How to Fight Back and Win (For a Very Specific Value of "Winning")

Jump or Get Pushed

Obviously, it’s extremely difficult to know what the Trump administration is planning. Whatever it is, I don’t think we can stop it.

We might be able to slow it down, for now. We might be able to roll some or all of it back, for a few years. If we’re lucky. I don’t like our odds, but it could happen. None of it may matter very much though, because the next MAGA government — and there will be another MAGA government — will do this same shit all over again. A big chunk of the American electorate hates American government, and that doctrine has been channeled into hating federal employees and taxes, which are two things we can’t govern without. This is not a problem we’re going to be able to fix with messaging. I see three strong possibilities going forward:

1. We win big and make some big changes, like restructuring the Supreme Court and getting rid of the silent filibuster;

2. we win a little, lose a little, but trend toward losing, slowly but continuously, for years or;

3. we fight from the mat, and take some terrifying risks.

The first scenario seems less likely every year. The second one seems the most plausible. The last one opens the door to all kinds of crazy shit — some of which might improve our position. If we were ever to go for that third option, part of the process leading up to it will be trying to get our heads around what we stand to lose, and what we stand to gain.

So let’s talk, again, about money.

Every year, the American federal government spends vastly more than it takes in. It’s routine, and to some extent beneficial. For our purposes, the important thing about it is that it works against Democratic states, and in favor of Republican states, to a staggering degree. In 2022, every state that went for Trump in the 2024 election (except Utah) got more in federal spending than they paid in federal taxes. Which makes sense. Theoretically, if we’re engaged in deficit spending, every state should get back more than it puts in. But that’s not what happens generally, or in 2022 specifically. In spite of all that deficit spending, in 2022 eleven states actually got fewer federal dollars back than they paid in federal taxes: Utah, which went for Trump in 2024, and ten other states that all went for Harris in 2024. I just want to say that again: eleven states paid more than they got back in federal funds, and ten of them were Democratic.

Nine other Democratic states, that went for Harris in 2024, did receive more than they paid out. If you work out the total balance of payments, including the Democratic states that got more than they pay, then states that went for Harris got net payments totaling $93 billion more than they paid out in 2022. Which sounds like a lot of money until you look at the next column over and see that states that went for Trump in 2024 got $807 billion more than they contributed. Per capita, that works out to $666 per person in states that went for Harris in 2024, and $4,145 per person in states that went for Trump.

You have to look at those numbers from two angles. One is that Democratic states in general get a lot less. The other is that, while Republican states are getting $4,145 per person, in ten out of nineteen Democratic states they’re getting less than zero. Their per capita balance of payments is negative. California’s per capita balance of payments in 2022 (which, to reiterate, was a typical budget year) was $-2,129. They got $6,274 dollars less in federal tax revenue, per person, than the Republican average. The average Californian got $11,817 less than the average person from Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky, and $13,928 less than the average person from Joe Manchin’s West Virginia. Washington, New Jersey, and Massachusetts got screwed even worse. New York, whose balance of payments was still negative, at $-361 million, has traditionally been at the top of that list as well — but in 2022 they were still recovering from COVID (so to speak), so the absolute value of their negative balance was much smaller than it was in 2016, 2017, etc.

What all that means is that ten out of nineteen states that went for Harris in 2024 could theoretically save money if they could stop paying federal taxes entirely, and replace all federal expenditures with comparable state expenditures, funded by state taxes. If blue states formed a bloc, and the richer blue states paid for all the programs in the nine poorer blue states, all the Democratic states together would be taking on debt at 1/6th the current rate of the nation as a whole.

So we should do that. Which I know sounds insane, but check my thinking on this.

Public opinion about taxes and spending contains a nearly universal contradiction: everybody wants fewer taxes and more services, grants, and support. Most politicians spend their careers trying to navigate, or push back against that paradox. Republicans, on the other hand, have cultivated a cultural myth of being able to have their cake and eat it too; they alone can lower taxes, and maintain services. They do it by lowering taxes a little bit for everyone (lowering taxes a lot for the rich) then borrowing to provide their supporters with more money and services. They hide it behind thinly-disguised bigotry, that assigns the blame for the increase in the debt to minorities that tend to vote Democrat. Reagan had his welfare queen trope. These days, the balance of payments problem underlies a lot of the anger behind the attacks on “waste” in the federal government, but also the focus on immigration, and trans folks receiving subsidized care of any kind. That scapegoating is about creating a plausible narrative for why government spending is someone else’s fault.

Republican politicians have also built a persistent, unshakeable faith in the sneakiness and cupidity of everyone who isn’t a Republican. When Seattle builds a public transit system (even one overwhelmingly focused on providing services to suburbs), suburban and rural voters in Washington State start screaming about urban hipsters stealing tax dollars for a tree-hugging boondoggle — even though King County, where Seattle is located, gets about $0.45 back for every dollar they pay in state taxes. And, of course, even inside King County, suburban voters spend a lot of time hating on Seattle, which is the main economic driver of both the state and the county. The worst Republican hostility generally comes from this one gigantic stinking lie underneath their entire platform: the lie that says they’re the most important people, they power the economy, they make American great, and the only thing holding them back is [literally anyone and everyone else; African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, people with college degrees, liberals, government bureaucracy, whatever]. We have to be at fault. If we aren’t, then they’re the problem. And they almost literally can’t believe that.

Set aside for a minute that this is unfair, and bad policy, and all that. Consider what it implies about an end-game that would be acceptable for Republican voters. They believe they power the economy. They believe they pay more than their fair share of taxes. They believe Democrats, liberals, African Americans, immigrants, trans people, and people who watch MSNBC are responsible for the ever-growing national debt. So they believe the fair, equitable, and rational way to make that debt flatten, or start to be paid down, is to de-fund everything and everyone who isn’t them. The situation that works for them is one where they keep getting (at least) all the services and funding they currently have, while services and funding to Democrats get cut until the budget zeroes out. In 2022, that would have required a cut of federal spending in Democratic states to the tune of something like $900 billion — all while continuing to tax them at the same rate. That’s the endgame implied by this fairy-tale they can’t live without. Nothing else will satisfy them, and the thing that will satisfy them is impossible. So they’re just going to keep coming at us, forever.

Republican leaders are pursuing other agendas, and always have. Trump and Musk are up to some deeply evil world domination stuff. But they get votes from this perpetual motion machine of American indignation and entitlement that has been concentrated and refined specifically in the Republican Party. And they’ve been winning with it since at least 1980, and arguably since Nixon. It won’t stop because Republican voters can’t live with the truth, and the win they believe they deserve is mathematically impossible. The choice Democrats face really does seem to boil down to just continuing to let this get worse — or doing something radical to break the pattern.

Democrats have a number of potential avenues for creating radical change, quickly. Almost all of them involve steering into the skid: work with Republicans to dismember the federal government in one or more huge ways. There are a lot of options, once you drink the Kool-Aid.

To be clear, this is a horrific idea that would cause untold suffering in the 39 states that take in more federal tax dollars than they contribute. Even in the states that will theoretically benefit, hundreds of billions of dollars would be wasted in the transition period. The process of, for example, California funding their Department of Education, Department of Food and Agriculture, Department of Public Health, etc, at the levels necessary to maintain the services they currently get (albeit at a significant loss) from the federal government would involve massive opportunity costs including the abandonment of a century of sunk costs, and a net loss of efficiency. Even assuming we could somehow organize a blue bloc and share expenses for the poorer blue states, having nineteen Departments of Education in nineteen Democratic states, each doing their own state version of what the federal government used to do for them, creates a lot of collective administrative redundancy. Going from a federal model to a state-run model would involve loss of priceless institutional knowledge, an incredibly costly restructuring of payments and obligations — the list goes on and on. And on. I mean, really. It’d be a disaster. The disruptions it would cause would make Brexit look like a precision drill routine for the Ohio State Marching Band.

I’d never even suggest it, except that Republicans seem intent on bringing about those conditions regardless. If we jump before we’re pushed, we might at least be able to structure the break in a way that protects some of the things that matter to us. If we wait for them to do it, they’re just going to make the current numbers more lopsided, for as long as possible. Republicans are struggling to pass a budget with majorities in both houses because the extreme right of their party wants to just eviscerate the whole civil service. Those are the Tea Party candidates — those are the people who’ve been winning in primary challenges across the country, for fifteen years. They want to slash trillions, with a “t,” from the federal budget, and in addition to owning the White House, they’re capturing an ever-growing share of the party’s presence in Congress. They probably won’t be able to do it this time, but they’ve done a lot more damage than they did last time, and they’ll do even more next time. Meanwhile, the chaos they cause flushes away billions in squandered grants and wasted administrative overhead. Even when (or if) Democrats get control of anything again, we’ll spend all our energy just trying to clean up the mess the Republicans made.

The American center has a long history of hoping that a sufficiently large shock will drive the extremists towards the middle (the extremists, to be fair, cultivate the same hope: that a big shock will start a revolution). The American right couldn’t believe the American left pushed back against the PATRIOT Act. The American left couldn’t believe the American right pushed back against vaccine mandates. Democrats continue to act as if sufficiently disgusting behavior from Musk or Trump will drive Republican voters away from fascism, and back toward more reasonable, mainstream candidates like Mitt Romney. No such shift could ever last because the core of the Republican electorate is totally committed to believing an impossible lie. A populist fascist leader like Trump will always be able to pull votes away from an establishment Republican candidate. He’s won three primaries, against slates of establishment Republicans in all different colors shapes and sizes. He’s what Republican voters want, and the his successor will be the person who does the best impression of him onstage. They. Will. Not. Stop. So we have to figure out some way to give them what they think they want, and get what we want out of it in the process. The only thing I see that might work is to break up the federal government in an intentional way, manage policy locally, and try to drive federal spending as close to zero as we can get it. Because they’re winning. And they’ll keep winning until something breaks that can’t be fixed, or the shooting starts, or both.

I don’t like it either. But I don’t see any obvious flaws in the reasoning. I’ll leave comments open for a while. Change my mind. Please.