Steve Benen has a warning:
Those in the media who are gushing over [Ryan’s budget] plan as if it has something to do with fiscal responsibility aren’t just wrong, they’re missing the point on a fundamental level.
For Benen, Rep. Paul Ryan is trying to “repeal the 20th Century.” Jackie Calmes of the New York Times seems to agree, except that she more accurately places the repeal date at around 1930.
By its mix of deep cuts in taxes and domestic spending, and its shrinkage of the American safety net, the plan sets the conservative parameter of the debate over the nation’s budget priorities further to the right than at any time since the modern federal government began taking shape nearly eight decades ago.
An important difference between today’s Republican agenda and their agenda in 1930 is that today’s Republican Party is almost universally supportive of our huge defense sector and our role as international beat-cop. They may quibble about details, like the existence of the United Nations, but they aren’t isolationists and they aren’t looking to cut defense spending. Their libertarian bent is now fractured, with the party very much interested in legislating on social issues and not much interested in protecting any civil rights outside of gun ownership. But, on economic issues, they’re somewhere between William McKinley and Herbert Hoover.
They’ve arrived at a more radical place than even their harshest critics have predicted. There is simply no mandate or consensus for this kind of change. It is not part of any larger global trend. We’re not seeing similar movements in other developed nations.
The disconnect between what the Republicans are offering and ordinary Americans’ experience with and expectations from government couldn’t be much larger. It’s no wonder that the Obama administration is pleased:
Many Democratic strategists, including some inside the White House and the president’s re-election campaign, see mostly opportunity: Pleasantly surprised that Republicans have defined themselves so far to the right, they see a chance for Mr. Obama to stake out a middle ground.
From the beginning of his presidency, Obama has sought to build and hold a center-right majority. I don’t mean that he has sought to govern from the center-right. I mean that he has tried to pull people from the center-right into his coalition. These are life-long Republicans like Bob Gates, Colin Powell, Lincoln Chafee, Ray LaHood, or, in a failed attempt, Judd Gregg, who have been alienated by either the foreign policy of the neo-conservatives, the social intolerance, the anti-intellectualism, or even the economic policies of the modern Republican Party.
To counter this, the Republicans have sought to exploit Obama’s weakness with white working-class voters. We are all familiar with how this has been done, with Birtherism being just the most loony example. The GOP had fabulous success in the 2010 midterms, but in going after union workers and now seeking to attack Medicare, the Republicans are squandering their gains and opening a hole a eighteen-wheel truck can drive through.
They seem to think that they can press their advantage and shift the Overton Window to the right, but they haven’t considered their relative lack of power. Proposing something deeply unpopular and then failing to deliver on it doesn’t do a party any good. The most likely outcome is that you take a big hit at the polls without fundamentally changing society in the direction you want to go.
I don’t think a major political party has been this disconnected from the American public since 1964 when Barry Goldwater said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” The Democrats should revive that phrase. For the modern GOP, “extremism in the defense of ideology is no vice.” What percentage of the public wants to erase the last eighty years of progress?
