JUST A JACKKNIFE HAS OLD MACHEATH, BABE

My sister-in-law-in-law (hi, Sally) commented on a phrase I used in a post a few days ago: “You don’t bring fact checkers to a knife fight.”  I credit Clay Shirkey for the inspiration.  Watching the Republican convention in July, 2016, he tweeted, “We’ve brought fact checkers to a culture war.”  Shirkey was building on a line from THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987) about bringing a knife to a gunfight. 

In the summer of 2016, almost no one (certainly not me) gave Trump a chance to win.  Shirkey thought otherwise, and he turned out to be right.  As I took another look at that two year old tweetstorm, something else he wrote jumped out at me: “Trump has promised 40% of the country what they've always wanted: a racist welfare state.” 

The 40% number now looks prescient.  That’s pretty close to where Trump’s approval ratings have stood for over a year.  But the comment about “racist welfare state” is even scarier.  With Trump, racism is a given.  It’s obvious now.  From his failed border wall to his failed Muslim ban, from refusing to help Puerto Rico to enabling storm trooper tactics by ICE agents, cruelty towards minorities has been the hallmark of his administration.

What Trump and his Republican enablers haven’t figured out yet is how to take government subsidies (e.g. health care and unemployment insurance) away from minorities while continuing to provide those same subsidies to poor white folks.  Instead, Trump delegated the tax code revision to Paul Ryan, whose only interest was in rewarding his billionaire donors.  The billionaires got their tax breaks, and in return, they funneled millions of dollars to their lackeys in congress.  Republicans went for instant gratification. 

They wasted an opportunity to design a racist welfare state, and their failure to do so may come back to haunt them in the long term. 

In other news related to the Republican philosophy of government, Washington Post columnist George Will weighed in on how to tell if you’re a conservative.  Will used to be a #NeverTrump Republican.  He’s still #NeverTrump, but he’s no longer a Republican.  He got so fed up with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that he changed his voter registration to independent.  But he’s still proud of being a conservative.

In a recent Post column, he proposed a litmus test to distinguish between true conservatives and mere poseurs (i.e. contemporary Republicans).  You’ll never guess what it was, so I’ll tell you.  Your true political colors will be revealed by the candidate you would have supported in 1912 presidential election. 

That’s quintessential George Will.  99% of the American populace don’t know and don’t care about 1912.  I actually knew who won (because it happens that an anecdote about the 1912 election is one of only two stories I know about my paternal grandfather, who died when my father was very young), but I couldn’t have told you who he beat or what the issues they ran on.

But George Will is made of sterner stuff, and he uses the 1912 election to distinguish between three philosophies of presidential power.  They actually turn out to be relevant today.  It’s three philosophies rather than two because there were three major candidates in 1912. 

Democrats nominated Woodrow Wilson, who – spoiler alert – won the election.  The Republican Party re-nominated its incumbent president, William Howard Taft.  You might think those two candidates would have been sufficient, but former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt popped up unexpectedly to play the spoiler.

Roosevelt served two terms as president from 1901-1909 and had thought of Taft as his protégé.  But Taft had other ideas, and a schism – partly personal and partly based on genuine policy disagreements – in the Republican Party.  Roosevelt joined the Progressive Party (also known as the Bull Moose Party), survived an assassination attempt, and outpolled Taft in the general election.  But both men were swamped by Woodrow Wilson, who carried 40 states. 

(My grandfather was a big Wilson supporter.  The story is that he and his friends went outside and fired their pistols into the air when word of the Democratic victory reached rural northeastern Oklahoma.)

George Will dismisses Woodrow Wilson as the first imperial president, a man who rejected – to the extent he could get away with – the Constitution’s restrictions on the executive branch.  But within the framework of the Constitution, there are two other positions on presidential power. 

According to Will, Theodore Roosevelt believed that a president could do anything that the Constitution didn’t expressly forbid.  William Howard Taft, on the other hand, believed that a president should only do the things that the Constitution expressly granted as the executive branch’s prerogative.

Roosevelt said of Taft, “I am sure he means well, but he means well feebly.”  Taft said of Roosevelt, “There is a decided similarity between Andrew Jackson and Roosevelt. He had the same disrespect for law when he felt the law stood between him and what he thought was right to do.”

Taft, of course, is the correct answer to Will’s conservative litmus test.  Conservatives, in Will’s view, believe in limited government, and they don’t abandon that view simply because they’ve come to power.

I don’t know enough about that era to say whether Will’s analysis of Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt is valid or not.  But the three presidential philosophies that Will describes resonate a century later.

Donald Trump obviously believes that he’s not bound by any laws.  His arrogance would make Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson blush.  He wants to be an emperor, not a president.

Most presidents in the past 50 years have leaned Wilsonian.  And ironically, the two exceptions have been Democrats – Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

If you get your news from the Republican disinformation machine, you probably believe that President Obama was a dictator.  But especially during his last year, he behaved a lot like the William Howard Taft that George Will admired.  Specifically, Obama knew that Donald Trump was surrounded by Russians who were trying to help him win the election.  He showed the evidence to Mitch McConnell in October, 2016 and pleaded with McConnell to issue a bi-partisan statement condemning Russian interference in American politics.  McConnell said no. 

I wish Obama had told McConnell to fuck off and gone public with evidence that Russians had penetrated the Trump campaign.  But his sense of propriety (as well as his mistaken belief that Hillary Clinton would win anyway) prevented him from telling a truth that may have changed the outcome of the election.  I admire President Obama.  I voted for him twice and would happily vote for him again.  But I think he blew this one.