Matt Yglesias

DeMint Confuses Nazis and Social Democrats; Also Calls Obama a Nazi

I’d seen a bunch of blogs tough briefly on the fact that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) compared Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler, but it’s only now that I’m actually reading the full statement:

Part of what we’re trying to do in ‘Saving Freedom’ is just show that where we are, we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. You still had votes but the votes were just power grabs like you see in Iran, and other places in South America, like Chavez is running down in Venezuela. People become more dependent on the government so that they’re easy to manipulate. And they keep voting for more government because that’s where their security is. When our immigrants get here, they’re worried, because they see it happening here.

Look, comparing your domestic political rivals to Nazis is a time-honored tradition. But confusing the Nazis and Germany’s Social Democrats is a scandal. The Social Democrats were the main source of opposition to Hitler at a time when the Communists were bizarrely maintaining that there was no difference between the two and the mainstream parties of the center-right decided that it made sense to form a tactical alliance with Hitler. Social Democrats stand for a generous welfare state and active labor market policies. Nazis try to conquer the world and send people to the gas chamber. Jonah Goldberg aside, this is not a subtle distinction.

The Right’s New “Socialist” Rhetoric

One thing most people probably don’t realize is that there are these international organizations of political parties from around the world. The big right-of-center parties—including the GOP, the Christian Democrats in Germany, the Conservatives in the UK and Canada, etc.—are in the International Democratic Union. The major left-of-center parties are typically in the Socialist International. But there’s also a “Liberal International” which is for liberal parties in the European sense, usually small right-of-center outfits that emphasis deregulation, social tolerance, and a business perspective. But based on what’s essentially terminological confusion and a desire to not be attacked as “socialists,” the Democratic Party isn’t a member of the Socialist International even though basically all the equivalent parties abroad—the sundry “labor” and “social democrat” parties of the UK, Australia, and the continent—are.

I wonder if the medium-term impact of the new red scare that the right is currently engaged in will be to change this dynamic. Mark Liebovich reports for The New York Times:

It seems that “socialist” has supplanted “liberal” as the go-to slur among much of a conservative world confronting a one-two-three punch of bank bailouts, budget blowouts and stimulus bills. Right-leaning bloggers and talk radio hosts are wearing out the brickbat. Senate and House Republicans have been tripping over their podiums to invoke it. The S-bomb has become as surefire a red-meat line at conservative gatherings as “Clinton” was in the 1990s and “Pelosi” is today.

“Earlier this week, we heard the world’s best salesman of socialism address the nation,” Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said on Friday, referring, naturally, to a certain socialist in chief.

Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas decried the creation of “socialist republics” in the United States. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff,” Mr. Huckabee said, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference here over the weekend, a kind of Woodstock for young conservatives.

By redirecting their rhetoric several clicks to the left, conservatives seem to me to be essentially collaborating in efforts to shift the center of public opinion to the left. Instead of a scenario in which progressive politicians had to squirm awkwardly away from the liberal label, the scary concept is now socialism. This actually makes it much easier to sell progressive policy as little more than a practical response to shifting events, but the ideological agenda it’s allegedly serving has been made so much more outlandish. At the same time, by associating socialism” with a popular president, they’re bestowing it with new legitimacy. If Obama’s policies can succeed in turning the economy around, maybe people will decide they like socialism just fine. Of course that’s a big “if” but it’s the “if” that hangs over all present-day political conversations.

The Right’s Civil War

Predictions of a “conservative crack-up” tend to be a dime a dozen in American politics, and it rarely happens. But this month, I really do get the sense that we’re witnessing the opening rounds in a significant battle inside the conservative movement. The difference, it seems to me, is that you’re increasingly seeing actual politicians and people who are very close to the political arena getting into the fray. That’s difference from a question of a handful of disaffected conservative intellectuals or an intramural squabble between pundits. Here, for example, Utah Governor Jon Huntsman basically calls the congressional GOP a “very narrow party of angry people”:

Q: In December you talked about people 40 and under having a very different view on the environment. Is there a similar generational gap on gay rights?

A: You hit on the two issues that I think carry more of a generational component than anything else. And I would liken it a bit to the transformation of the Tory Party in the UK…They went two or three election cycles without recognizing the issues that the younger citizens in the UK really felt strongly about. They were a very narrow party of angry people. And they started branching out through, maybe, taking a second look at the issues of the day, much like we’re going to have to do for the Republican Party, to reconnect with the youth, to reconnect with people of color, to reconnect with different geographies that we have lost.

On Huntsman’s side, roughly speaking, I think you can also see Governor Charlie Crist of Florida and New York Times columnist David Brooks along with his merry band of reformist conservative pundits. Anchoring the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got Bobby Jindal of Louisiana leading a weird band of stimulus rejectionists. He’s being backed up by the House GOP’s quasi-official leaders Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich both of whom have taken the reality-defying view that Jindal’s speech yesterday was secretly brilliant. Guys like Eric Cantor and Mike Pence in the House and Jim DeMint and Mitch McConnell in the Senate have, likewise, really been digging in their heels on the idea that blanket oppositionism is the way to go. Thus far, though, you haven’t seen anyone on the Hill really take up the reformist banner. There’s the Senate’s troika of northeastern moderates, of course, but I think everyone agrees that they’re not the future of the American right. For the infighting to really become significant in a policy sense, you’d need some members of the House and Senate to try to put what Crist and Huntsman are talking about into practice.

DeMint: The Richest 0.7 Percent of the Population is “Lots of People”

The right-wing is flinging smokescreen rhetoric about income taxes and small businesses so quickly that it’s difficult to keep track of what they’re saying. But the important things to recall are that very few people find themselves in the top two tax brackets, and that though some of these people are small businessmen they’re paying taxes on net income. These are brackets for a small number of unusually prosperous people. For example, here’s Jim Demint:

It looks like he’s gonna try to get a lot of that revenue from raising payroll taxes on upper income and that sounds good but basically that affects small businesses and their ability to hire people. So I just think it shows a lack of understanding of the private sector. A lot of people make — who are reporting a quarter million dollars — you know, I’ve done that before in my small business, and I was actually taking home like 50 or 40.

In fact, about 0.7 percent of households file in the top two brackets:

Meanwhile, I don’t know why DeMint thinks people who are only taking home $40k or $50k would be filing as people who earn $250,000. I think he wants people to think that the government is taxing gross business receipts, so that if I spend $230,000 on my business to earn $300,000 in revenue, that I’m taxed on all $300,000. But that’s not how it works at all. You deduct business expenses and pay taxes on your net income. Any small businessman who’s earning a middle class income isn’t paying in the top two brackets, just as any salaried employee who’s earning a middle class income isn’t paying in the top two brackets.

Vegas Baby, Vegas!

Some curious logic from Jim DeMint’s office:

The President has a point that taxpayer money should not be used to pay for Wall Street fat cats to fly to Las Vegas but why is it okay for taxpayer money to be used to help pay for Hollywood elites to get there on a fancy gambling train? And why are we subsidizing leisure in a stimulus bill rather than encouraging work and greater productivity?

Several points. One — there’s no such provision in the bill. Two — there are two million people in the Las Vegas metro area, so it’s not as if taking the train to gamble is the only conceivable use of such a route. Three — lots of people go from L.A. to Las Vegas, it’s not an “elites only” option. I would refer Senator DeMint’s staff to this well-known scene from Swingers:

The larger rhetorical theme here seems to be that DeMint believes there should be no infrastructure projects of any sort in Southern California because any such project would, per se, be a taxpayer subsidy to “Hollywood elites.” It’s a pretty repugnant sentiment. For whatever reason, conservatives are constantly allowed to get away with this business of summarily dismissing vast regions of the country as unworthy and never get called on it. But this sort of thing is leading the movement on a direct (albeit, non-rail) route to a Dixie-only ghetto.

The DeMint Alternative

When you see conservatives on TV saying it’s a strawman for Obama to accuse them of wanting to do nothing, keep in mind that they’re correct. Overwhelmingly, the congressional right backed Jim DeMint’s plan for $3.1 trillion worth of permanent tax cuts for corporations and wealthy people.

Similarly, when you see conservatives on TV complaining about the size of the stimulus package recall that overwhelmingly, the congressional right backed Jim DeMint’s plan for $3.1 trillion worth of permanent tax cuts for corporations and wealthy people.

This would be over triple as costly as the stimulus that will soon be signed, probably less effective at producing jobs, and much more devastating to the United States’ long-term budgetary situation. Even the GOP’s favorite anti-stimulus economists have nothing good to say about this plan.

The DeMint “Plan” — Fewer Jobs, Slower Growth, More Money for Rich People

The Heritage Foundation’s Michael Franc, who I had the pleasure of debating last weekend on C-SPAN, can barely contain his enthusiasm over Jim DeMint’s plan to save the economy by extending Bush’s policies:

DeMint plans to offer a pro-growth alternative plan, one that generates so many new jobs it practically short-circuited Heritage’s econometric model when we analyzed it. It already boasts the support of two key Senate Republicans — Sens. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), the Minority Leader, and Thad Cochran (R., Miss.), the senior Republican appropriator. His plan would drop the top marginal tax rate to 25% on wage earners, mom-and-pop business owners, and other employers, maintain the top rate on investment income at 15%, keep the children’s tax credit at $1,000, and impose a modest 15% tax on estates valued over $5 million.

Once our model cooled down, we learned the DeMint plan would lead to the creation of 1.3 million new jobs in 2010, 7.5 million by 2013, and an astounding 18 million within ten years. Residential and commercial real estate activity would also soar, by almost $300 billion over 5 years.

DeMint says his plan was actually just based on the Heritage stimulus proposal, so it’s not really clear why Franc would be surprised that it did so well on Heritage’s own model. Or, rather, it’s clear that Franc is just screwing around with people and not offering serious commentary. Meanwhile, “1.3 million” sounds like a large number, but it’s actually ridiculously low. Call it the Doctor Evil stimulus:

The trouble is that for job growth to keep pace with population growth, we need to add 1.5–1.6 million new jobs every year. To get a labor market recovery off the ground after well over a year of job losses, we need the pace of job growth to be considerably faster than that. DeMint’s promise of 1.3 million jobs is a promise to keep recessionary conditions going through 2010. Meanwhile, even the Bush administration Treasury Department has conceded that large, unfunded, permanent tax cuts of the sort DeMint is proposing result in slower long-run growth. Because DeMint’s plan is so generous to the richest Americans, they may well wind up better off under his slow-growth scenario than they would be under more balanced policies. But middle class Americans would be much better served by a policy that brings about more rapid recovery—the Romer-Bernstein number for the Obama plan is 3.7 million jobs instead of DeMint’s 1.3 million—and that lays the foundation for long-term growth by avoiding the sort of huge long-run deficits that DeMint’s plan would guarantee.

DeMint’s Remnant

Senator Jim DeMint is not so interested in bipartisan cooperation:

Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina is the kind of uncompromising conservative who can make the leaders’ life difficult. Mr. DeMint thinks, among other things, that some of his Republican colleagues are helping Democrats push America far to the left.

“We have to have a remnant of the Republican Party who are recognizable as freedom fighters,” Mr. DeMint said. “What I’m looking to do as a conservative leader in the Senate is to identify those Republicans, and even some Democrats, and put together a consensus of people who can help stop this slide toward socialism.”

This is an interesting turn of phrase regarding the need for “a remnant” of the GOP, since this is a well-known idea from the work of Albert Jay Nock who’s kind of a predecessor figure for the modern, Buckley-and-forward version of the conservative movement. Nock was writing in 1936, and his idea was that the mid-thirties opponents of the inevitable slide toward socialism were being insuperably hampered by the need to appeal to a mass audience:

One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a political-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness: “I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the population. What do you think?”

An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe. Still, I reflected, even the greatest mind can not possibly know everything, and I was pretty sure he had not had my opportunities for observing the masses of mankind, and that therefore I probably knew them better than he did. So I mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get the idea out of his head at once; he would find that the masses would not care two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such circumstances the popular favourite is generally some Barabbas. I even went so far as to say (he is a Jew) that his idea seemed to show that he was not very well up on his own native literature. He smiled at my jest, and asked what I meant by it; and I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah.

It occurred to me then that this story is much worth recalling just now when so many wise men and soothsayers appear to be burdened with a message to the masses. Dr. Townsend has a message, Father Coughlin has one, Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Lippmann, Mr. Chase and the planned economy brethren, Mr. Tugwell and the New Dealers, Mr. Smith and Liberty Leaguers — the list is endless. I can not remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved.

Nock goes on to offer a reading of the story of the Prophet Isaiah in which the moral of the story turns out to be the need to spend less time focusing on the appeal to the masses on more time on preserving a pure “remnant” of conservatism that could return at some long-distant future point. At the time of Nock’s writing, of course, the country was near the high-tide of the New Deal after the unified Republican rule of the 1920s resulted in the Great Depression. Eventually, of course, the conservative movement did make a comeback—though I’d hardly say it eschewed efforts at appealing to the masses—and resulted in another giant economic crisis.

At any rate, “remnant” thinking is naturally seductive for any out-of-power political movement. But I do think it has a special kind of appeal to the right. Whether or not you think progressive economic works in practice, and whether or not progressive economic policy is popular in practice at any given time, the progressive idea is that we’re setting about to make sure that prosperity is more broadly shared—to improve the material condition of the broad mass of people. That’s something that ought to appeal to people. So progressives cling pretty dearly to the notion that our views can and should be made broadly popular. Conservative thinking doesn’t really have that element. It appeals, on both a theoretical and practical level, to the idea of the natural right of the wealthy to their wealth. At its most politically successful, conservatism in the voice of Ronald Reagan made the argument that libertarianish economic policy would in fact produce the results that progressive economic policy claimed for itself—broader and more robust prosperity. But conservatism isn’t committed to that objective as a matter of principle, so it needs to be open to “remnant”-style arguments about the need to just chill out in the woods for a few decades while the masses go off on a wild socialistic ride.

John Holbo’s classic post on Donner Party conservatism is also relevant here.