Inequality will drive the midterm elections
For Republicans, it is dangerous to focus too much on the moment — immigration reform and avoiding government shutdowns — when the more enduring threat to their grip on power are charges of insensitivity about inequality.
In a market economy, sometimes it is necessary to reward innovation and hard work, but too often class differences are abused by cynical politicians.
Inequality can be too extreme. Future prosperity is not well served when the children of the poor and working classes are trapped in dysfunctional communities and denied access to decent schools, universities and other means for escape.
Excessive public assistance and preferences dulls ambition and slows growth, which ultimately exacerbate inequality. In turn, those create greater opportunities for liberal politicians to preserve their power and positions by promising new confiscation of wealth and punishments on innocent productive citizens.
It is not inequality ordinary Americans dislike. They recognize the need to reward creativity and ambition but have contempt for unfair advantages. In particular, those bestowed by rich parents on children or politicians to campaign donors and demographic groups that vote in blocks for leaders who deliver reliably on their demands.
Rural and small-town America has been devastated by globalization and technological change, failing schools and poorly crafted free trade agreements. President Barack Obama responded with more handouts and flawed free trade deals.
The voice that candidate Donald Trump heard deep in the heartland was from disaffected and economically disenfranchised white voters. They are tired of politicians patronizing their plight, the liberal media denigrating their values, and intellectuals pushing global governance. Most importantly, they want jobs not handouts, opportunities not finger-pointing and guilt.
The GOP tax cut will make American-based businesses more competitive and lift economic growth a bit, but it will mostly raise prosperity on the two coasts and among communities served by top-flight universities — for example, Ann Arbor and the research triangle in North Carolina.
Overall, the Trump administration and GOP Congress — much like President George W. Bush and his GOP Congress before them — are hardly addressing the genuine concerns of the great mass of voters who put them in power. Yet, the clients and executive class of the liberal state see the GOP as an existential threat to their systems of privileges and persecution so carefully erected during the Clinton and Obama years.
The recent elections in Alabama and Virginia sent a clear message. The coalition that profits most from their insidious systems of entitlements and preferences so carefully erected by successive Democratic governments is energized to turn every election into a Dump Trump referendum and to turn out in great numbers, whereas the GOP base doesn’t have the same mojo.
Trump would do well to refocus his energies on disassembling the apparatus of political correctness in practice and implementing radical trade reforms, or reconcile to the GOP losing control of Congress in 2018 and the presidency in 2020.