We don't need no stinkin' policy

The "revenue-neutral flex fund" gives way to 24/7 culture war hooey

© 2011 JD Hancock, used under a Creative Commons license

It’s my style to put lots of links in my political writing, maybe because so much of what I write about is so hard to believe I feel compelled to cite evidence. I find that one of the old stories I bring up a lot is this 2014 Village Voice column about the end of policy as a conservative political tool.

I didn’t think of it that way at the time, though; I was just bemused by a bunch of chatter in the wake on Obama’s second election that sought to draw the median voter back to the Republican Party with “reformicon” policy ideas, promoted by such rightwing bigbrains as Ross Douthat.

These turned out to be standard-issue rightwing proposals like a minimum wage cut, school vouchers, etc. all repackaged to look new-and-improved for 2016. About the only really “new” thing about it was a retrenchment from their old overtly anti-gay stuff, shifting (as I then said) “from gay-bashing to straight-bashing” by attacking unmarried straight white cohabitants and child-rearers, as practiced by Kevin Williamson and, a little further down the line, J.D. Vance.

Conservatives had been pushing what they invariably characterize as bold new ideas for decades, and whenever one of them (such as trickle-down and welfare reform) actually gets traction it leads to an obvious disaster; one might say Obama’s winning streak was powered by the conservative catastrophe that was the deregulation of financial markets, which led to the 2008 recession. (Some day we oughta do something about that!)

But by 2014 the smell of bullshit had become overpowering and the bullshit-shovelers seemed not to know it was a problem. In a follow-up post to my Voice column I quoted conservative writer Sam Tanenhaus (at the New York Times, natch!) on Marco Rubio’s “plan to create a ‘revenue-neutral flex fund’ that would disburse federal funds to the states to spend as they wished on antipoverty programs.” The very name of the thing should have been a tipoff, but here’s the bit that had me chewing on a rag:

The plan wouldn’t save a dime in the short run — in fact, it would most likely increase costs — but it met the bigger ideological goal of “incentivizing” work, a pet theme on the right since the days of [Irving] Kristol and his liberal ally Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

I’d always known it was just a closed system, a way for wonks to give self-ennobling cover to the cruel legislative labyrinths they designed to keep paupers from dignity and sustenance, but it was something to hear them virtually admit to the con game out loud.

Well, we saw what came after: Trump cut out the middleman — that is, he removed all the wonkish pretense and got straight to the cruelty with his migrant caravans and pussy-grabbing. Some saps took a while to realize it; Ross Douthat’s “How Trump Might Help Reform Conservatives” is, like so many of his columns, a classic of the genre. But they all eventually crawled aboard.

All these years later it’s just gotten worse. Recently Tubby gave what were advertised as speeches “on the economy” in North Carolina, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. I wonder what Sam Tanenhaus and the boys thought of these. Trump just ranted and raved in his traditional manner, adding almost as an afterthought that he would save the economy by drilling more oil, which he claimed would cut energy prices “by 50 to 70 percent” within 18 months, and with punitive tariffs, which he claimed would have no repercussions for the U.S. economy, which is impossible. He also talked about Hunter Biden, Kamala Harris’ laugh, deadly migrants, etc.

Many rapid-response accounts of these speeches in the Prestige Press did what they could to make them look like old-fashioned “policy” addresses: “Trump Lays Out Economic Plan – Everything From Cutting Taxes, Paying Off the Debt to ‘Drill, Baby Drill,’” charitably reported U.S. News & World Report. Others took pains to describe his assertions in a neutral tone so that they could not be accused of bias, as with this from ABC News’ “Trump focuses partly on economy” report:

Attacking Harris, Trump branded her as a complainer and argued that the policies she’s currently advocating for shouldn’t be taken seriously because she would have already accomplished them as vice president.

“Kamala has declared that tackling inflation will be a day one priority ... But day one for Kamala was three and a half years ago. Why hasn’t she done it?”

Given what everyone knows about the role and powers of the American Vice-President, it’s as if ABC were dealing with a badly-brought-up child who demanded to know why Superman wasn’t at his birthday party, while trying not to cause a scene.

Conservative factota did what they could with it — National Review, hilariously, described the Trump “day one” comment as “Trump Makes the Case That Kamala Harris Is Responsible for Rising Food Prices” — but follow-up stories in even some Prestige Press outlets had to admit, as the Washington Post did, that “more than 80 percent of [the North Carolina speech] was about subjects other than the economy” and that the “economic” items were just so much froth.

And at this writing no one in the conservative press has leapt up to tie Trump’s yammerings to a program of conservative policies. Instead they beat the same scummy culture-war tocsins that all other MAGA operatives do. Douthat’s recent columns are not about how Trump can reform the economy, education, foreign policy, or any of the other traditional poli-sci subjects he used to pimp, but instead are Vance-adjacent thumbsuckers like “Is It Weird to Care About the Birthrate?” and “Masculinity Is on the Ballot.”

To the extent policy and paleo-patriarchy can be stitched together, the result is pretty much the Project 2025 agenda that, once revealed, was so unpopular with voters that Republicans had to disown it. So it would seem the revenue-neutral flex fund games are over, and out-loud-and-proud male and white supremacy have become the whole thing. As I constantly remind you, voter suppression and insurrection may yet pull their fat out of the fire, but failing that I would count this a large handicap for the forces of darkness.