Pick a topic from table 1 of p. 122 in the Grossman article and write about the stances of the parties-in-government on this issue. How the results in the table reflect that difference? That is, how are voters responding to what officials actually propose or accomplish? (h/t Danny)
Who will win the Democratic nomination in 2020? In your answer, consider similarities and differences between the 2016 and 2020 contests.
Propose and defend one reform of the presidential nomination process in either party. In your answer, spell out the goal of your reform. Are you trying to make the process more open or transparent? Or are you trying to encourage the nomination of a more electable candidate? What would opponents of this proposal say? What practical and political obstacles stand in the way?
Essays should reflect an understanding of class readings and discussions. Many resources, including CQ Weekly and Politics in America are at Honnold Library/Databases/CQ Library. You should check other sources as well. See:
Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page. Please submit papers as Word documents, not pdfs.
Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in the format of Chicago Manual of Style. Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space.
Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Return essays to the Sakai dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Friday, March 13. Papers will drop one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.
The Republican Party is best viewed as the agent of an ideological movement whose members are united by a common devotion to the principle of limited government. Conservatives maintain an innate skepticism about—or opposition to—the use of government action to address social problems and tend to evaluate candidates and policies on the basis of ideological congeniality.
While he and Nancy were in the kitchen, we sat in the library den. Opposite us were several large bookcases filled with books. I got up and began examining the titles. They were, almost without exception, works of history, economics, and politics, including such conservative classics as F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Whittaker Chambers's Witness and Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. There was also a book I had never read: The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, a nineteenth-century free-market economist. I was stunned. I had never read Bastiat. I opened several books -- they wer dog-eared and underlined.
I started reading NR, and it sang to me. They saw it the way I was seeing it: America is essentially good, the war is being fought for serious and valid reasons, the answer to every social ill is not necessarily a social program, when you let a government get too big you threaten your own liberties—-—and God is real as a rock. I was moved, and more. It assuaged a kind of loneliness. Later I found that half the people in the Reagan administration had as their first conservative friend that little magazine.
Back to Grossman and Hopkins:
In contrast, the Democratic Party is properly understood as a coalition of social groups whose interests are served by various forms of government activity. Most Democrats are committed less to the abstract cause of liberalism than to specific policies designed to benefit particular groups. Democratic-aligned constituencies make concrete programmatic demands on their representatives and, if the alternative is inaction, are often willing to compromise in order to win partial achievement of their objectives. Unlike the Republican Party, Democrats lack a powerful internal movement designed to impose ideological discipline on elected officials, which gives Democratic officeholders more freedom to maneuver pragmatically but also denies the party a common philosophy to direct its actions and a common cause around which to mobilize its supporters
Thomas Edsall: "Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil."
Only Wyoming has a majority of registered voters identifying themselves as Republicans; two states have a majority of registered voters identifying themselves as Democrats: Maryland and Kentucky (since 2010, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia have all seen their Democratic-majority registrations slip to just Democratic-pluralities).
For climate skeptics, it’s hard to compete with the youthful appeal of global phenomenon Greta Thunberg. But one U.S. think tank hopes it’s found an answer: the anti-Greta.
Naomi Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is blond, eloquent and European. But Naomi denounces “climate alarmism,” calls climate consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has even deployed Greta’s now famous “How dare you?” line to take on the mainstream German media.
“She’s a fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” said James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, an influential libertarian think tank in suburban Chicago that has the ear of the Trump administration.
In December, Heartland headlined Naomi at its forum at the UN climate conference in Madrid, where Taylor described her as “the star” of the show. Last month, Heartland hired Naomi as the young face of its campaign to question the scientific consensus that human activity is causing dangerous global warming.
“Naomi Seibt vs. Greta Thunberg: whom should we trust?” asked Heartland in a digital video. Later this week, Naomi is set to make her American debut at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a high-profile annual gathering just outside Washington of right-leaning activists.
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Heartland’s tactics amount to an acknowledgment that Greta has touched a nerve, especially among teens and young adults. Since launching her protest two years ago outside the Swedish parliament at age 15, Greta has sparked youth protests across the globe and in 2019 was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” the youngest to ever win the honor.
Bannon (p. 156): "The modern economics of the newsroom don't support big investigative reporting staffs. You wouldn't get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We're working as a support function."
Wynton Hall (p. 157): “We live and die by the media. Every time we're launching a book, I'll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we're going to place, every op-ed Peter's going to publish. ... Getting our message embedded in mainstream outlets is what gets us the biggest blast radius."
The IRA [Internet Research Agency, Russian troll farm in St. Petersberg] organized and promoted political rallies inside the United States while posing as U.S. grassroots activists. First, the IRA used one of its preexisting social media personas (Facebook groups and Twitter accounts, for example) to announce and promote the event. The
IRA then sent a large number of direct messages to followers of its social media account asking them to attend the event. From those who responded with interest in attending, the IRA then sought a U.S. person to serve as the event's coordinator. In most cases, the IRA account operator would tell the U.S. person that they personally could not attend the event due to some preexisting conflict or because they were somewhere else in the United States. The IRA then further promoted the event by contacting U.S. media about the event and directing them to speak with the coordinator. After the event, the IRA posted videos and photographs of the event to the IRA's social media accounts.
The Office identified dozens of U.S. rallies organized by the IRA. The earliest evidence of a rally was a "confederate rally" in November 2015. ... From June 2016 until the end of the presidential campaign, almost all of the U.S. rallies organized by the IRA focused on the U.S. election, often promoting the Trump Campaign and opposing the Clinton Campaign. Pro-Trump rallies included three in New York; a series of pro-Trump rallies in Florida in August 2016; and a series of pro-Trump rallies in October 2016 in Pennsylvania. The Florida rallies drew the attention of the Trump Campaign, which posted about the Miami rally on candidate Trump's Facebook account (as discussed below).
Across much of America, conservatives can mount powerful state legislative campaigns through three well-funded networks that operate as complements to one another. Think tanks affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN) spew out studies and prepare op-eds and legislative testimony. Paid state directors and staffers installed by Americans for Prosperity (AFP)sponsor bus tours, convene rallies and public forums, run radio and television ads, send mailers, and spur activists to contact legislators. And inside the legislatures themselves, many representatives and senators, especially Republicans, are members of ALEC, which invites them to serve alongside business lobbyists and right-wing advocacy groups on national task forces that prepare “model” bills that the legislators can advance at the state and local level, with assistance from ALEC staffers.
DLC fades with the disappearance of conservative Southern Democrats. Democratic share of Southern (CQ def) House seats 87th Congress (1961-62).....93.4% 103d Congress (1993-94)....61.6% 104th Congress (1994-96)...48.8% -- Gingrich 115th Congress (2017-217)..28.0%
Buckley v. Valeoand the part of the decision that allows for Bloomberg (Hershey 285):
2. Limitation on Expenditures by Candidates from Personal or Family Resources. The Act also sets limits on expenditures by a candidate "from his personal funds, or the personal funds of his immediate family, in connection with his campaigns during any calendar year." ... The primary governmental interest served by the Act -- the prevention of actual and apparent corruption of the political process -- does not support the limitation on the candidate's expenditure of his own personal funds. As the Court of Appeals concluded:" Manifestly, the core problem of avoiding undisclosed and undue influence on candidates from outside interests has lesser application when the monies involved come from the candidate himself or from his immediate family."171 U.S.App.D.C. at 206, 519 F.2d at 855. Indeed, the use of personal funds reduces the candidate's dependence on outside contributions, and thereby counteracts the coercive pressures and attendant risks of abuse to which the Act's contribution limitations are directed. [Footnote 59] The ancillary interest in equalizing the relative financial resources of candidates competing for elective office, therefore, provides the sole relevant rationale for § 608(a)'s expenditure ceiling. That interest is clearly not sufficient to justify the provision's infringement of fundamental First Amendment rights. First, the limitation may fail to promote financial equality among candidates. A candidate who spends less of his personal resources on his campaign may nonetheless outspend his rival as a result of more successful fundraising efforts. Indeed, a candidate's personal wealth may impede his efforts to persuade others that he needs their financial contributions or volunteer efforts to conduct an effective campaign. Second, and more fundamentally, the First Amendment simply cannot tolerate § 608(a)'s restriction upon the freedom of a candidate to speak without legislative limit on behalf of his own candidacy. We therefore hold that § 608(a)'s restriction on a candidate's personal expenditures is unconstitutional.
BCRA and McConnell v. FEC: "We are under no illusion that BCRA will be the last congressional statement on the matter. Money, like water, will always find an outlet.
Oil shocks (1973 OPEC and 1979 Iran) begat inflation, which begat rising nominal property values and bracket creep, which begat Prop 13 (1978) and Kemp-Roth
DLC (275) and Clintonism -- DLC fades with the disappearance of conservative Southern Democrats. Democratic share of Southern (CQ def) House seats 87th Congress (1961-62).....93.4% 103d Congress (1993-94)....61.6% 104th Congress (1994-96)...48.8% -- Gingrich 115th Congress (2017-217)..28.0%
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Present at the creation (Rosenfeld 190-191). Paul Weyrich, who founded Heritage and the Free Congress Foundation, spoke of the moment of inspiration in 1969, when he was a staffer for Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO).
In 1965, LBJ got Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. The effect was dramatic. In 1972, Rev. Andrew Young (D-Georgia) became the first African-American representative from the Deep South since Reconstruction. He later said:
“It used to be Southern politics was just ‘n-----’ politics, who could ‘outn-----’ the other—then you registered 10 to 15 percent in the community and folks would start saying ‘Nigra,’ and then you get 35 to 40 percent registered and it’s amazing how quick they learned how to say ‘Nee-grow,’ and now that we’ve got 50, 60, 70 percent of the black votes registered in the South, everybody’s proud to be associated with their black brothers and sisters.”
By 1966, howver, the civil rights consensus was already fraying:
Party regulars did not have a deep commitment to the old system (Rosenfeld 143). "Opponents of reform could not articulate a plausible argument for existing arrangements..." (144)
When you win big you can have anything you want for a time. You come home with that big landslide and there isn’t a one of them [in Congress] who’ll stand in your way. No, they’ll be glad to be aboard and to have their photograph taken with you and be part of all that victory. They’ll come along and they’ll give you almost everything you want for a while and then they’ll turn on you. They always do. They’ll lay in waiting, waiting for you to make a slip and you will. They’ll give you almost everything and then they’ll make you pay for it. They’ll get tired of all those columnists writing how smart you are and how weak they are and then the pendulum will swing back.
