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Their Lies Must Be Their Undoing
Running against the GOP culture of lying opens the door to every Republican vulnerability.
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Liberals perked up last week when House Speaker Mike Johnson let slip that Republicans plan to slash Social Security and Medicare if they manage to hold Congress¹.
These programs, "have to be adjusted and fixed,” Johnson said, adding, “we have a plan to do that next year, and it's critical."
Liberals always get excited when Republicans remind the public, in unguarded moments, that the raison d’etre of GOP politics is to funnel money up the income ladder, then use budgetary pressures as an excuse to cut and privatize entitlements.
It hits every sweet spot: The Republican view on these issues is terribly unpopular. Democratic views—ranging from protecting health and retirement safety nets to expanding them—are very popular. Anchoring discourse around distributive policy is politically advantageous relative to culture wars, and frees Democrats from the task of using power against Republicans. Much better and more pleasant to deploy political capital toward advancing forward-looking ideas than imposing direct political accountability on the GOP.
Once upon a time I believed this to be true, and even now I wish it were. In the past, politics has centered around this higher-minded stuff, and it seemed to benefit Democrats. Thus, the thinking goes, if we could yoke politics back to New Deal issues—where it was from the financial crisis through Barack Obama’s first term—Democrats could rebroaden their appeal and win elections the old fashioned way: with superior arguments about values and ideas.
All things equal, it’s better that Johnson said this than that he didn’t. That much is trivially true. But with the benefit of hindsight, I’d argue the advantage lies less in the fact that the Republican fiscal agenda is terribly unpopular, than that it’s often hidden, and Republicans usually lie about it.
A campaign anchored around the putrid Republican culture of lying (about policy, and elections, and everything else) presents the public a character critique with windows into every one of the GOP’s constituent liabilities: that its agenda is unpopular, that its leaders are corrupt, that its appeals are bigoted. By contrast, a campaign that brushes most of that stuff aside in order to present a simple contrast of policy proposals is likelier to fail.
