Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Author:David Frum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2020-05-25T23:00:00+00:00

Churchill, though, was speaking to and for a society whose unity had been forged in the hardships of war. The American spirit of unity is dissolving—and with it, the willingness and ability of Americans to care for one another.

This dissolution has weakened the nation but strengthened the parties. Partisanship has become a much more powerful identity in the 2010s than at any time since the aftermath of the Civil War. The revenues of the two great parties have risen into the billions, as each fundraises off dislike of the other. Yet the excesses of partisanship lead the party into self-harm too.

Two examples.

The first is the Republican debacle in Kentucky in 2019. Kentucky has evolved into one of the brightest Red states. It is one of the least urbanized states east of the Mississippi. More than 40 percent of Kentucky households own guns. Kentucky elected a loudmouthed Trump-before-Trump governor in 2015. It elected a Republican supermajority in the Kentucky House of Representatives, the first Republican victory in the Kentucky lower house since 1921. Trump won the state by thirty points. On the eve of the 2019 vote, Republicans held every statewide office, including both US Senate seats.

Yet there was a warning ahead that Republicans should have discerned. No state had benefited more from the ACA than Kentucky. Four hundred and forty thousand Kentuckians gained coverage under the ACA; Kentucky’s uninsured rate tumbled from 20 percent in 2013 to 7.5 percent in 2015. In the state’s poor Appalachian counties, where Republicans won most overwhelmingly, the gains had been especially striking.

Republicans heedlessly used their triumphs in Kentucky elections to attack health coverage in the state. They requested and got waivers to ACA rules that enabled Governor Matt Bevin to shrink Medicaid and SCHIP enrollment by thirty-one thousand. He wrecked his own administration on that change. By 2018, a plurality of Kentuckians, 44 percent, approved of the ACA.16 Bevin soon found himself the most unpopular governor in the country—and a loser in November 2019.

The rollback of coverage threatens Republicans outside Kentucky too. Nationwide, Medicaid and SCHIP enrollment shrank by 1.73 million in 2017 and 2018.17 Between 2010 and 2016, the percentage of Americans with health insurance steadily rose; in 2017 and 2018, coverage declined. In the single year 2018, the number of Americans protected by health insurance dropped by 1.1 million.

Yet the Trump era also offered warnings to Democrats about their political blind spots.

Trump closed the Republican election campaign in November 2018 with two weeks of warnings about a caravan of would-be border crossers heading to the United States from Central America. Democrats dismissed Trump’s angry rhetoric as bigoted flimflam. But it worked. Democrats had a good election in 2018. But so did Republicans. In the big off-year elections of the past—1994, 2006—the losing party suffered a notable decline in support. Not so in 2018.

Republican candidates for the House in the disaster year 2018 together won more votes than they did in their mighty victory of 2010. Republicans failed to hold the House because Democrats showed up in even greater numbers: 9 million more in total.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.