Horror show: Blueprint for a Republican presidency

A specter is haunting the United States: the specter of a Republican presidency that would turn back the clock, eradicating the modest progress on social justice achieved under Obama in such areas as health care and replacing Obama’s diplomatic approach to countries like Iran and  Cuba with a punishing policy of sanctions and threats.

The horse race among the ridiculous number of candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination has captured the bulk of media attention. Donald Trump’s outrageous comments and his meteoric rise in the polls has drawn reporters and pundits to his candidacy like moths to a light. What has attracted very little attention, in contrast, is what a Republican presidency would mean.

Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on mere guesswork and speculation. Writing in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, Lanhee J. Chen, who occupies a number of impressive academic positions but also a decidedly unimpressive entry in his c.v.–political director of the Romney/Ryan campaign–recently provided as close to a blueprint as we are likely to get. What it amounts to is a program to roll back every progressive move Obama has managed, against relentless Republican resistance, to bring to fruition, not only in foreign policy but on the domestic front as well.

Chen’s piece has the ominous feel of the Project for the New American Century, (PNAC) the neo-con manifesto that, when it was written two decades ago, seemed a mere right-wing fantasy. But George W. Bush’s presidency turned delusion into reality, fulfilling among other neo-con wet dreams, the invasion of Iraq. The war turned into a disaster, and the neo-cons were discredited–for a while. But according to a recent article in The Nation, the usual suspects are back, regrouped under a new organization but selling the same claptrap, and they are mounting a kind of comeback.

Chen’s wish list is more encompassing than even the PNAC’s delusional dream of a Middle East–indeed, for some of them, the world–remade in the image of an idealized version of American democracy.

Chen’s action plan for a GOP president combines the imperial pretensions of the neo-cons with the hyper-laissez faire savage capitalism of a Paul Ryan. Because lunatic political projects, like dreams in the Wizard of Oz, sometimes do come true, it is worth setting out the main points in Chen’s roll back project and providing a brief rebuttal:

• Roll back efforts to expand the reach of labor unions.

This sounds like a joke but instead it’s a vicious desire to kick a nearly dying horse in the head. The reality is that union membership–in absolute terms and relative to the size of the labor force–has been in a steep decline for decades. So, consequently, has their reach and power. There are several reasons for this, none more significant than the hostile political climate in which unions have struggled to survive during the prolonged conservative era kicked off by Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the Traffic Controllers’ Union in the early 1980s.

Judges appointed by conservative presidents from the Supreme Court on down and  politicians in the U.S. Congress, the state legislatures and governors’ offices  reliant on financial support from business have drastically diminished the reach of labor unions. Also, and crucially, their bargaining power on behalf of workers.

The consequences are all too clear. The significant growth in productivity and GDP in recent decades has virtually all gone to “returns to capital.” Translation: it has been monopolized by those whose money works for them, As for those who must work for their money, “returns to labor” have flat-lined.

This goes a long way toward explaining the decline of the middle class and our scandalous level of inequality. Admittedly, globalization has played a role in this as well, but the point that should concern U.S. citizens is that public policy has worked to aggravate rather than to moderate the impact of globalization on economic inequality.

In sum, the right has done a lot to neutralize unions, which today are virtually a ghost of their former selves. Mr. Chen now would like a president that would deliver a kill shot to a ghost.

• Eliminate the mandate requiring the expanded use of renewable energy by the federal government.

The entire world outside the most benighted sectors of the U.S. population plus the energy industry and its allies in the political class now recognize that global climate change is already a present danger and portends a future disaster. Mr. Chen and his friends want the U.S. to be accepted by other countries as first among nation. But how then can this country fail to lead by the minimal example of encouraging the use of renewable energy by our own government?

• Roll back the administration’s “foolhardy” reconciliation with Iran and Cuba.

In fact, what Mr. Chen characterizes as the Obama administration’s foolhardy policy changes regarding Iran and Cuba are some of the few sensibly initiatives undertaken by this country toward these two nations in a long time.

The 1953 CIA-engineered coup against democracy in Iran was both a betrayal of this country’s professed ideals and extremely foolhardy insofar as it led to a brutal dictatorship which paved the way for the emergence of the theocracy that rules today in Tehran. The 1961 CIA-run invasion of Cuba–known in U.S. foreign policy circles as the perfect disaster–was only the most spectacular consequence of almost six decades of a policy of futility and failure. Foolhardy, indeed.

Mr. Chen’s list of Mr. Obama’s outrages is too long to discuss here in detail. Suffice it to say that it includes just about every right-wing hobby horse and policy response, from the cruel (withdrawing legal status granted by an executive presidential order to undocumented immigrants brought here by their parents as minors) to the pettiest and most chauvinist (undoing the restoration of the Alaska native name for the tallest peak in North America, the mountain formerly known as Mt. McKinley now officially again Denali.)

Two very different sentiments struck me upon reading Chen’s jeremiad. One is an increased appreciation for Obama’s legacy. The other is that should a Republican win the White House, we should be very, very scared.