At The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, Paul Waldman makes a powerful case about why no infrastructure bill has yet emerged from the Trump presidency: a point that I think is essential to understanding the current state of American politics. He starts with a critique of the Post’s own reporting on the subject — specifically, a recent article on the current prospects for an infrastructure bill getting passed by Congress and signed by the president. Remarking on the article’s references to “partisan impasse” and “the capital’s infamous gridlock” as explanations for why no progress has been made, Waldman cuts to the chase and reminds us that the lack of movement on an infrastructure bill is rooted in deep and largely irreconcilable differences between the Democrats and Republicans both on this specific issue and in “the larger question of legislating and governing.” His is a point too often obscured in daily politics coverage: Republican goals for governance are limited, and indeed regressive: most of their agenda concerns restricting both the role of government and the rights of Americans. Meanwhile, the Democrats, as Republicans would agree, largely support an activist government that wants to increase social benefits like health care and education.
It may seem like Waldman is making a partisan point, but this is really just an indisputable statement of fact. One reason it’s so obscured, though, is that political coverage continues to identify bipartisan cooperation as the highest form of political achievement; another, as Waldman points out, is that politicians themselves continue to say that Washington gridlock is the problem, which will be fixed if you just election Politician A to go to the capital so that he or she can break the infernal logjam. It is not too much to say that President Trump himself made this argument during the 2016 campaign, every time he identified a problem that he alone would be able to solve.
On infrastructure specifically, Waldman points to a major distinction between Democrats and Republicans: “In simple terms, Democrats want to build infrastructure by building infrastructure, while Republicans want to mostly provide tax incentives to private corporations so they’ll build infrastructure from which those private entities can profit.” Lest you think this is exaggeration, I’d invite you to read in its entirety the Post article that sparked Waldman’s critique. While its “pox on both your houses” framing is flawed in the ways that Waldman pinpoints, the article in fact provides plenty of evidence to support his points about the Republican reluctance to fund things like bridges and broadband internet that help a modern nation go round. His underlying premise is that any pretensions that Trump has a governing philosophy meaningfully distinct from the Republican Party is more or less bunk, and hoo-boy, does the Post article show this.
First, the piece gathers some amazing commentary from Republican anti-tax powerhouse Grover Norquist. The mere presence of Norquist alone in the infrastructure debate is pretty decisive support for Waldman’s argument that the GOP is opposed to an affirmative role of government, seeing as Norquist is perhaps most famous for his line about wanting to shrink government down enough so that it can be drowned in a bathtub (an analogy whose violence and sadism are increasingly revealed to be among the proto-fascist antecedents to the Trump-led authoritarianism currently struggling to be born). But Norquist’s comments about why Trump would be right not to work with the Democrats on infrastructure highlight how nearly impossible cooperation between the two parties really is. Norquist accuses the Democrats of trying to “trick” the president into a tax increase proposal to fund the new spending, so that they could then use the tax hike as a cudgel to beat Trump and the GOP in 2020. In inimitable Norquistian hyperbole, he refers to this theoretical tax increase as “‘fingerprints on the murder weapon’ that would be used to convict Republicans in the next election” — for this GOP heavyweight, politics is apparently not war by other means, but a series of baroque murders for which one continually seeks to evade justice.
Particularly telling is the way that Trump, while having represented himself as someone who would be particularly effective on the infrastructure front, has basically retreated to the sanctity if not safety of the GOP’s anti-tax hilltop; the Post article notes that Trump echoed Norquist’s views in a Fox News interview, saying, “What they want me to do is say, ‘Well, what we’ll do is raise taxes, and we’ll do this and this and this,’ and then they’ll have a news conference, ‘See, Trump wants to raise taxes.’”
Of course, the Trump-GOP spin into authoritarianism and unapologetic governance on behalf of America’s uppermost classes involves far worse sins than hypocrisy and incompetence in keeping our bridges from falling down (though people being killed through entirely preventable infrastructure failures is pretty reprehensible). But infrastructure is an interesting issue because it goes to the heart of the fundamental incompetence of the party’s governing philosophy, such as it is. After all, how on earth is the American economy supposed to function without spending money on things like highways? As Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, puts it: “We have to talk about real revenues, which means some form of taxation in some way. You can’t do it with fairy dust.”
Yet fairy dust is apparently not just what the GOP seems to believe in, but has actually chosen to snort into its virtual gaping nostrils, inducing a pseudo-psychedelic trip for them and a waking nightmare for the rest of us. It’s as if they’ve embraced an imaginary capitalism, in which makers and innovators wave a wand and make jobs and growth happen, and that all the things that support a modern economy — not just infrastructure, but an educated workforce and a stable financial sector — just magically exist and have no need for further upkeep or improvement. I’m tempted to say it’s a strangely childlike or naive view, but the truth is that it’s more truly an embrace of a full-on cannibal capitalism, that sees nothing beyond the gains of the present moment, the future be damned (witness the party’s indifference to climate change for the ultimate example).
So the Waldman piece is spot-on about a basic point of American politics that keeps getting lost — that on basic ideas of why government exists, the two parties are as far apart as can be — but to be honest, the reason it truly grabbed my attention is because it helped clarify for me the media’s continuous lack of appropriate context for covering both the Trump presidency and current American politics more broadly. The Post article in question falls down in a major way by framing the infrastructure stalemate as simply another example of quarrelsome politicos failing to reach an achievable consensus (even as it provides ample evidence of why this consensus is hardly achievable); but taking another step back, you can see that it also sidesteps at least three equally crucial frames: 1) the overall chaos and incompetence of the Trump presidency; 2) the great degree to which the president’s energy has been taken up by evading responsibility for his bad deeds in the 2016 election; and 3) the president’s obsessive focus on immigration and border security as the pre-eminent issue both for the U.S. economy and for his re-election in 2020.
The inadequate contextualization of news coverage appropriate to the moment finds its analogue in the dilemma facing the Democrats in how to deal with Trump: fight him tooth and nail, up to and including impeachment, or work with him? The infrastructure dialogue between the Democratic leadership and the president brings these two threads together, as the most recent outcome was the president’s declaration that infrastructure legislation would not move forward unless the Democrats swore off further investigations of his administration. In this case, of course, the philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats would seem to be secondary to the larger political conflict between Trump and the Democrats; but it’s important to note that Trump’s ultimatum only seems reasonable if you choose to pretend that absent the Trump administration’s various illicit activities, the two parties might find common ground. Ignoring this fact makes Trump seem somewhat reasonable — he just wants to get to the people’s business, if those darned Dems would let him! — but in fact Trump’s embrace of Republican orthodoxy on taxes and spending is already putting agreement far out of reach.
The sheer number of disconnects — between the GOP and the Democrats on basic ideas of why government exists; in the enduring propensity of politicians from both parties to proclaim an undying faith in the bipartisan ideal; in the unwillingness or inability of the media to adequately report these partisan differences; between Trump’s increasingly lawless presidency and the idea that politics as usual can still proceed; in the Democrats’ inability to decide on whether they still want to work with Trump or to impeach him — combine to create a daily atmosphere of dissonance and frequent incomprehensibility that largely serves to hide the radicalism of the GOP and excuse the inadequate Democratic response to our era of political crisis. Add in the matter of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russians, and the president’s subsequent obstruction of justice, and you get a fuller sense still of why many people wish to believe that it is all still politics as usual, and why this denial is increasingly part of our collective political problem.