The wages of extremism
Some spotty and not fully cogent thoughts on state level politics and Medicaid expansion
Over the weekend, the Texas Republican Party adopted its 2022 platform. It’s an extremist document. It states that “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice,” which dovetails with increasingly violent and even eliminationist rhetoric aimed at the LGBTQ community and coming from what were once fringe elements on the far right, but which are oozing ever closer to the mainstream of the party and its media and cultural ecosystem. The Texas GOP has now also openly declared itself insurrectionist, declaring “[w]e reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.” In this and other ways, the platform mirrors the intensifying extremism of other state Republican parties. These state level developments have been fed by Trumpism. But the state level GOPs are now incubating and nurturing ever greater depths of depravity, in a feedback loop that will prompt Republican politicians with national ambitions to try to catch the tiger by the tail and ride hate, incitement and violent reality denial to Congress and the White House. Texas has been home to many of the most influential right-wingers in modern American history. Still, it’s bracing that the country’s largest Republican-controlled state and its second biggest overall has now so openly embraced authoritarianism.
Leaving aside the dark and violent fantasies that GOP pronouncements like the Texas platform are mainstreaming, other important new developments are unfolding in the states at the policy level. As Perry Bacon, Jr, detailed in the Washington Post today, the result is that, from a policy perspective, we are increasingly living in two Americas. For example, among the 25 states now under unified Republican control, just since the start of 2021, a majority (not always the same ones) have passed into law provisions that further restrict abortion (making it all but impossible in states like Texas and Oklahoma), restricted or banned the teaching of “divisive” topics like race in American history, further restrictions on voting access, anti-trans provisions of various stripes and that old Republican favorite - cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations. For good measure, ten of the 25 have made legal the permitless carry of concealed weapons.
Bacon shows that the 16 states under unified Democratic control have generally passed a much less ambitions agenda, focused mainly on expanding abortion access and voting access and increasing earned income tax credits. One reason for the ambition gap is that some key Democratic priorities - like addressing climate change - are hard to do at the state level. Another is that Democrats had hoped that, however thin their margins, unified control of the national levers of political power would accomplish many of their goals. After the likely loss of that control in November, Bacon surmises that Democrats at the state level will become more aggressive. We’ll see.
Part of what’s so upsetting about the escalating rhetoric of extremism is the extent to which it is drowning out attention to the bread and butter issues that materially affect people’s lives. This is by design, of course. Though much maligned in some quarters, Thomas Frank’s characterization of the GOP’s dance with its supporters in his 2004 bestseller, What’s the Matter with Kansas ,is still apt. In the book’s most quoted passage, Frank wrote:
“The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”
Not all of this still holds, of course. Republican legislatures and, any day now, the Supreme Court will have delivered on their promises to restrict or effectively ban access to legal abortion. And critics pointed out that while GOP has long drawn support from the less well-educated, that is not synonymous with being badly off, economically speaking. Regardless, for my money, the substantial thrust of Frank’s missive still holds. Trans kids’ participation in athletic competitions not according to their sex assigned at birth and Critical Race Theory are the high profile issues GOP elites, like Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, are using to stir up animus and drive people to the polls. More stealthy are GOP efforts to at the state level to undermine voters’ preference for increasing government economic largesse.
One glaring example of that fact is the unconscionable resistance of numerous GOP dominated states to Medicaid expansion, the provision of Obamacare that extended the program to adults without children and greatly expanded coverage and funding more broadly. Medicaid expansion was a gift to the states, a largely federally funded program that would not only give more people access to affordable health care but would actually improve the balance sheets of state budgets and their economies overall. After years of court battles and with Obama out of the White House, some Republican holdouts relented. In some deep red states, like Idaho in 2018, that’s because voters overwhelmingly approved expansion in a ballot measure, over the objections of the state’s Republican leaders. But in 2022, a dozen states still have not accepted expansion. Most are under unified Republican control. A couple - Wisconsin and North Carolina (grrr) - have Democratic governors whose preference for expansion have been thwarted by majority Republican legislatures.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Medicaid expansion saves lives. Blocking expansion results in more people dying. Political leaders who have stood in its way have done so to flex political power for no other purpose than to punish those deemed unworthy of access to basic care. For various reasons that’s not the kind of behavior that registers as extremism. Nevertheless, the fact that Medicaid expansion didn’t long ago reach all fifty states is a crime, an unconscionable denial of basic decency and humanity that deserves more attention in our outrage-fueled political discourse