ScratchPad 2024-08-29: Why Republicans Today Have Zero Capability to Design Technocratic Policies That Do the Job...
A scratchpad…
PolicyGrifters: I think it began in the first half of the 1980s. Marty Feldstein as Ronald Reagan’s chief economist waged a mighty bureaucratic war of analysis and leak to try to get the Reagan administration and the Republican congressional caucuses to take the problem of the federal budget deficit that they had created seriously. He won—the eventual result was the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings PayGo budget-straitjacket legislative framework. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. James Baker and company brought down the hammer, convincingly establishing the dictum that in the future nobody who did that—nobody who did not fall in behind the policy and soldier—would have any standing or access within the Republican Party. And so the Republican Party lost its technocratic governor keeping their policy policies from going off the rails. And they have—first gradually, then suddenly—gotten to their current state of complete technocratic policy bankruptcy:
Matt Yglesias: The crank realignment is bad for everyone: ‘A stupid party + a bunch of biased institutions degrades epistemics across the board…. This optimizes their coalition for the electoral college, but it makes it harder for conservatives to actually marshal knowledge and govern the country. It’s striking that the GOP has never put together a halfway serious plan to fight inflation or reduce crime. A lot of Romney-Clinton voters could, conceivably, have been tempted back into the GOP ranks with a serious effort to persuade them that Republicans have genuine solutions to Biden-era problems. But the Trump-era Republican Party lacks the capacity to put forth such an effort. That’s not to say there are no capable people in the GOP. But they are few in number and increasingly marginalized in a conservative ecosystem that doesn’t care about experts or knowledge. For the last week, the entire right side of the political spectrum has been soaked with nonsensical conspiracy theories about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual revision of employment statistics. William Beach, who ran this agency under Trump, tried to explain what actually happened <https://x.com/beachww453/status/1826681499426717931?s=46&t=Axk8KmuO5xMOGsk-4UVWZw>, but there are no institutions on the right that amplify credible experts and marginalize conspiracists… <https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-crank-realignment-is-bad-for>