I don’t much like Frum, but he’s 100 percent right on this and it’s worth reading. Nor is it all “Republican,” some of this is shared by a lot of Democrats. I’m going to summarize, since the Atlantic has a very limited amount of free views.
1) Lower taxation is the most important economic policy.
2) Covid is no big deal. Reopen, let people die, the numbers aren’t that big.
3) Climate change is either no big deal or can be dealt with with technology, it’s not worth spending money on.
4) China is the US’s enemy, and when China loses, the US wins, and vice-versa.
5) The post-war order is dead — NATO and the WTO. The EU is a rival, Britain and Japan are subordinates; Canada, Australia and Mexico are satraps (he says dependencies).
6) You deserve as much health care as you can afford.
7) Voting is a privilege, not a right, and can be restricted.
8) Anti-black racism is BS, it’s whites and Christians and so on who are discriminated against now.
9) Abortion rights need to go. (Interestingly, he dances around this one a bit, while stating the other mostly clearly.)
10) Secret money and conflicts of interest are no big deal.
11) The border wall is good, and a long delay in granting illegal immigrants rights is good.
12) The protests should be crushed by granting police more powers. (Dances around this a bit too.)
13) Trump and his surrogates acting up on Twitter and so is just a reaction to worse excesses of his critics.
If you have free articles left at the Atlantic, this is worth reading in full. My take is that it’s accurate; this is the real Republican platform. Frum says it is kept secret because while Republicans agree, most non-Republicans don’t. Remember that there are a lot of independents and non-voters.
All of these points are more or less known, and each point has been discussed by various people in detail, but what Frum has done is put them clearly and in one place. He’s a little obscure on abortion rights, BLM, and that the US has subjects, not dependencies.
The attitude to China is shared by Democratic elites. The attitude to the EU isn’t, though the UK is understood to be a lackey and Japan is the most important US ally after the UK. Until they get serious and get their own nukes and figure out a way to deal with their oil dependency issues, they can be considered subordinates.
Canada is scared of the US, the relationship isn’t of a child to a parent (well, not a non-abusive one), it is of a servant to a master. My fellow Canadians won’t like that, but it’s true. Mexico has an even worse relationship with its “master.” As for Australia, they’ve decided the master they have is better than the other possible master, which would be China, and they’re probably right.
It is also true that Democrats generally believe in low taxes as well. They don’t believe in them quite as much, but they do believe. They aren’t taking Covid that seriously, and while they mouth off about Climate Change, they have never done anything but accelerate it. Remember that Obama/Biden vastly increased fracking and bragged about it, and that Biden’s policy platform removed the pledge to end subsidies to oil companies.
As for health care, Democrats and Republicans aren’t that far apart. Democrats want to subsidize some for the poor and middle class, but they don’t want to end the fact that the quality and amount of care one receives is primarily based on the ability to pay, and that it is a market purchase.
With respect to BLM, Biden has promised to give police more money, saying it will be spent on anti-racism training, and so on. (That’s been done before, and you see the results.) Both parties want the police to have more money, not less.
Finally, while Democrats are nowhere near as bad as Trump on corruption and secret conflicts of interest, they are bad, very bad.
Frum’s done a real service here by spelling out Republican beliefs carefully.
What’s interesting, however, is the extent to which Democrats (the ones who run the party), agree. Democratic voters sometimes don’t (they want Medicare for all — at about 80 percent now), but what they say they want really isn’t relevant when they won’t vote for it in the primaries.
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There was a lot of furor over AOC speaking at the DNC. First, that she had only a minute, then that she didn’t “endorse” Biden.
The two most important consequences of this decision derive from the fact that Biden is old and almost certainly senile.
Biden was one of the key architects of the bankrupty bill, which made it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans.
