| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Some days it's hard not to despair for the republic.
I don't have high expectations for political rhetoric. Spin? Exaggeration? Insults? They're mostly harmless. Voters don't need to have precisely accurate information about public policy. If what they get from their party leaders stretches the truth a bit, it's usually close enough. Forty years ago, Republicans pretended that Democrats weren't really willing to fight the Cold War, which wasn't strictly true but did emphasize a real difference between the parties. Democrats accused Republicans of being eager to slash Social Security, which also wasn't strictly true but, again, did point to a real difference. Most Democrats really did support lower defense spending and dovish policies! Many Republicans really did want to slow the growth of Social Security spending! Voters who bought the exaggerated versions were still learning about significant splits on real issues.
Of course, back then both parties had real policy agendas, and so when out of office they could argue for their own ideas and criticize those of the party in power. The Democrats are generally still like that.
And the Republicans? They're drifting farther and farther into a fictional world and away from the real one. Take climate. New York magazine's Jonathan Chait over the weekend argued that Republicans are not only giving up on a real policy response to climate change, but also understand little about, say, related energy policy. It was a good column, but the best illustration came after it was published: the War on Joe Biden's Fictional War on Meat, which has broken out across conservative media in recent days.
Daniel Dale explains: "This stuff is completely imaginary. Biden has not proposed any limit on Americans' meat consumption. What happened: 1) The Daily Mail ran an article that dishonestly connected Biden's climate plan with a not-at-all-about-Biden study. 2) Others on the right just ran with this." He supplies several examples of Republicans, governors included, fighting back against this fictional plan, including — in a nice touch — some accusing Biden of hypocrisy for eating meat while trying to force the nation to give it up. (Again: He is not doing this.)
Meat consumption is, in fact, relevant to climate policy, and one can argue (as Ezra Klein does) for more investment in both plant-based meat substitutes and lab-grown meat. We could presumably have a solid policy argument about the best way forward, with the out-party highlighting the practical and political weaknesses in the in-party's plans and proposing alternatives. That's exactly what Democrats did while Donald Trump and George W. Bush were in the White House, and what Republicans did when Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson were in office. It's one of the reasons that elections can produce good public policy even if voters don't really pay attention, as long as the out-parties believe in it.
Here's where it gets depressing. That healthy form of competition, the one that leaves the out-party at least somewhat ready to govern? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be much more effective than the War on Biden's Fictional War on Meat version. It's not that Republican misinformation hoodwinks voters; it's that elections strongly tend to be referendums on the incumbent president and on how the nation is doing as a whole, so that no matter how dysfunctional the out-party is, it's likely to win during hard times. So this kind of nonsense by Republicans during a period of unified Democratic government isn't likely to by punished by voters.
Even worse is the unfortunate fact that a lot of important Republican party actors, notably the Republican-aligned media, have little or no incentive to win elections or to appeal to anyone beyond those customers who are eager to believe the worst fantasies about Democrats and will pay (in campaign donations, book sales and TV ratings) those who indulge them.
And so we get a party that has nothing to offer but fact-free insults about a core question of public policy.
1. Rick Hasen on a big looming threat to elections.
2. Frances E. Lee and James M. Curry with a good reminder that the filibuster is hardly the only obstacle to the Democratic agenda.
3. Ryan Gingeras at the Monkey Cage on Biden and the Armenian genocide.
4. Courtney Bublé on executive-branch vacancies and why the current law isn't good enough.
5. Drew Armstrong on how U.S. vaccination is going.
6. Jonathan Cohn on the upcoming fights over health care.
7. Harry Enten on Biden and race.
8. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Faye Flam on how to encourage people to vaccinate.
9. And Scott Gottlieb urges an end to outdoor masking requirements. Biden had asked people to mask for 100 days; seems to me that if he's about to ask everyone to hang in there a while longer as vaccinations continue, this is one clear win he could announce this week, no?
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