Paul Ryan will be remembered for many things — his rise to fame as President Barack Obama’s most famous critic as Congress; in 2012 to run for Vice President; his role leading national institutions, as adopted Donald trump as their candidate, and then President.
But he deserves to be remembered as the man who, more than anyone else, made the Republican party on the extreme libertarian vision of government in response to the election of Obama. By doing so, he ended up achieving little party priorities — and created a discovery that helped propel trump to the White house.
The success of Ryan was so full that it is difficult now to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way, and the other Republican policy made possible in the years of Obama. Instead, Ryanism dominate, and the only prominent Republican to vehemently reject turned out to be Donald trump.
In 2009, Obama was elected, along with a large margin in Congress by landslide margins — and this against the background of the financial crisis and the disastrous wars started under his Republican predecessors. The party was in crisis, to put it mildly. They just handed a stunning defeat, which was a direct consequence of the economic devastation at home and mass murder abroad, which grew out of the policy.
One group of conservative writers and political entrepreneurs proposed a sensible way forward. Using Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty as their sample, Ross Douthat and Reyhan Salam coined the term “Republicanism Sam’s club” in a 2005 article in the weekly Standard, and has elaborated this idea in the book 2008.
The Republican party, according to them, rose“, out of touch with its own base” on domestic policy. The party needs to “the big-government vision of conservatism’ that George Bush and Karl Rove have hinted, but failed to develop it and give it coherence and stability”.
This meant that the economic agenda which took the costs of globalization, some American workers seriously; that it embraced the cash payments and subsidies “for those who are providing care to children in the family”, and does not occupy the position of non-interference of the family alone; that deprioritized the reform of the social security system and made a “serious effort to expand health insurance for all Americans.”
Douthat and Salam was not alone in this recipe. A former employee of the Bush administration David Frum, in his 2008 book, Comeback, was offered a similar prescription. “In times past, Republicans have offered a clear and simple answer to questions about the future economic growth of America: lower taxes and reduce regulation”, – he wrote. “These answers have become more inadequate.”
An even more prominent voice, former chief Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, formulated a similar vision in heroic conservatism 2007. “From the Republicans headed toward important elections, [and] crude anti-government messages would be a political disaster,” Gerson wrote. “Campaigning about the dangers of the government while opponents say about health and education would seem to be petty, cold and boring.”
It as a responsible party respond to election, bruises and bumps: trying to determine where the message went wrong and adjust their policies to better fit the public mood. This mechanism is a huge reason why democracy is generally to respond to popular discontent. The reaction can only be part of one of the two major parties.
Given the predictable back-and-forth on the election win, both parties will be in power at some point, so if one of them breaks out of popular sentiment in a dramatic fashion that involves challenges to the government’s ability to respond adequately to public needs.
And from a comparative point of view, it is hardly unreasonable way to him. The Christian Democratic party, dominated in Europe with a similar Pro-business, socially conservative but a social state, and-adequate relation. As the United States has grown more ideologically divided between its participants and, thus, in a sense, more European — it would be natural for Republicans to emulate their colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic.
Non-interference agenda Ryan took over the party and led to disaster for him
Paul Ryan stood more or less opposite the recipe for the party. The problem with the Bush administration, its diagnosis should not be neglected middle class interests in favor of the policy of non-interference, but excessive pandering to big government and lack of loyalty to the dismantling of the welfare state.
The Ryan plan 2008 for America’s future, his first budget plan was a recipe for libertarian shock therapy is mostly used only of the Federal government. Medicare, Medicaid, and social security will be largely or completely privatized. Corporate income tax and all taxes on investments will be completely eliminated.
The whole point of the agenda Ryan was to dramatically cut taxes on the rich owners of capital and to pay for it, gutting the most popular programs in America to support seniors and the poor. He has no evident popularity outside of die-hard free marketers, who make up a vanishingly small part of the voters.
Surprisingly, the Republican party has wound up fully embracing this vision. As a member of the budget Committee ranking, and then Ryan chair, wound up the formulation of economic policy vision that the whole group took. Instead of running from him in 2012, fearing that Democrats wanted to cut his support for cuts to medicare, MITT Romney doubled Ryanism and chose him as my partner.
Not much of this vision became law, for the 2017 tax cuts, which, dramatic as they were, was far from the most ambitious of Ryan’s concept of the Tax code. And just like any choice of the party’s policy making, it is difficult to determine what role Ryanism plays in determining the fate of the party in the years of Obama. Romney lost in 2012, Yes, but the majority of applicants for current presidents to lose. Congressional Republicans gained in 2010 and 2014, but the opposition party almost always gets in between.
However, it is very difficult to make the argument that Ryanism helped the party and very easy to make an argument, not to hurt him. The Obama campaign ran attack focused on the Ryan budget in 2012, and the budget helped him to make his larger case that Romney was the rich man and the vulture capitalist, who would favor the wealthy at the expense of the middle class.
When it became clear that Romney denounced the “47 percent” of Americans who do not have positive Federal tax burden on income, the budget Ryan put the meat on the bones of the ensuing attacks of the Democrats. As the campaign progressed, more and more Republicans down-ballot candidates distanciruemsa from the Ryan budget or completely reject it for fear that it will doom them electorally.
Also significant is the fact that a successful Republican campaign 2010-2014 was not based on the Ryan budget. He was not seen as a convincing appeal to voters. Instead, in 2010, Republicans ocataves the airwaves with ads attacking Democrats for supporting cuts to medicare included in obamacare. They were barely is the fact that their budget guru, Ryan wanted even deeper cuts. In 2014, the final month or two of the campaign is not about economic issues, but the rise of ISIS and Ebola.
Another telling sign of impotence Ryanism election was the emergence of Donald trump. Unique among his Republican primary candidates, trump has promised to protect Social security and medicare (even Medicaid, too, in the first place), and violently attacked Republicans who wanted to cut those programs, as part of broader austerity measures.
Trump did not, of course, to fulfill that promise. And it seems that the dominant reason for his success in the primary (and in General) is that he successfully urged voters prejudices. But his heterodoxy on the right, of course, helped at least in something, especially with older voters.
Ryan suggested Republicans don’t need to sabotage yourself on the way
Imagine then, a world where the Republican party has embraced Ryan as his guru, where he took over the Christian Democratic faction in the party in 2009 and 2010. They proposed a healthcare plan that, while more market-oriented than Obamacare, still brought universal coverage for a serious illness.
They proposed to reduce payroll taxes, rather than corporate or income tax, and supported the child benefit to encourage families to have more children. They suggested the family leave and subsidies for stay-at-home moms and working moms who need the help of a child to show that they take work-life issues seriously.
That probably would not be enough to overcome the advantage of incumbency Obama in 2012. But it almost certainly would have helped on the margin. And it would pave the way for a few responsible and experienced candidate with this message, to win the main 2016, promising to protect the rights, anticipating the call from a deranged game-show host.
That would have been good on the merits. Political scientists have wondered in recent years how the democratic system in America never fully managed to tame inequality, despite the voters of the middle class waterlogging of the rich; they wondered how many had different Republican party. And this scenario would be good for a much narrower, because it would help to prevent the appearance of the trump.
Instead we got a Ryanism, and after Trumpism. This is the lasting legacy of Paul Ryan in politics, and it is very dark.
Sourse: vox.com
