You can’t make a fascist less fascist. But you can buy him off

17 July 2023

Donald Trump could lose next year’s presidential election. He could be prosecuted. He could serve time in prison (though that part seems rather unlikely). But all things being equal, none of it will matter. His followers will simply move on. There’s always another demagogue ready to tell lies.

All things being equal are the keywords, though. As long as the conditions remain the same – especially economic conditions – we can expect Republicans to mourn him, then forget him. Donald Trump, after all, was never a cause. He was always a symptom. The conditions will endure.

If you can change economic conditions, however, you can create opportunities to change the way that some Republicans – not all; don’t be daft – think about democratic politics. If you can change that, you’ve changed everything. You have, as the scholars say, effected a “paradigm shift.” You have shifted the fundamental assumptions underlying politics.

Remember that, for many Republicans, democratic politics isn’t a solution to shared human problems. It’s a problem, the problem. It produced a Black president, after all. All things being equal, with a gap growing between the .1 percent and 99.9 percent, with 40 years of “neoliberal” economic policies that have immiserated the middle class, what’s the point of democracy when autocracy could have prevented Barack Obama from happening?

You can’t make a fascist less fascist. But you can buy him off.

That’s what Joe Biden is doing.

According to Timothy Noah, of The New Republic, the people who are benefiting most from investments allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act live and work in states that, in 2020, went to Donald Trump by a mile.

“In North Dakota, which Biden lost to Trump by 34 points, and where Biden’s net approval rating was negative 46 percent in March, according to a Morning Consult compilation, personal income during the first quarter of 2023 rose 11 percent over the previous year,” he wrote last week. He added:

In Nebraska, which Biden lost by 20 points, and where Biden’s net approval rating in March was negative 36 percent, personal income rose 11.1 percent.

In Montana, which Biden lost by 16 points, and where Biden’s net approval was negative 21 percent, personal income rose 8.3 percent. In South Carolina, which Biden lost by 12 points, and where Biden’s net approval was negative 23 percent, personal income rose 6.8 percent. All these increases in personal income exceeded the national average, which was 5.1 percent.

MSNBC’s Ali Velshi did a segment based on Noah’s reporting. But, as I have come to expect from his employer, he focuses on the wrong things.

“As money started to roll up for infrastructure projects, Republicans went looking for a pat on the back even after voting against the funding that made those projects possible,” Velshi said. “Republicans vocally dragging Biden’s economic policies yet bragging about funding and nationwide economic victories that happen does not make them hometown heroes.

“It simply makes them hypocrites.”

He’s missing the point.

That the Republicans are taking credit for Bidenomics tells us that they believe that their constituents want Bidenomics. Voters want roads and bridges. They want higher incomes. They want prosperty. And if they want this much, they’ll want more, which is what we should pay attention to.

For all their autocratic tendencies, the Republicans in the Congress still operate in a democratic setting – they still need to face the demands of constituents. And if constituents start liking something, they’re going to start expecting something, which means the Republicans, instead of abandoning democratic politics, are going to be forced to reengage it.

At the same time, by taking credit for economic policies (Bidenomics) that are changing the economic conditions in their states and districts, the Republicans are inadvertently promoting democratic politics. They are saying to those who have lost faith in democratic politics – on account of democratic politics having produced a Black president – that it’s OK now. Their faith can be restored. After all, democratic politics saw, over the first three months, that incomes in red states exceeded the national average.

And there’s much more to come.

I doubt Biden believes that, by investing so much in red states, that he’s going to win over people who believe he’s a stand-in for Satan Himself. As I said, you can’t make a fascist less fascist. You can, however, buy him off.

By changing the economic conditions of his life, you can give him a reason to demand that his congresspeople reengage. You can give him a reason to think democratic politics isn’t all that bad. The assumptions underlying politics will have shifted fundamentally. That, I think, changes everything.

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