As prospects dim, Mike Pence continues his crusade against Social Security
Is he still allowed to wear the Republican patch?
Mike Pence comes from a nasty age of Republican politics. It can be hard to remember in these days of overt, slovenly, clownish fascism from the American right that the blue suit wearing douche bag Republicans of the George W. Bush era did enormous damage to America’s image in the world while laying the foundation for the unpopular oppressive domestic policies that are now being forced on the country mostly via the Supreme Court.
I think it’s still an open question whether Donald Trump or George W. Bush was the worst president in American history—it’s certainly one of the two. And Trump is a execrable figure, a vindictive and hateful and stupid person constantly appealing to anger, insecurity, and white nationalism, who disrespected the constitutional process in a way that can never be accepted or normalized. But Bush extinguished America’s powerful post-World War II image as a world leader while attempting to enshrine anti-gay discrimination into the Constitution, and tried to destroy voting rights through far-right judicial picks, and wanted to decimate Social Security.
Pence is a holdover—he was a Trump sycophant, but never a true Trump follower. The crass and confrontational social media driven presidency is just not his idea of style. He would prefer an “aw shucks” style speech while taking women’s rights away. He would like some “morning in America” talk while he unleashes polluters to befoul the environment. Pence wants to honor the troops—before sending them to a pointless war with Iran, probably.
One of the many ways in which he is a holdover, and one that places him in conflict with the demagogic Trumpist elements, is Pence’s dogged pursuit of undermining and eliminating federal entitlement programs. Never mind that Social Security is popular and seemingly effective, that the concerns about its supposed insolvency have long been overblown for political reasons, and that updating the law to make high earners pay a little more would fix any future potential deficits anyway.
So why has interest in entitlement “reform” cooled in the Trumpist part of the Republican party (which is now a solid majority of that party) as well as among mainstream centrists Democrats like Joe Biden? Probably because it was always an issue that only wealthy elites (in both parties) care about because the way Social Security, Medicare, and the overall federal budget are managed can affect interest rates on government bonds. Since only the super-wealthy have much need to sock money away in Treasury bonds, they are the only ones who intrinsically care about this issue.
For a while the middle class foot soldiers of the Republican Party had adopted this concern of the wealthy as their own and were liable to repeat the nonsense about the national debt being “too big” (we have covered this already) and that we were “stealing from future generations” (quite a line from a party that broadly supports undermining environmental protections). But now Republicans are being directed to do stuff like spread false election conspiracy theories and attack the rights of trans people and arbitrarily label people as “woke.”
The Trumpist (and Desantist or whatever) formula is much more focused on crass appeals to emotions. Pence’s old style formula is of course also driven by emotional insecurity (this is the American right we are talking about!) but it wove a fairly shoddy and hateful but mostly consistent intellectual framework around all of it. It was a weak system in search of justifications for what rich men wanted anyway, but it was convincing enough to the mediocrities that filled the ranks of the Bush admin Coalition Provisional Authority think tank lobbyist revolving doors. Now the shift from Bushist war capitalism to Trumpist fascism means less adherence to questionable principles and more blind obedience to the paramount leader of the movement and his whims.
At this point Mike Pence is out there running to be the next president, as dumb as ever, posing in a biker jacket to try to look hard. But the crasser new center of the Republican party can see through these cheap appeals. In an era kinder to morons like him, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked about the putative “dead-enders” out there who never stop fighting for their fallen regime. Mike Pence is one of those deluded fighters who still believes in George W. Bush’s vacuous “ownership society” and he is probably not going to get very many votes.