Simple Criticism Is Insufficient: Why Democrats Must Obstruct Mass Deportation
According to polling by Blueprint 2024 done after the November presidential election, voters think the top two priorities for the Democrats going forward should be inflation/prices (46%) and immigration (24%). This is consistent with previous exit polling by AP Votecast that the top two issues for voters were the economy (39%) and immigration (20%).
Because of poll results like these, there will be a strong temptation among Democrats to “do something” and create an excruciatingly detailed, comprehensive post-election immigration policy that will appease all the policy experts and have lots of bullet points. I admit that my own wonkish tendencies have temporarily seduced me along this path, but I have now come to the conclusion that it is better for Democrats to adopt a completely obstructionist policy of opposing the Republicans’ mass deportation policy in its entirety.
How the GOP Obstructionism Won Them Victory From Despair
In 1993, the GOP had just lost the presidency to Bill Clinton, a defeat that ousted them from the Oval Office after 12 years in power. In addition, Clinton had just proposed a sweeping health care reform package that had strong majority support. The Republicans could have developed an alternative health care proposal that was more market-oriented and in line with GOP economic policies, but instead, a memo from conservative intellectual William Kristol convinced GOP Congress members that it would be better to obstruct Clinton’s health care plan without offering any counterproposal in return.
According to Kristol’s memo,
Simple Criticism is Insufficient. Simple, green-eyeshades criticism of the plan–on the grounds that its numbers don’t add up (they don’t), or that it costs too much (it does), or that it will kill jobs and disrupt the economy (it will)–is fine so far as it goes. But in the current climate, such opposition only wins concessions, not surrender.
I would argue that the Democrats are in a completely analogous situation with respect to Trump’s mass deportation proposals. If anything, Kristol’s memo is even more applicable to the Democrats, because Kristol’s economic criticisms are even more true when applied to Trump’s deportation proposal. Far from hurting the GOP, Kristol’s obstructionism led to the Republicans capturing both houses of Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1994.
Another example of when the GOP successfully used obstructionism after a major electoral defeat occurred in 2008, after Barack Obama won the presidency in the wake of the Great Recession. In January 2009, before Barack Obama was even inaugurated, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell assembled GOP Senators at a retreat in West Virginia and laid out a “no-honeymoon strategy” of opposing anything the new president proposed. In the words of Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, “If he [Obama] was for it, we had to be against it.”
Although the strategy memo that Mitch McConnell circulated at that retreat has still not seen the light of day, former Senator Robert F. Bennett of Utah once went into greater detail about McConnell’s post-Obama strategy:
Mitch said, ‘We have a new president with an approval rating in the 70 percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that. And we wait for the time where the image has been damaged to the point where we can take him on.’
Once again, the Republicans were in a situation similar to the situation faced by Democrats now. Both Republicans in 2008 and Democrats in 2024 were in despair after a disappointing electoral defeat. Both Obama and Trump had successfully used speeches at large campaign rallies that energized new voters who hadn’t participated in the electoral system before. Similarly, both Obama and Trump were heralded by pundits and political scientists as the harbinger of a new political realignment. Trump assembled a completely new political coalition of racially resentful white working class voters, socially conservative minorities, and voters resentful about inflation who had not typically voted for the GOP before. Similarly, pundits circa 2008 used to hail Obama as the embodiment of a new “post-partisan” coalition of working-class minority voters, energized youth, and white-collar professionals who previously either didn’t vote or didn’t reliably vote for Democrats before. Yet, by obstructing everything that Obama proposed, the GOP as led by Mitch McConnell won back the House of Representatives, leaving Obama’s so-called post-partisan coalition much more fragile than it was before.
I am diametrically opposed to everything Mitch McConnell stands for, but I think he understands the basic lessons of Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government better than many political scientists. McConnell correctly reasoned that he could damage Obama simply removing the halo of bipartisanship from Obama’s proposals, and all he had to do to accomplish that was to withdraw his cooperation.
As Mitch McConnell later revealed in an interview with The Atlantic Monthly,
We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals. Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.
In this respect, I find Mitch McConnell’s assessment of how American politics works to be much more realistic than Kamala Harris’s strategy in the 2024 campaign of blaming Donald Trump for killing Biden’s bipartisan border bill. In her sole debate with Donald Trump, Harris criticized Trump “Because he’d prefer to run on a problem than fixing the problem.” In retrospect, I think this hurt Harris because it advanced Trump’s goals of defining the border as a more important “problem” than Trump’s obvious unfitness for office. In the televised debate, Harris tried to look tough by touting her proposal to fund technology to detect fentanyl at the border, but because Trump is so closely associated with the immigration issue, voters were more likely to believe the anti-fentanyl policy was Trump’s idea.
The median voter does not spend dissecting minuscule policy nuances distinguishing Republicans from Democrats. Anytime Democrats try to make a finely calibrated pivot to the right on immigration, it will be completely ignored in our broken media and information environment, because voters have this mental of Democrats = “soft”, Republicans = “tough” that mere facts won’t dislodge.
For these reasons, it is in the Democrats’ best interest that Trump’s mass deportation plans does not get Democratic cooperation, because if they do, this will lead the media to declare Trump’s deportation policy as “bipartisan” and it will make the policy seem less damaging and insane than it really is. It is highly likely that there will be massive negative economic consequences from Trump’s deportation plan, and the Democrats need to keep their “fingerprints” off the inevitable economic damage. According to a report by the American Immigration Council, mass deportation could lead to up to $1.8 trillion in losses to the economy, as well as losing over 10% of the workforce in both the agricultural sector and the construction sector.
How To Turn Trump’s Xenophobia Into His Achilles Heel
Donald Trump’s simplistic, xenophobic views about immigrants can be turned to Democrats’ advantage. On a psychological level, Donald Trump cares more about his hatreds than the economy. This places him at odds with the American electorate as a whole, who have consistently prioritized the economy and inflation as the #1 most important issue over immigration in polls both during and after the election. In the 2024 election, Trump’s focus on anti-immigrant hatreds did not hurt voters’ assessment of Trump’s ability to manage the economy, especially after the New York Times tried to pass off Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan seriously as a serious proposal to solve the affordable housing crisis.
Democrats often get into power after having to clean up a Republican mess (e.g., FDR after Hoover’s Great Depression, Carter after Watergate, Obama after the Great Recession), and there will be a temptation among Democrats to mitigate the economic problems that Trump’s mass deportation plan will cause. But I fear that we cannot dislodge anti-immigrant prejudices in the American mass public unless the median voter realizes that their anti-immigrant preferences inevitably lead to them hurting themselves economically, especially in the prices they incur at the grocery store.
The American public says inflation is their #1 concern, but Trump is ideologically and psychologically wedded to a mass deportation plan that will only make that inflation worse. As a result, I think opposing Trump’s immigration policy with no Democratic counterproposal (similar to how Kristol opposed Clinton or how McConnell opposed Obama) is the best way for the Democrats to demonstrate to the American public that Republicans cannot be trusted with management of the economy, even though voters have historically believed that Republicans are better at the economy than Democrats.
Donald Trump shamelessly benefited from the electorate’s amnesia about Trump’s mismanagement of the economy under the COVID-19 pandemic, but the upside of that is that electorate will eventually forget about inflation under Joe Biden as well. Instead of futilely trying to make Trump’s deportation policy more “reasonable,” Democrats should continue to obstruct and denounce Trump’s mass deportation policy by repetitively tying it to the increased inflation and economic calamity it will cause. We cannot reduce Trump’s popularity by attacking his cult of personality directly, but the Democrats can consistently hand Trump an “inventory of losses” that gradually weakens Trump and makes him look more like a “loser” in the eyes of his base.