On the menu today: A few days ago, the economist, philosopher, and living legend Thomas Sowell took Republicans to task for stumbling through a presidential-election season, neck-and-neck and flailing “against an administration whose policies have been rejected by the public in poll after poll.”
Ronald Reagan won two consecutive presidential elections by landslides. How did he do it? He did it by addressing the voting public as if they were adults who could understand an issue — if you explained it to them in plain English, instead of in political jargon or snappy quips. There are some Republicans today who seem to understand that. But they are not running in this year’s presidential election. Perhaps they may run in 2028.
Talk to the Voters about the Issues
In July, the Center Square Voters poll surveyed the priorities of “nearly 2,300 likely voters, including 1,006 Republicans, 1,117 Democrats, and 172 true (non-leaning) independents. It has a margin of error of 2.1 percent.” Respondents could pick three issues from a list of 18 options and rank them, first, second, and third.
Unsurprisingly, the top three issues were inflation/price increases (45 percent), illegal immigration (36 percent), and the economy/jobs (28 percent). After those priorities, abortion came in fourth at 26 percent, and crime and violence in fifth at 23 percent. If Republicans want to gain traction, it would probably help to offer some direct, clear arguments and hard facts about these issues.
(It would also help if the Republican nominee could at least feign interest in the top priority of voters and not complain when he’s giving a speech about the economy, “They wanted to do a speech on the economy. They say it’s the most important subject, I’m not sure it is, but they say it’s the most important subject.”)
Inflation/Price Increases
We should turn the question to the voters: Why do you think the high inflation of recent years occurred?
The answer from Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and almost all the Democrats is that corporations weren’t so greedy during the pandemic in 2020, suddenly became greedy and increased prices in 2021, were at their greediest in June 2022, and then gradually became less greedy thereafter.
That is an asinine explanation that hand-waves away every economic decision of the Biden administration.
The answer from economists on the right is that the federal government, first under Trump and then under Biden, went on an insane spending spree that ran up $12.7 trillion in new debt, pumping way too much money into the economy while not increasing the amount of goods and services at a similar pace.
If you won a couple of million bucks in the lottery, you would suddenly have a lot more money, but there would be little reason for the stores in your town to raise prices. After all, only one customer — you — would have more money to spend. But if everyone in your hometown won a couple million bucks in the lottery simultaneously, prices in your locality would probably start climbing quickly, because everyone had more money to spend. Your local Maserati dealership would increase the prices, because suddenly a lot more customers could afford to pay more.
If the amount of money put into an economy increases rapidly, while the amount of goods and services to spend it on remains flat or increases slowly, the value of the money goes down. If you don’t believe me, watch Duck Tales.
Back in May 2021, former Clinton administration Treasury secretary Larry Summers warned the Biden administration, “We’re taking very substantial risks on the inflation side. . . . We are printing money, we are creating government bonds, we are borrowing on unprecedented scales. Those are things that surely create more of a risk of a sharp dollar decline than we had before. And sharp dollar declines are much more likely to translate themselves into inflation than they were historically. . . . In a super permissive fiscal environment, if inflation expectations are allowed to rise, the process of putting them back and restoring normality is likely to be uncontrolled, expensive and costly.”
The Biden team and congressional Democrats were warned. They ignored the warnings and charged ahead.
Two months later, Joe Biden insisted, “Some folks have raised worries that this could be a sign of persistent inflation. But that’s not our view. Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen are — were expected and expected to be temporary. . . . Nobody’s suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist. That’s totally different.”
The 40-year high in inflation had other factors, of course. Just about everything you buy must get there on a train or a truck, so when the cost of fuel goes up, the cost of everything else goes up. Americans cheer on increases in wages, but when the cost of labor goes up, the cost of what those workers produce and sell goes up, too.
Illegal Immigration
Again, we should turn the question to the voters: Why do you think the high level of illegal immigration in recent years occurred?
Do you think it had anything to do with President Biden and Vice President Harris halting any new border-fencing construction immediately upon taking office, and terminating all remaining fence construction in April 2021? (The lone new construction, in October 2023, was after the Biden administration had exhausted all legal options to block already-allocated funds.)
As Mark Morgan, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Presidents Obama and Trump, put it, “From the moment that Biden took over, he started canceling and dismantling almost every single effective tool authority and policy we had in place.” Do you think that influenced illegal immigration for the past three-and-a-half years?
When the backlog of asylum claims grew so long that last year migrants were told to come back for a court date in 2033, do you think that made migrants more likely to attempt to cross the border, or less likely? When everyone in the world knows that if you cross the border, get caught, and claim asylum, it will take a decade for the U.S. government to determine whether your claim is valid or not, do you think that makes more people attempt to cross the border, or fewer?
When Harris traveled to Guatemala in 2021, and told migrants, “Do not come,” why do you think migrants didn’t listen to her? Do you think Harris’s long history of saying that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal” — a false statement, by the way — convinced some migrants that the Biden administration didn’t really mean “Do not come”?
If Harris has been the “migration czar” since the start of this administration, and has generated results like this, why would you expect different or better results when she’s president?
This morning, Axios does Harris a favor of sorts, with a bold headline declaring “Harris flip-flops on wall.” What they mean is that Harris supported and continues to support the Senate immigration-reform bill put together by Oklahoma Republican senator James Lankford. That bill allowed the government to spend up to $650 million on a wall, up until 2028, and depended upon a secretary of Homeland Security report. While it would be better than nothing, the full allocation would amount to 100 miles of new border fencing.
Back in June of 2017, Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council — the labor union that represents U.S. Border Patrol — testified before Congress, “We need an additional 300 miles of primary fencing.”
This is the most nominal form of “supporting” new wall construction. It’s more accurately described as begrudgingly acquiescing to the minimal amount of new fencing construction to get a deal done.
The Economy/Jobs
Sure, the Biden administration can say jobs were created during its term . . . just 818,000 fewer than it originally thought from April 2023 to March 2024.
Abortion
At this point, there is little reason to think that either a Harris administration or a Trump administration will reduce the number of abortions that occur in the United States. (The number of abortions in the U.S. declined during the Obama years and increased during the Trump years, and there is little reason to believe that those were the desired goals of either administration.) A Kamala Harris administration would attempt to eliminate the Hyde amendment and establish a nationwide system of taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
Trump declared Friday “My administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” which is about as clear and explicit a betrayal of the pro-life cause as you can get.
The pro-life case for Trump is that he’s lying. More on this below.
Crime
Sure, the official statistics tell a story that’s friendly to the Biden–Harris administration, but that raises the question of why so many people don’t feel safe if crime is declining as much as the official statistics suggest. One theory is that the number of unreported crimes is increasing. (Note that murders are just about always reported.) The data in the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Victimization Survey indicate that the number of unreported “violent victimizations” increased from 8.7 per 1,000 in 2021 to 13.2 per 1,000 in 2022. In other words, the number of reported “violent victimizations” increased modestly (7.5 per 1000 to 9.7 per 1000, or 29 percent) while the number of unreported “violent victimizations” increased 51 percent.
Steve Smith, a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute, writes, “This is a dire indicator on many levels as it means that for a variety of reasons, crime victims are opting out of participating in the criminal justice system beyond their willingness to participate in surveys. This is not ‘normal’ or a ‘peace wave’ — but a concerning reality that people are losing faith in their country’s system of justice.”
I notice that after emphasizing she was “a progressive prosecutor” in 2019 and 2020, Harris is now boasting, “After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security.” Hey, remember when “Kamala was a cop” was a sneer in the 2019 primary? Good times, good times.
Coming Soon under Harris: Supreme Court Term Limits
One more challenge to the notion that there’s a conservative case for Kamala Harris:
Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told Dispatch Politics on Thursday that he expects Harris will support legislation to enact Supreme Court term limits. “They have not gone so far as to say, ‘We endorse your bill.’ They have said that your bills are precisely aligned with what we are talking about,” he said when asked if he had received any formal indication from Harris’s campaign that the vice president supports his term-limit legislation.
One of the reasons you should not argue, in early August, that there is a conservative case for the Democratic nominee is because later in the month, the nominee may endorse price controls, taxpayer-funded abortion on demand, and term limits for Supreme Court justices, and then you’re still stuck with your endorsement.
We Had to Burn Down Conservatism in Order to Save It
The nationalist-populists explained to me that the Republican Party could no longer be the party of free-market economics and free trade; that we had to accept a Republican Party whose convention featured Teamsters president Sean O’Brien cheering on how Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) “changed his position on ‘national right to work.’” We had to accept a vice-presidential nominee who declared, “I’m not philosophically against raising taxes on anybody,” said he’s open to raising the minimum wage to $20, and worked with Elizabeth Warren to regulate Wall Street.
The GOP had to move to the left on economics, you see, to save the conservative part of the agenda.
The nationalist-populists explained to me that the Republican Party could no longer be the party of hawkishness and interventionism; that we had to be a quasi-isolationist, noninterventionist party that would encourage the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO allied country that the president felt wasn’t spending enough on defense. We had to accept a vice president who once said to Steve Bannon on his podcast, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
The GOP had to move to the left on foreign policy and national security, you see, to save the conservative part of the agenda.
The nationalist-populists explained to me that the Republican Party could no longer be the party of the First Amendment, and that we had to support a nominee who wanted to overturn New York Times vs. Sullivan, which held that public officials and public figures must show “actual malice” or “reckless disregard” of the truth in order to win a libel suit.
The nationalist-populists explained to me that the Republican Party could no longer be the party of the Second Amendment, and that we had to support a nominee who declared, live on national television, as president, “I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida . . . to go to court would have taken a long time. Take the guns first, go through due process second.” Sure, Trump eventually backtracked from that stance, but it’s revealing that those were his first instincts.
The GOP had to move to the left on the First Amendment and Second Amendment, you see, to save the conservative part of the agenda.
The nationalist-populists explained to me that the Republican Party had to get tough on immigration, which meant nominating a man who believed, “You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too. Anybody graduates from a college — you go in there for two years or four years. If you graduate, or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country.” This would turn a lot of institutions of higher education into green-card factories.
The GOP had to move to the left on immigration policy, you see, to save the conservative part of the agenda.
The nationalist-populists explained to me that I had to support a presidential nominee who pledged he and his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”
The GOP had to move to the left on social policy, you see, to save the . . . hey, wait a minute, how much is left of the conservative agenda?
ADDENDUM: Yesterday, I chatted with my old friend Dana Perino of Fox News on her podcast, discussing the Democratic convention and the state of the race. In the short video version, you can see me reenact the “therapy”/reprogramming scene from A Clockwork Orange.