What is a Loyal Opposition to Do?

You'll win so much you get tired of winning

I realize that no right wingers read my blog, but if they did I could imagine them protesting.  What if a Democrat is elected and wants to do something they see as genuinely harmful?  Does being a loyal opposition mean that we can't oppose what we see as harmful measures?  And my answer is of course, you should oppose whatever measures you see as bad.  But there are restraints on what is appropriate for a loyal opposition.  And, incidentally, this message is for my side as well.  Here are some suggestions:

Make peace with the New Deal

One of the Republican Party's deep underlying problems is that its donor class and its wonk/think tank class are committed, at least on paper, to the repeal of the New Deal, but that program has basically zero support among the voting public.  The Republican Party's response is to make a highly theoretical commitment to repeal all existing social programs but not press it too hard in the corridors of power, but instead make apocalyptic denunciations of any attempt at expansion.  Once Social Security was the end of all liberty and would place us on the road to a Communist tyranny.  When everyone settled in and started liking Social Security, it became tolerable, but Medicare and Medicaid definitely meant that freedom was lost.  When it turned out that liberty could survive Medicare and Medicaid, but Obamacare was Communist tyranny and meant T-4, death panels, mass murder of seniors, etc.  Well, Republican have failed to repeal Obamacare and appear to have made peace with it, but now anti-anti-Trumpers are warning that they will have no choice but to vote for Trump because a Democratic administration might add a public option.  Spare us!  None of this means that you have to agree to every expansion of the welfare state.  It just means stop treating every expansion as an apocalyptic battle with all liberty hanging in the balance and start treating it as an ordinary dispute.  

Accept that elections have consequences

This means that if the other party wins control of the Presidency and both houses of Congress, it will use its position to pass legislation.  This is perfectly normal, acceptable and reasonable.  Of course you are free to oppose it, to rally your voters against it, to urge everyone to call or write to oppose it, etc.  But, once again, accept that this is (usually) a normal policy dispute and not a matter of the survival of liberty.  Also be aware that if the other side wins the triple crown and you oppose its legislation, you will probably lose.  That does not mean that all is lost.  You may not be able to block the other side's legislative program altogether, but you may be able to blunt the most objectionable parts of it.  Just be careful how you spend your political capital.  What part of Obamacare did Republicans find most objectionable?  Two things, ultimately.  They ended up deciding the public option and the requirement that it cover end-of-life counseling.  And the Democrats did, ultimately, drop, these provisions.

What did the public find most objectionable?  Two things, ultimately.  First the high deductible, narrow network plans were not much use for people who do not use much healthcare.  Second, requiring that all insurance policies offer the same package meant that a lot of exiting policies were canceled.  It was Republicans' refusal to offer any cooperation to Obamas's executive overreach in offering some relief for people whose policies were cancelled.  If Republicans had made a realistic opposition, focusing on the harm to people whose policies would be cancelled, or shown a willingness to cooperate on this narrow issue, a lot of the resulting hardship might have been avoided.

Of course, Republicans might answer that the resulting hardship served them very well politically, which leads to the next point.

Sometimes you have to accept defeat and move on.

A Norman Ornstein article which, alas, I can no longer find, offers suggestions for what the losing party can do when legislation it opposed is enacted:

• It can see the repeal the legislation.  To do so, it will need either to control the Presidency and both houses of Congress or a veto-proof majority in both houses.
• It can seek to amend the legislation into an more acceptable form.  That might be doable without the triple crown or a veto-proof majority, but it will call for some bipartisan cooperation.
• It can seek to minimize the perceived harm in implementation.
• Or it can passively step back and leave implementation to the other party.

And, although Ornstein does not mention it, it can challenge the legislation as unconstitutional.  But in that case, it gets only one bite at the apple.  What is not acceptable is holding the budget and the debt ceiling hostage to force over legislation the other side considers unacceptable and the votes to block, or repeated, ever less plausible lawsuits to stop it, or outright sabotage.

Any country needs a certain stability of policy.  A country in which one party regularly nationalizes industry (say) and the other party denationalizes it, or one party builds a health insurance program and the other destroys it is going to be a ruin.

Offer a practical program that addresses real-world concerns.

I can see many Republicans responding with outrage.  This just means a one-way ratchet against them!  Doesn't it mean that Democrats will keep adding more and more programs, and regulations and regulatory agencies and Republicans can never repeal any of them?

To which I would answer, it may seem that way sometimes, but I don't think it is so simple. Republicans have had their share of victories that have stuck.  Our top marginal tax rate was 91% in the 1950's and 70% in the 1960's and '70's.  Ronald Reagan's major cuts brought it down only to 50%.  Our regulatory agencies once set all fares for trucks, trains, and airplanes.  European countries once had significant nationalized industry.  None of those seem at all likely to return.  So, no, you aren't stuck standing athwart history yelling stop. Sometimes you can win, and and make it stick.  Just not always.

What would I suggest for now?  I could see several possibilities.  Instead of denouncing all regulation as evil, how about focusing on which specific regulations on most damaging to small business and focus on repealing them?  

Are you frustrated that you lose voters as the country becomes more and more urban?  Then point out to those white, upscale professionals that one of the reasons housing prices in the city are so outrageous are all the land use regulations.  

Are you frustrated the black voters keep following the Democrats?  Then look seriously at Black Lives Matter and see some of its libertarian potential.  You are right that actual police killings of civilians are rare and almost always more complex than they appear at first sight.  But killings are the tip of the iceberg.  Much of the real frustration is with the whole practice of for-profit policing.  So point out that having more regulations than you can ever enforce invites a discriminatory enforcement and discuss the advantages of fewer regulations.  And attacking for-profit policing can be an effective way to starve the beast at a municipal level -- reducing fines undercuts city revenue for services.

Global warming is the biggest issue facing us today.  The fires on the West Coast and flooding on the Gulf Coast are signs of worse to come if we don't stop it.  I believe many conservatives are right in saying that liberals are using fighting global warming as an excuse to impose their own favored lifestyle.  But the alternative is not to say that global warming can't happen because your principles do not allow it, or that you would rather let the planet cook than accept any sort of government regulation of the economy.  The alternative is to find a way to fight global warming that is more congenial to conservative preferences.

This applies to our side, too.

Let's face it.  Our side does it, too.  Not so much in the corridors of power.  I haven't noticed Democrats creating any debt ceiling crises, and they have shown themselves willing to work with Donald Trump to offer economic relief, rather than hurting people for political advantage.

But our insistence in treating some things as absolutes allowing no compromise rather than normal policy disputes has caused its own problems.  Gay marriage is the obvious example.  We won on that.  Hurray!  But can we stop making gay marriage the sole marker of who is an is not a good person?  Can we stop treating anyone who ever opposed it as a social pariah?  And can we figure out some sort of compromise to allow people with genuine religious objection?  If you wouldn't for a Jewish or Muslim caterer to serve pork, if you wouldn't require a Muslim or Mormon caterer to serve alcohol, then neither should you require a caterer to serve a wedding that violates his/her religious convictions. There has got to be some reasonable accommodation that can be made.

And I won't even talk about the current insistence that gender is purely a state of mind completely unrelated to  biology, other than to say that if this view ever moves out of a few fashionable circles into the general public, expect a lot of resistance.