An Incomplete Thought

Last month, the Council on Foreign Relations hosted The Future of Democracy Symposium, the transcript of which is online. I was reading the transcript of the second session, Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession, and although there were several topics to ponder, a particular one caught my interest. An audience member, Matthias Matthijs, who had been on the previous panel, asked the following question:

"If we can believe demographers, by 2040 they predict about 70 percent of Americans are going to live in fifteen states and the other 30 (percent) are going to live in thirty-five states. So that’s—is that a problem for American democracy, going forward?" 

The question was answered by Brad DeLong, an economist whose blog I follow.

"You might well say that the thirty-five states that will elect seventy senators and yet have a decreasing share of the population, that these are overwhelming communities in states that are being left behind by the economic engine of American world globalizing value chain whatsit and that for a political logic to over represent those people to offset the fact that the economic logic is grossly under representing them might be something that is not totally unfair... 

"But this requires—this requires that the senator from Nebraska, say, actually be interested in policies that tend to bring money and wealth into the state of Nebraska rather than the senator from Nebraska cheering the nominations of Herman Cain and Steve Moore to the Federal Reserve Board on the grounds that it owns the establishment...

"It could well be a problem. If we had normal politics, if we had normal interest group Theodore Lowi polyarchy politics, it could be fine. But if it, indeed, becomes some kind of identity politics in which Ben Sasse wins reelection by owning the libs, in which whoever the current governor of Kentucky is—I forget—wins reelection by taking Medicaid away from his own voters, then it will be a serious problem.

This caught my interest because Oklahoma would be one of those 35 states, and the 2018 elections, in which we reelected our economically ignorant Senators (James Lankford actually gave credence to the idea that the Trump Tax cuts would pay for themselves,) also included the race for the Governor of Oklahoma.

Our two Republican candidates in the primary runoff were the Mayor of Oklahoma City, Mick Cornett, who had a strong economic record, having shared responsibility for changing Oklahoma City from a near ghost town to a thriving community, and Kevin Stitt, whose ads before the runoff were primarily about Mr Cornett not being fascist enough.
Naturally, Stitt won both the runoff and the general election because that's what Oklahomans care about.
I don't know what conclusions to draw from this (hence the title.) I wonder often when candidates run on populist positions whether they are true believers or just cynical.  During the general election, Stitt did not accept Mary Fallin's endorsement because he said his approach to solving the state's problems was going to be different than hers. (She, along with much of our legislature, believed that tax cuts create growth, which is why our schools and hospitals are are closing or struggling.)  Stitt's "different" approach was not to raise revenue, but to make government more efficient -- because, after all, if you're starving, the problem is not that you don't have enough food; it's that your pantry is badly organized. This appeals to the populists in our state, because taxes are worse than illness or ignorance.  Also, we gotta stick it to the libs.

Now, I don't have a real reason to doubt that Governor Stitt has Oklahoma's economic interests at heart, though I disagree with his stated philosophy.  The history is still unwritten, so we'll just have to see how it goes. But that one hyper-partsan moment of his campaign really bugs me.