THE SCHIZOPHRENIC STATE OF OUR UNION

In 1963, President Kennedy sent a general and a State Department official to South Vietnam to report on conditions there. When they returned, the general reported that the American-backed government in Saigon was widely supported, the Viet Cong were disrespected and  South Vietnam was winning the war.  He advocated that America stay the course. The State Department official said that the Saigon government was corrupt, the Viet Cong were gaining respect and South Vietnam was losing. He said disaster was imminent.

After listening to them, Kennedy asked a question.

"You two did visit the same country, didn't you?"

On Tuesday night, President Biden delivered his state of the union address to Congress and the American people and Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders followed that with the GOP's response.

For close to an hour and a half, President Biden told us the state of the union was  pretty good.

Unemployment is at fifty year low.  Inflation is coming down.  Manufacturing jobs are returning. Democracy has been rescued.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, however, was having none of that.

According to her, the state of the union is . . .

Old 

("At 40, I'm the youngest governor in the country.  At 80 [Biden] is the oldest president in American history.") 

Confused 

("I'm the first woman to lead my state," she said, "and he's the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is.")

And crazy 

("The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.")

All of which, sixty years later,  raises JFK's question anew . . .

You two did visit the same country, didn't you?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

For the past forty years, the yin and yang of American politics has fluctuated between Republican presidencies and Congresses committed to winner take-all economics and cultural conservatism on the one hand and Democratic presidencies and Congresses that have had to either reverse economic slumps or clean up economic disasters while defending old civil rights and fighting for new ones on the other.  

Twelve years of Reagan and Bush I were answered by eight years of Clinton. Eight years of Bush II were answered by eight years of Obama.  And four years of Donald Trump are now being answered by Biden.  

During that same period, fourteen years of Democratic Congresses in the Reagan/Bush and first two years of the Clinton era were replaced by twelve years of Gingrich's (and Hastert's) Republicans, who in turn were replaced by Pelosi's Democrats (four years), Boehner's and Ryan's Republicans (four years), Pelosi's Democrats again (four years) and now Kevin McCarthy's Republicans.

Over this time frame, the arguments of both parties have changed.

And to understand the real state of the American union circa 2023, it's important, I think, to understand those arguments and those changes.

Start with the Democrats.

Between 1980 and today, they have gone through two fundamental changes.  The first began in the 1980s and came to fruition in the Clinton years. The party moved away from its New Deal or Rooseveltian (as in FDR) roots, conceded that globalization was a reality, helped at some level in creating the new architecture of globalism with things like NAFTA and other trade deals, but stood firm in preserving Social Security and Medicare and in continuing to fight to preserve the historic gains of the '60s and '70s on civil rights and woman's rights.  This approach conceded a lot to the so-called free market and actually helped create the enormous gap in wealth between the richest Americans and everyone else.  Labor was weakened and jobs were off-shored. 

The second is occurring now.  

It involves an effort to articulate and pass an economic program that actually is not winner take-all but instead creates opportunity and some security for the middle and lower middle classes and the poor. Think of things like Obamacare, childcare credits, student loan forgiveness, and infrastructure spending and in-country manufacturing that generates well-paying, non-college degreed jobs.  It also involves a continuing effort to preserve woman's rights and minority rights and a willingness to enlarge those  rights to recognize historically marginalized communities (like gays and lesbians), protect new ones (like the trans-gendered), and re-imagine the scope of some old ones (like Me-Too). 

Now to the Republicans.

They too have gone through two fundamental changes in the past forty years.  

Unlike the Democrats, however, their changes have been process more than policy changes.  

They have changed how they campaign for office, how they message, how they target voters and attempt to win.  The change started with Newt Gingrich and reached its zenith under Donald Trump. In a word, they now demonize their opponents.  Democrats became corrupt, unpatriotic, girly-men in the Gingrich years and first decade of this century and then were graduated to baby-killers, radicals, socialists, losers, electoral thieves, anti-white racists and the woke mob as we moved through the first decade of this century to the Tea Party and Trump and today.  The natural consequence of this evolution was the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the attempt by an actual mob to overturn a presidential election.

The other process change is that, over the past forty years, the Republican Party has eschewed traditional norms and exercised raw power to obtain its desired results.   Examples include impeaching President Clinton essentially over lying about sex, refusing to allow President Obama to fill Justice Scalia's Supreme Court seat ostensibly because it became vacant in an election year, voting to advance Justice Coney-Barrett to the Court even though it was an election year, using the filibuster to stop Obama's lower court appointees but abolishing it to put Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and playing chicken with debt ceiling increases anytime a Democrat is in the White House (but not otherwise).

These changes have had electoral consequences for both parties.  

For the Democrats, and even though it has in the new Biden administration started to address the problem, its historic working-class base has eroded, especially among white, non-college educated men living in the mid-west and the south.  Its coalition is now composed of metropolitan and suburban voters and includes women and minorities.  Because its voters are  geographically concentrated, the party has a hard time winning in the south and the rural plains.

As for the other side . . .

Since 1992, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in every presidential election but one.  It has for the most part been non-competitive in big cities and surrounding suburbs.  It is largely a southern and plains state party. It's ability to win the presidency is a function of the electoral college (which made Bush II president in 2000 and Trump president in 2016).  Its ability to win or even be competitive in the Senate is a function of each state having two senators regardless of size. And its ability to win the House is based entirely on gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The two parties now have little to nothing in common.  

The Democrats attempt to govern the old-fashioned way.  They try to persuade independents and non-affiliated voters in an effort to create governing coalitions and pass laws.  The Republicans do no such thing. They appeal to their narrow base and otherwise divide and incite to get that base to the polls.  Other than supporting tax cuts for the super-wealthy, which they rely on to fund their political operation, and wrapping themselves in the flag that was desecrated on January 6, they invent problems that do not exist (e.g., anti-white racism, or the teaching of so-called Critical Race Theory or gender identity in grammar schools), all in an effort to create anger in and generate and retain the loyalty of working-class voters who get no benefit from their winner take-all economics. 

Some of their biggest personalities (e.g., Donald Trump or Marjorie Taylor Green) are preternaturally rude and regularly incite violence in an effort to get their way or cower their opposition. After 45, a genuine narcissist and pathological liar, it is hard to believe that any of his erstwhile supporters would now attack his successor as a "liar"  or "crazy". But their level of hypocrisy is off the charts, even for politicians. 

So . . .

What is the state of the union?

It is  schizophrenic.

On Tuesday night, playing to type, Governor Sanders bathed herself in the patriotism of former President Trump's 2019 Thanksgiving visit to the troops in Afghanistan, reporting that a soldier had yelled "Mr. President, I reenlisted in the military because of you." Left unsaid was that same soldier's reaction a little more than a year later when the president for whom he reenlisted incited an attempted coup to stay in the White House.  Otherwise, she pretended that an anti-white, trans-gendered, gerontocracy was destroying the freedom of millions of Americans by indoctrinating children, mandating vaccines and opening the southern border.  "I'm for freedom," she said, "[President Biden is] is for government control." 

None of this is true.

The border is not open. The notion that schools are teaching kids to be anti-white or change their sex is laughable.  And Covid is well contained, largely as a consequence of the (expired) mandates Sanders so blithely condemned.

In the meantime, unemployment is at an all-time low, inflation is coming down rather rapidly, wages are going up, domestic manufacturing is returning and the government is putting real money in the pockets of the middle classes with infrastructure spending, prescription drug relief, and expansions of Obamacare.

In truth, President Biden and Governor Sanders do not live in the same country.

Fortunately, however, the one Biden lives in . . .

Actually exists.