The Cantor Bombshell

Sitting down last night to a modest repast of grocery-store sushi, the computer monitor offered up a surprise nosegay. The serpent-like Eric Cantor, Republican House Majority Leader and one of the architects of the 2010 Tea Party revolution, had been resoundingly defeated in Virginia's 7th Congressional District primary by a Tea-Party backed Randolph-Macon econ professor, Dave Brat.

Cantor, who spearheaded most of the high-drama budget-based brinkmanship of the 112th and 113th Congresses -- the fiscal cliff, the sequester, the debt ceiling, the government shutdown last October -- ended up being hoisted by his own petard.

There will be much discussion in the next few days of what caused Cantor's undoing. For a member of the House leadership to lose a primary, and to lose by a landslide -- 10%, is almost unheard of. Jonathan Martin's frontpage synopsis, "Eric Cantor Defeated by David Brat, Tea Party Challenger, in G.O.P. Primary Upset," points to the Majority Leader's insufficiently hostile stance on immigration as the possible cause of his undoing. But what is apparent to me is that Cantor lost because he is seen as a fat cat wheeler dealer who represents an establishment that has failed to deliver anything at all for the average citizen:

Republicans were so sure that Mr. Cantor would win that most party leaders had been watching for how broad his victory would be. His defeat will reverberate in the capital and could have major implications for any chance of an immigration overhaul. 

Mr. Cantor, 51, who is in his seventh term, had sought to counter Mr. Brat’s accusations that he was too willing to compromise on immigration. The majority leader, who had raised $5.4 million for the campaign, blanketed Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District with fliers and television advertisements in which he emphasized that he opposed an “amnesty” policy. 

Apparently, Brat went hat in hand looking for help from the big ultra-conservative groups (without knowing for sure, I would imagine he talked to Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity) but got nowhere:

Mr. Brat had little help from national groups that have funded other Tea Party challengers. Instead, he relied mostly on state and local activists. 

Larry Nordvig, executive director of the Richmond Tea Party, said the national groups were not aware of “how much activity was going on underneath the surface down here and how large the ABC — Anybody But Cantor — mentality was.”

Jonathan Weisman, per usual, is the reporter to turn to (writing here with Jennifer Steinhauer) for the straight dope, "Cantor’s Loss a Bad Omen for Moderates":

One measure of the extraordinary defeat could be seen in the candidate’s finances. Since the beginning of last year, Mr. Cantor’s campaign had spent about $168,637 at steakhouses compared with the $200,000 his challenger, David Brat, had spent on his entire campaign. With Mr. Cantor out, members from solidly Republican states will almost certainly be vying for one of the top jobs, if not Mr. Boehner’s gavel. The current Republican leadership slate is filled with members from swing states where the pressure to moderate views on topics such as immigration looms.

What is going on here is the same thing as the European Parliament elections a couple weeks back; it is the"Ballad of a Thin Man." Seismic change is rumbling right under foot and the mainstream -- the prestige press, the establishment pols -- is not registering it. As Nancy Pelosi parties into the Georgetown night celebrating the the unexpected bonanza of Cantor's demise, the system continues its collapse.

What is maddening is that it is all so obvious. Capitalism is not spreading the wealth, producing employment. People are fed up, want change. Once again, Thomas Edsall has an excellent op-ed, "The Downward Ramp," that pretty much sums it up:

With the bursting of the tech bubble at the start of the 21st century, two decades of growth at the high end of the job market — once the province of college graduates with strong cognitive abilities — came to an abrupt halt, according to detailed studies of employment and investment patterns by three Canadian economists. We are still feeling the ramifications. 

But new evidence produced by Paul Beaudry and David A. Green of the University of British Columbia, and Ben Sand of York University, demonstrates that the collapse, between 1980 and 2000, of mid-level, mid-pay jobs — gutted by automation or foreign competition (and often both) — has now spread to the high-skill labor market. 

The U-shaped pattern of job growth characteristic of recent decades – strong at the top and bottom, but weak throughout the middle — has now become “a bit more like a downward ramp,” according to David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. who documented the decline in mid-level jobs in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Preliminary findings suggest that this trend is alarming in almost every respect. Just one example: the drying up of cognitively demanding jobs is having a cascade effect. College graduates are forced to take jobs beneath their level of educational training, moving into clerical and service positions instead of into finance and high tech. 

This cascade eliminates opportunities for those without college degrees who would otherwise fill those service and clerical jobs. These displaced workers are then forced to take even less demanding, less well-paying jobs, in a process that pushes everyone down. At the bottom, the unskilled are pushed out of the job market altogether.

Edsall's columns, focused on the politics of inequality and race, provide a codekey of the neoliberal paradigm.

Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a co-author of a major new study of employment patterns, wrote me that “Beaudry et al are finding exactly what we find.” The E.P.I. report, “Raising America’s Pay,” points out that “entry-level hourly wages fell on average for both female and male college graduates from 2000 to 2013 (8.1 percent among women and 6.7 percent among men).” 

These trends are certain to reverberate into the political system.

The downward pressures means that the problem of declining opportunity will now be a fact of life across nearly all classes.

But the political system, captured as it is by the 1%, is unable to address the problem. So you have the fringe parties kicking ass in the European elections and now the Cantor bombshell. Expect more bombs to drop.