In the latest crisis, Israelis, including Benjamin Netanyahu, have praised Biden for his prompt support, which probably explains why Trump has lashed out at a former political ally.
Furthermore, Biden has taken a remarkably hard line on Chinese technology. Where Trump huffed and puffed ineffectually against Chinese trade surpluses (which were never the problem), Biden has imposed sanctions that the Center for Strategic and International Studies calls a “policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry — strangling with an intent to kill.”
If this is “projecting weakness,” what would projecting strength look like?
Yet it seems safe to say that the world no longer trusts U.S. promises, and perhaps no longer fears U.S. threats, the way it used to. The problem, however, isn’t Biden; it’s the party that reflexively attacks him for anything that goes wrong.
Right now America is a superpower without a fully functioning government. Specifically, the House of Representatives has no speaker, so it can’t pass legislation, including bills funding the government and providing aid to U.S. allies. The House is paralyzed because Republican extremists, who have refused to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy and promoted chaos rather than participating in governance, have turned these tactics on their own party. At this point it’s hard to see how anyone can become speaker without Democratic votes — but even less extreme Republicans refuse to reach across the aisle.
And even if Republicans do somehow manage to elect a speaker, it seems all too likely that whoever gets the job will have to promise the hard right that he will betray Ukraine.
Given this political reality, how much can any nation trust U.S. assurances of support? How can we expect foreign enemies of democracy to fear America when they know that there are powerful forces here that share their disdain?
Yes, the Pax Americana is in decline. But the problem isn’t lack of toughness at the top. It’s the enemy within.
The U.S. government will almost certainly shut down on Oct. 1, the work of ultraconservative holdouts who want to “burn the whole place down,” as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) put it. Yet, for now, Mr. McCarthy does not appear willing to take away the matches. He could sideline the objectors by calling House Democrats and agreeing to pass bipartisan legislation to fund the government. . . .
The resisters had plenty of chances to bargain, and they have refused. They won’t even approve a defense bill that has everything in it they want. And even if legislation passed the House, the Democratic-controlled Senate would reject it.
Those Democrats have good reason to object to House GOP spending-cut proposals. President Biden and Mr. McCarthy agreed in May to a 2024 and 2025 budget outline that includes some spending cuts (about$180 billion worth of savings in those two years). But the holdouts demand more — and big — cuts. They argue a government shutdown is better than approving a bipartisan budget.
If the objectors’ goal is to control government spending, as they claim, forcing a destabilizing and expensive shutdown over what amounts to only about 10 percent of the federal budget is counterproductive. They don’t want to touch Social Security or Medicare. They refuse to discuss tax policy. They want to increase spending on defense, veterans aid and border control. Their deep concern about federal spending falls entirely on a portion of the “nondefense discretionary” budget, which funds education, transportation, science research, policing, parks, support for low-income Americans and other popular programs.
Meanwhile, a shutdown would hurt the economy. Historically, consumer confidence drops during shutdowns. This could be especially harmful now, as consumers and businesses pull back on spending and banks issue fewer loans. It would also demoralize federal workers at a time when many agencies are struggling to recruit. And it would reaffirm why Fitch downgraded U.S. debt last month, a decision owing largely to political dysfunction. Moody’s — the only one of the three major credit rating agencies that has not downgraded U.S. debt — has already warned a shutdown would be a “negative” in its assessment.
In an ideal world, the House and Senate would pass the necessary 12 agency budget bills by Sept. 30. But that has rarely happened this century; instead, federal budgeting usually involves smashing funding bills into one big package and passing it at the last minute — perhaps after lawmakers have given themselves an extension. That is the only realistic course now: passing a continuing resolution to keep the federal government running until December to give lawmakers time to debate and advance a full 2024 budget. The Senate is expected to approve a bipartisan “CR” by this weekend, a deal far from what the House GOP holdouts are demanding.
There is discussion of a discharge petition in the House, through which a majority of members — Democrats and some Republicans — could force a vote on a CR without Mr. McCarthy’s approval. In return for signing such a petition, moderate Republicans could insist that a bipartisan debt commission be included in any compromise deal. They could also push for Ukraine aid and other supplemental funding requests from the White House to be offset by revenue increases or spending trims elsewhere. At some point, moderate lawmakers from both parties, who represent a much broader swath of the country than the ultra-partisans, have to retake control of the legislative process.
Yet, it is hard for even the most frustrated of moderate Republicans to break ranks with their party leadership by signing on to a discharge petition. Until that changes, Mr. McCarthy is in charge, and the speaker is worried he could lose his job if he strikes a deal with Democrats to pass a CR, because the resisters would move to oust him. He should tell them, “Good luck.” Eventually, he will have to. The only way out of this impasse — in which Republicans control just one chamber of one of the two branches of government responsible for budgeting — involves bipartisan agreement.
Mr. McCarthy can’t lead the Freedom Caucus holdouts to accept this reality. But he can win over the public by putting the nation first, standing with the majority of his own party and getting a deal done — with Democratic votes.
The following post is part of an op-ed by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times:
Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird. It’s not just that Republican policies are well outside the mainstream, but that the party itself has tipped over into something very strange.
I had this thought while watching a clip of Ron DeSantis speakfrom a lectern to an audience we can’t see. In the video, which his press team highlighted on Twitter, DeSantis decries the “woke mind virus,” which he calls “a form of cultural Marxism that tries to divide us based on identity politics.”
Now, I can follow this as a professional internet user and political observer. I know that “woke mind virus” is a term of art for the (condescending and misguided) idea that progressive views on race and gender are an outside contagion threatening the minds of young people who might otherwise reject structural explanations of racial inequality and embrace a traditional vision of the gender binary. I know that “cultural Marxism” is a right-wing buzzword meant to sound scary and imposing.
To a normal person, on the other hand, this language is borderline unintelligible. It doesn’t tell you anything; it doesn’t obviously mean anything; and it’s quite likely to be far afield of your interests and concerns.
DeSantis is a regular offender when it comes to speaking in the jargon of culture war-obsessed conservatives, but he’s not the only one. And it’s not just a problem of jargon. Republican politicians — from presidential contenders to anonymous state legislators — are monomaniacally focused on banning books, fighting “wokeness” and harassing transgender people. Some Republicans are even still denying the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, doubling down on the election-related conspiracies that hobbled many Republican candidates in the midterms.
Not only do Americans not care about the various Republican obsessions — in a recent Fox News poll 1 percent of respondents said “wokeness” was “the most important issue facing the country today” — but a large majority say that those obsessions have gone too far. According to Fox, 60 percent of Americans said “book banning by school boards” was a major problem. Fifty-seven percent said the same for political attacks on families with transgender children. . . .
And yet there’s no sign that Republicans will relent and shift focus. Just the opposite, in fact; the party is poised to lurch even farther down the road of its alienating preoccupations. On abortion, for example, Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, says candidates need to address the issue “head-on” in 2024 — that they can’t be “uncomfortable” on the issue and need to say “I’m proud to be pro-life.”
But the Republican Party has veered quite far from most Americans on abortion rights, and in a contested race for the presidential nomination, a “head-on” focus will possibly mean a fight over which candidate can claim the most draconian abortion views and policy aims. . . .
It’s as if the Republican Party has committed itself to being as off-putting as possible to as many Americans as possible. That doesn’t mean the party is doomed, of course. But as of this moment, it is hard to say it’s on the road to political success.
As for Joe Biden? The current state of the Republican Party only strengthens his most important political asset — his normalcy. He promised, in 2020, that he would be a normal president. And he is promising, for 2024, to continue to serve as a normal president. Normal isn’t fun and normal isn’t exciting. But normal has already won one election, and I won’t be surprised if it wins another.
Here is how Frank Bruni puts it in The New York Times:
Elon Musk is a geyser of gibberish, so it’s important not to make too much of anything he says. But a recent Twitter thread of his deserved the attention it got, if not for the specific detail on which most journalists focused.
They led with Musk’s statement that he would support a Ron DeSantis candidacy for the presidency in 2024. That obviously disses one Donald Trump, though it should come as no surprise: Magnates like Musk typically cling to the moment’s shiniest toys, and DeSantis, fresh off his re-election, is a curiously gleaming action figure.
But how Musk framed his attraction to the Florida governor was revealing — and troubling. He expressed a desire for a candidate who’s “sensible and centrist,” implying that DeSantis is both.
In what universe? He’s “sensible and centrist” only by the warped yardsticks of Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake and the like. But those yardsticks will be used frequently as various Republicans join the 2024 fray. And therein lies real danger.
Trump’s challengers will be defined in relation to him, casting them in a deceptively flattering light. They’ll be deemed steady because he’s not, on the ball because he’s out to lunch, enlightened because they don’t sup with Holocaust deniers. They’ll be realists to his fantasist, institutionalists to his nihilist, preservationists to his arsonist.
None of those descriptions will be true. Some will be persuasive nonetheless.
That dynamic is already doing wonders for DeSantis as he flies high over a very low bar. “Look!” say Republicans eager to take back the White House. “It’s Superman!” Hardly. But his promoters are hoping that the shadow of Trump produces such an optical illusion. . . .
It is not normal to release a campaign ad, as DeSantis did last month, that explicitly identifies you as someone created and commanded by God to pursue the precise political agenda that you’re pursuing. Better words for that include “messianic,” “megalomaniacal” and “delusional.”
It is not sensible to open a new state office devoted to election crimes when there is scant evidence of any need for it. That is called “pandering.” It is also known as a “stunt.”
It is not centrist to have a key aide who tweeted that anyone who opposed the “Don’t Say Gay” education law in Florida was “probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” Those were the words of Christina Pushaw, who was then DeSantis’s press secretary and “transformed the governor’s state messaging office into a hyperpartisan extension of his political efforts,” as Matt Dixon noted in Politico, adding that she “used the position to regularly pick public fights with reporters on social media, amplify right-wing media outlets and conservative personalities and attack individuals who oppose or challenge DeSantis.”
DeSantis’s response to her derisive and divisive antics? He made her the “rapid response director” for his re-election campaign. Because that’s the normal, sensible, centrist thing to do.
DeSantis used his power as governor to punish Disney for daring to dissent from his political views. He used migrants as political pawns and sent two planes full of them to Martha’s Vineyard. He pushed for an extreme gerrymander in Florida that marginalized minority voters. He’s a darling of the National Rifle Association.
And the signature line from his stump speech is that Florida is “where woke goes to die.” I’m with him on the destructiveness of peak wokeness, but base-camp wokeness has some lessons and virtues, which a sensible centrist might acknowledge and reflect on. Can’t Florida be where woke goes to decompress in the sun and surf and re-emerge in more relaxed form?
DeSantis himself might currently reject the labels that Musk gave him: It’s the right-wing-warrior side that promises to propel him most forcefully through the primaries, should he enter them. But he or any nominee not named Trump would likely segue to the general election by flashing shades of moderation.
In DeSantis’s case, there’d be chatter galore about his 19-point re-election victory as proof of his appeal’s breadth. But another Republican, Senator Marco Rubio, won re-election in Florida by sixteen points, suggesting that forces beyond DeSantis’s dubiously pan-partisan magnetism were in play. And Florida is redder than it used to be.
The extremists and conspiracists so prevalent in today’s Republican Party have distorted the frame for everyone else, permitting the peddling of DeSantis as some paragon of reason. Be savvier than Musk. Don’t buy it.
