Trump Dooms The GOP
We are starting to see the full extent of the damage Trump has wrecked on the Republican party. What was once a conservative party committed to low taxes and spending is now a populist party committed to high spending and bigotry.
The Republican plan to win back the House in 2022 is to make a renewed attack on illegal immigration and Democratic spending. The notion this is a winning hand is really rather odd since it was never spending that was unpopular, it was the need to raise taxes to pay for it. And ‘illegal immigration’ is really just code for ‘Latino is the new black’.
Since the 1970s, immigration policy in the US and Europe has increasingly focused on limiting entry to the most skilled, most desirable workers. Doctors, engineer and other skilled professionals are to be welcomed (albeit grudgingly). The possibility of being beastly to foreigners was of course the heart and soul of the UK Brexit campaign. Once the UK was independent it could jolly well give those dirty foreigners exactly what they deserved.
But as the UK started to learn before Brexit, it isn’t just doctors and nurses who are valuable healthcare providers. Hospitals require a vast number of technicians and an even greater number of behind the scenes workers that patients may never see. Before Brexit, a large number of the people performing the unglamorous menial tasks in the NHS were immigrants from other EU countries.
Brexit is Brexit, but the COVID pandemic has caused a similar disruption in the labour market in the US and throughout the world. Menial labour is no longer readily available and in the US at least, no longer cheap.
The reasons for labour scarcity are not hard to see. The US has just passed the grim total of 600,000 dead for a start. An even larger number are suffering from ‘long COVID’ which removes the patient and in many cases a carer from the work force as well.
Businesses that laid off their staff in the first wave of lockdown are now finding it difficult to impossible to hire replacement. Why work as a waitress for a wage of $2.13/hr plus tips when you have spent the past 15 months learning Java and Python and now earn more in a week than you used to earn in a month?
The pandemic has caused many people to rethink their life goals and priorities. Building is booming as people extend and remodel their homes. Small business owners in their late 50s look at the challenges of restarting their business after a year on hold and conclude they would rather spend the the next ten years in retirement instead.
A similar effect was seen after the first and second world wars. A period of enforced collective austerity is usually followed by a period of individual hedonism. For the first time since the 2008 crash, the US is facing a labor shortage in many parts of the country and many sectors of the economy. Workers are refusing to take menial jobs because they know it is a matter of when, not if they find something better.
The US isn’t going to become any less racist as the pool of menial labor shrinks but concern about ‘illegal immigration’ will mostly disappear outside the fetid sewer of Fox News and its branches.
If Trump were to vanish into thin air, the Republican party might be able to make a come back beating the drum on runaway spending. But even that seems rather unlikely. The Tea Party movement of 2009 was built on anger at the idea that the taxpayer was paying to bail out the very rich at the expense of the ‘middle class’. A similar astroturf effort might possibly create a similar reaction against Biden’s infrastructure bill.
But Trump is refusing to vanish, and Trump himself made the case for a massive infrastructure bill. The only differences between Biden and Trump on this issue is that Biden is actually making an effort to deliver one and (much of) the spending will be paid for with increased taxes. Trump’s tax cut for the 0.01% is being repurposed to spending on infrastructure. The deficit will still explode the same as it did under Trump but at least the country get something to show for it.
As long as Trump remains alive, the only platform the Republican party can run on is the platform chosen by Trump. Trump can’t beat the drum on infrastructure any more so all he has left is bigoted attacks on immigration and the airing of his personal grievances.
By the time the 2022 campaign season is in full swing, there will be far more news stories asking if immigration should increase to meet the demand for menial workers than stories about illegal immigrants. So that just leaves the Republican party with Trump’s personal grievances.
Which is more likely to win Republicans the House and Senate in 2022, the big lie that Trump won in 2020 or the bigger lie that the criminal charges against Trump are fabricated?
