That the most openly racist major party presidential nominee in at least a century chose to speak at historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was jarring enough on its own. The candidate who appeals to neo-Confederate extremists chose the location where the original Confederacy finally was broken as a backdrop. The candidate whose party ridiculously touts its long-since forfeited lineage from Abraham Lincoln seemed to need to pound the final nail in that legacy's coffin. The candidate whose vocabulary seems limited to a mere couple hundred words chose to contrast himself with the author of the most celebrated oration in American history. And where Lincoln invoked the better angels of our nature, Donald Trump whined, ranted, and threatened legal action against the growing number of courageous women who have stepped forward to testify that his bragging about molesting women was not mere words.
Trump at Gettysburg was one of the most cravenly bizarre moments in a campaign that has steadily redefined the concept. And yet somehow, appalling a spectacle as it was, that very spectacle overshadowed something deeper and more systemic about Trump's chosen location on that chosen date. Because almost exactly one week after that speech, which would be yesterday, comes the anniversary of something that the appalling spectacle of Trump's entire campaign has somehow managed to cast in the shadows. Something that has defined the Republican Party for three decades, and has defined the fundamental problems about one of the most fundamental national conversations we should be having about fundamental policy.
Donald Trump's extremism is the culmination of decades spent by the Republican Party enabling, catering to, and empowering extremism. He is not an anomaly. As I wrote back in February: Donald Trump is the candidate the Republicans deserve. He is the nominee the Republicans deserve. The entire party apparatus created the conditions that made Trump's nomination not merely possible, but inevitable. They built that. But even outside of that extremism, mainstream GOP doctrine has been dangerously wrong on the very issue the Republican Party has pretended to build its very brand on.
The Republicans and their media enablers long have cast the party as economically responsible and fiscally conservative. It's a false pretense. A lie. It's not only that the Republicans have no credibility on deficits, it's that their entire economic ideology is bankrupt. The extent of Trump's failures has prevented us from being able to talk about his party's policy failures. And its defining issue is a failure. And Lincoln's legendary words make that explicit. Because yesterday is a defining anniversary in our nation's history. Four score and seven years ago to the day, Republican anti-regulatory policies triggered a stock market crash that began the worst economic depression in U.S. history. Four score and seven years ago to the day was Black Tuesday: October 29, 1929.
In the third presidential debate, Donald Trump's unprecedented refusal to say he would accept the result of the coming election became the single headline. It even overshadowed what in any other year would have been the single headline: his calling the first ever woman to be nominated by a major party "such a nasty woman." And both of those moments allowed the recklessly normalizing pundits to claim that without them, Trump would have been okay. Those moments allowed those same media train wrecks to claim that moderator Chris Wallace did a good job. It allowed everyone to gloss right over Wallace's unchallenged framing of an economic question in the false terms of boilerplate right wing false economic narrative:
WALLACE: Secretary Clinton, I want to pursue your plan, because in many ways it is similar to the Obama stimulus plan in 2009, which has led to the slowest GDP growth since 1949.
TRUMP: Correct.
WALLACE: Thank you, sir.
Shorter Wallace: Thank you, sir, for validating my lie.
Wallace: You told me in July when we spoke that the problem is that President Obama didn’t get to do enough in what he was trying to do with his stimulus. So is your plan basically more — even more of the Obama stimulus?
CLINTON: Well, it’s a combination, Chris. And let me say that when you inherit the level of economic catastrophe that President Obama inherited, it was a real touch-and-go situation. I was in the Senate before I became secretary of state. I’ve never seen people as physically distraught as the Bush administration team was because of what was happening to the economy.
I personally believe that the steps that President Obama took saved the economy. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves for taking some very hard positions. But it was a terrible recession.
So now we’ve dug ourselves out of it, we’re standing, but we’re not yet running. So what I am proposing is that we invest from the middle out and the ground up, not the top down. That is not going to work.
That’s why what I have put forward doesn’t add a penny to the debt, but it is the kind of approach that will enable more people to take those new jobs, higher-paying jobs. We’re beginning to see some increase in incomes, and we certainly have had a long string of increasing jobs. We’ve got to do more to get the whole economy moving, and that’s what I believe I will be able to do.
That is the actual correct answer. The Bush-Cheney economic crisis caused a near economic collapse, and the Obama stimulus prevented that collapse from emulating what began four score and seven years ago. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote:
Then there was the discussion of economic policy. It was really bad – and inappropriate – when Wallace talked about the Obama stimulus, and simply asserted that it “led” to slow growth. That was editorializing, and bad economics.
The past eight years have actually been a huge experiment in macroeconomics. Saying that the Obama stimulus was followed by slow growth is a terrible argument: When you spend money to fight a terrible slump, weren’t any disappointments in performance arguably caused by whatever caused the slump, not by the rescue operation? But we have a lot of other evidence, all of which says that spending money in a slump helps the economy, and that the Obama stimulus was therefore the right thing to do.
Some of that evidence comes from the details of the stimulus itself, which had different effects in different regions – and that tells you a lot about how it worked, and the answer is that it was positive. Even more compelling is the anti-stimulus that came from austerity policies in Europe: Countries that slashed spending and raised taxes had much deeper slumps than those that didn’t.
Basically, events have strongly confirmed the Keynesian thinking that lay behind the Obama stimulus. The impression that it failed comes mainly from the fact that it wasn’t big enough to produce a rapid turnaround – and no, that’s not after-the-fact rationalization. I and others were practically screaming at the time that it wasn’t sufficiently large.
And the consequences of Europe's austerity have been devastating. So devastating that not only European government leaders, but even investors are beginning to call for austerity to end:
A growing number of investors and policy makers, seeing central banks as powerless to revive an anemic global economy, are championing a resurgence of fiscal spending.
A move away from central-bank-led policy, and toward the use of the government’s taxing-and-spending power to revive growth, would end a years-long economic era and could cause upheaval in financial markets.
Investors, among them bond king Bill Gross, once feared that government profligacy was a death knell for sovereign bonds. Back in 2011, Mr. Gross dumped U.S. Treasurys and declared that U.K. government bonds were resting “on a bed of nitroglycerine.”
Today, he is calling for more government spending.
As a nation, we are still held economic hostage to deficit fever, despite the continuing lessons from the Great Recession. Europe is still struggling while, despite Republican efforts to hamper it, the United States is in a real recovery:
Healthy job growth, coupled with moderate wage gains, lifted the median household income to $56,500 last year, up 5.2%, or $2,800, from 2014. It was the sharpest annual increase on record.
The nation's poverty rate fell to 13.5% in 2015 from 14.8% the year earlier, the largest single-year percentage drop since 1968.
And if the Republicans were to have their way, they would eagerly gut it. But none of this is new. With a brief interregnum in the afterglow of the New Deal, when they briefly embraced government spending and regulation and the economy continued to thrive, Republicans have for nearly a century championed government of, by, and for big business. They owned the White House between 1921 and the stock market crash now known as Black Tuesday and the subsequent economic catastrophe now known as the Great Depression. The economic ideology of those presidents was little different than that of mainstream Republicans today. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge cut taxes and federal spending and generally opposed federal regulation of businesses. Coolidge famously stated:
After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.
The only thing missing from Coolidge's understanding of American humanity was humanity. His Republican successor to the presidency, President Herbert Hoover, was aptly summarized by the legendary historian Richard Hofstadter:
Hoover's greatest handicap, however, lay not in his personal limitations but in his philosophy. He devoutly believed in the comparatively unregulated profit system under which he had grown up. He would not say that the system was invulnerable—it could, of course, be thrown out of gear by wrong thinking and unwise practices; he knew also that it was subject to cyclical fluctuations, which he felt could be diminished. But its basic principles were thoroughly "sound." If it were allowed to proceed with no more than a smack and a dab of government regulation here and there to prevent "abuses," it could not fail to minister more and more effectively to human welfare.
The results of this low tax, low spending, anti-regulatory paradigm are described in the opening paragraph and opening pages of Nick Taylor seminal work, titled American Made The Enduring Legacy of the WPA When FDR Put the Nation to Work:
In 1932, the United States faced the greatest crisis in its history short of war. The American industrial powerhouse that had emerged at the end of the Great War in Europe had fallen still. The stillness had progressed from the stock market, which had lost almost 90 percent of its value since the awful crash of October 1929, to the nation's factories, and from the factories to city avenues, small-town streets, and out across the countryside, where it reached farmers who were mired in a crisis of their own, caused by debt and drought. Workers from every walk of life were idle, one-quarter of the workforce—13 million men and women, though some estimates ranged to 15 million and above. As their resources dwindled, they descended a spiral from belt-tightening to despair to destitution. Millions lost their homes, wore their clothes into rags, and had to forage like animals for food: city dwellers fought for scraps in garbage cans and dumps, while in the country, the hungry scratched for roots and weeds.
This was the crisis President Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 to solve.
And conditions were not improving. Businesses continued to fail at an unprecedented rate, more than 50,000 since the crash, and the pace of these failures was accelerating. By 1932, more than 3,600 banks had closed, robbing millions of depositors of their life's savings. Every time a bank or business shut its doors, men and women lost their jobs and their buying power, which meant more business failures. As a result, industry was operating at a fraction of capacity, with production lines slowed or shut down entirely. In Birmingham, Alabama, 25,000 of the steel town's 108,000 salaried workers had no jobs at all, and another 75,000 were working reduced hours, for an average pay of $1.50 a day. Thirty percent of workers were jobless in Detroit, 40 percent in Chicago, 50 percent across the state of Colorado. New York City had 800,000 workers without jobs. Skilled laborers in the construction industry—carpenters, plumbers, and electricians—saw their jobs disappear as new construction vanished. White-collar professions were equally hard hit. Only half the nation's engineers had work. With few new homes, or commercial or public buildings, to design, architects' practices were decimated; only one in seven had jobs.
And then, against Republican opposition, came a raft of reforms including the New Deal. As explained by David Woolner of the Roosevelt Institute:
Consider, for example, just a few of the major initiatives that were introduced under FDR’s leadership: the banking and financial reforms that brought us the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and, until the passage of the Graham-Leach Act in 1999, the separation of commercial and investment banking. These monumental pieces of legislation brought much needed stability and transparency to our financial system and helped restore the American people’s faith in the banking and securities industries. What is more, they were not inspired by any deep-seated enmity for capitalism on FDR’s part. Rather, they were based on common sense principles derived from the hard-won lessons of the 1920s, which, above all else, taught the American people that “heedless self-interest” represents not just “bad morals,” as FDR put it, but also “bad economics.”
FDR also acted swiftly and effectively to help troubled American homeowners through such programs as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which refinanced approximately 20 percent of all urban mortgages in the country in less than three years; revolutionized the mortgage industry through the widespread use of the 30-year amortized mortgage; and led to the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA). His administration also pushed through the Social Security Act, which not only provided pensions for the aged, but also our nation’s first national system of unemployment insurance, two programs that remain critical to our social and economic wellbeing. Then there was the passage of the National Labor Relations Act that established the National Labor Relations Board and guaranteed the rights of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established maximum hours and minimum wages for all workers, unionized or not.
The Works Progress Administration was charged with putting people to work on projects that served the public good. At its peak, the WPA employed more than 3.3 million people, stimulating a trickle-up recovery and transforming the nation. Taylor writes:
The accomplishments of the WPA came to be measured in statistics: 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 civilian and military buildings, 800 airports built, improved, or enlarged, 700 miles of airport runways. It served almost 900 million hot lunches to schoolchildren and operated 1,500 nursery schools. It presented 225,000 concerts to audiences totaling 150 million, performed plays, vaudeville acts, puppet shows, and circuses before 30 million people, and produced almost 475,000 works of art and at least 276 full-length books and 701 pamphlets. Such numbers convey almost no impact by themselves. They are silent on the transformation of the infrastructure that occurred, the modernizing of the country, the malnutrition defeated and educational prospects gained, the new horizons opened.
Given the history both from four score and seven years ago and from comparing the different approaches and results between the Obama administration’s and Europe’s response to the Great Recession, this should not be a subject of debate. The Chris Wallaces of the world should not be able to get away with spinning lies. The extremism of a Donald Trump should not be all that condemns the Republican Party to electoral destruction. The entire Republican economic ideology is an embrace of failure, spanning nearly a century, encompassing the two most devastating economic collapses of that century. Trump’s bizarre and unintentionally ironic exercise in narcissistic symbolism of a week ago also unintentionally cast those failures in the spotlight. Because four score and seven years ago, the same Republican economic ideology that Republicans continue to try to impose triggered the Great Depression.