Concern Trolling: Go Truss Yourselves

 (Part 3, I think, of a continuing series)

Via Scottish Daily Express.

What might help Republicans’ prospects? Losing the House in November.

Hear me out, Republicans! It's true that, as Steve M was arguing the other day, you're not in anything like the awful position Britain's Conservatives are in—deeply unpopular, no doubt, but nowhere near as unpopular as the Tories in the short unhappy life of the Truss premiership, and besides, Democrats are pretty unpopular too.

Then again, one of the reasons you're not as unpopular as the Tories is that you haven't been in power for the last 12 years, and most particularly the last two years, when you've been locked out altogether, except for a Supreme Court determined to do the most unpopular things it can right away, as if they expected to be losing their own majority next year. You can't really be blamed for anything else, especially the thing you've managed to focus public attention on, the pump price of gasoline and the other price rises that go along with it. You can block almost anything you don't like in the Senate, and you have no responsibility for offering anything better. You can spend all your time on Twitter, like Ronny Jackson or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Gym Jordan, and not think about legislation at all. The setup is working for you.

Take over the House on November 8 and that starts changing. You're going to have to do something. It doesn't necessarily matter what—again, as Steve was saying, proposing an economic program as pro-rich crazy as the one Liz Truss proposed won't get the same kind of reaction here as it did in UK—but that's not the problem.

It wasn't even Liz Truss's problem, in spite of what pundits like Henry Olsen have been saying. The "mini-budget" eliminating the 45% top income tax bracket and partially paying for it with steep cuts in social services (accent on the "partially", because it wasn't in fact clearly paid for at all) was pretty bad, not so much for the popular rage it caused as the horror among economists and business owners, but what really destroyed her was the extraordinary fecklessness of her response to the rage and horror, the "U-turn" in which she quickly dropped the whole thing, like Emily Litella saying "Never mind." If it didn't matter, why on earth did she bring it up in the first place? If it did matter, why didn't she preserve some of it on her second try? Why did she fire the chancellor, as if to suggest that he tricked her into it? The tergiversation was what showed how totally unfit she was for the job.

House of Representatives Republicans have a problem very precisely analogous to that of the House of Commons Conservatives, personified in the figure of minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who will become something like a prime minister (a French one, not a British one) if his party wins the House, who is every bit as feckless, dim, uncharismatic, and overall mediocre as Truss. But that's just the personification: the real problem is the party.

British Conservatives have been choosing incompetent prime ministers for the past six years because they're unable to unite around a competent one—the divisions in the party (most clearly over Brexit) are just too deep. It hasn't been bad enough (until now) to lose them an election to the similarly divided Labour Party, but enough to prevent them from managing the country in any acceptable way—the public is finally starting to notice.

The US Republicans have been heading in the same direction since the 2010 midterms, when they gave President Obama the famous shellacking and installed John Boehner, who's not incompetent, as Speaker, and then proved incapable of accomplishing anything (especially Mitch McConnell's plan to "make Obama a one-term president") other than the endless bogus investigations of Hillary Clinton, as Boehner struggled with his "Freedom Caucus" and division over the culture war issues. When he finally gave up in 2015, the party turned to a much less plausible Speaker, the losing vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, even as they were ruling out all the plausible presidential candidates in favor of the most impossible ever and the culture war issues triumphed leaving Ryan even more incapable than Boehner had been. It wasn't bad enough to lose them an election until 2018, but when they did and Nancy Pelosi, fully prepared to be a real prime minister, returned to the Speakership, it made a Democratic victory in 2020 inevitable.

If Republicans take back the House this year as they did in 2010, they will be setting themselves up to lose the presidential election in 2024, not because they'll destroy Social Security and Medicare—even if they take the Senate and abolish the filibuster they still won't be able to override Biden's veto; more likely McConnell will keep the filibuster and establish some kind of détente with Biden, and the government will sort of stagger on, and Biden's major accomplishments of the past two years will survive. But McCarthy's role will diminish as the House devolves into 24/7 hearings on Hunter Biden and he's unable to muster votes from his unruly members and he won't last, and will be replaced by somebody as irresponsible as Newt Gingrich (or Boris Johnson, to get back to the UK analogy) or worse, as inflation ends and Chairman Powell's recession begins, and Republicans now have a big share of responsibility for rising unemployment, as they did for the slow economic gains in 2011-12.

While the struggle between the libertarians (who still dominate campaign funding) and "cultural conservatives" or semi-fascists for short (who dominate the electoral base) won't get any easier, and they'll end up nominating a predestined loser (Trump or DeSantis) for the presidency, while Democrats continue to be more unified than ever since 1936 or so, and Biden will win an almost easy reelection, as Obama did in 2012.

Whereas if you guys lose now, you'll have two more years of being able to ignore government and focus on Twitter, get your act together ,and get somewhere. I mean I'm just saying. I've got your best interests at heart.