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?
It is not part of any larger global trend. We’re not seeing similar movements in other developed nations.
Isn’t Cameron trying to privatize the NHS?
Yeah, how’s that going?
A backdoor attempt that does some privitization of the National Health Service doesn’t compare with the know-nothingness we’re facing here in the States.
Since the GOP wants to commit political suicide, then, we should help it to complete the task. Cite their extremism and their extreme negativity and let’s see if the voters want to push the clock back eighty years. Can you imagine campaigning on this kind of program?
What? Obama has sought to govern from the center right at every turn.
What? Obama has sought to govern from the center right at every turn.
MNPundit, I’d be interested to have you elaborate on your point.
From my perspective, to use the football field analogy, I see Obama regularly positioning himself on the 30 yard line (left side of your TV screen) and trying to get everyone up to the far 40 yard line to agree with him. Thus the consistent courting of Colin Powell, David Brooks, Arlen Specter, Jon Huntsman, Olympia Snowe, etc.
I find it helpful (in small doses) to try to understand what’s going on in the heads of people like the House Republicans and the new Republican governors. Don’t they realize they didn’t get elected to indulge their inner crazy desires? If they’re such smart politicians how do they take the opportunity presented to them by last fall’s elections and so quickly alienate 2/3 of the public?
I think part of the answer is that Obama has picked off a significant chunk of moderate Republicans so the conservatives are left talking to themselves in an echo chamber.
I think another part (this gets into some speculative psychologizing on my part, so consider yourself forewarned) is what the sociologists used to (and perhaps still do) call status anxiety. In this case, a bunch of relatively well-off, older, straight white men in a country where there’s a growing number of darker-skinned folk (not just in the city, but now moving into the suburbs too!), gays not only out of the closet but getting married, women increasingly well-educated and independent. All those guys who believed they “made it on their own” are at least indirectly confronted with the fact that they made it at least partly because of their genes and who their parents were—and those factors don’t matter as much as they did 30 years ago.
Where would this lead us…to some convoluted form of N Korea’s rule where the people of the nation are starving, ill educated, beaten down…with all monies going toward a brightly shining military parading before the Koch brothers?
You said it! That’s exactly where.
Consider this: 62 freshman seats in the GOP-controlled House were won with substantial contributions from the Koch brothers organization Americans for Prosperity. Those 62 members of Congress and the longer-term GOP folks who got AfP money are covering Boehner’s right flank and “dragging him to the Tea Party position”. And they can do that because of the threat of that generous AfP money being shut off and members of Congress being primaried with new folks bought with that money.
The opinions of the Koch brothers now dominate the Republican Party; there are other donors but they are following the Koch brothers’ lead.
They don’t want to go back to anywhere. They want to dismantled all parts of the federal, state, and local governments that do not serve their private interests. And their private interests are predominately in the extractive (oil, minerals, timber) and chemical industries. The US military is seen by them as their private army, navy, and air force.
But…they want ordinary folks, who have no protection for their incomes and futures, to subsidized the government agencies that serve their interests.
This is not really going back to anything; it surpasses the wildest dreams of the robber barons. This is the opening battle to determine what institutions have global domination going forward. The options in principle are: global civil society, global transnational corporations, and global political institutions. And it about which players are going to have dominance in the global institution that holds power. The Kochs and Rupert Murdoch are staking huge claims for themselves in a system of global conglomerate corporations.
In policy, it is going back to 1895. Pre-trust-busting, pre-public-education, the point of institutionalizing Jim Crow laws, the period before any serious labor laws, the era of child labor, the era of sentimental religious piety and the origins of entrepreneurial fire-and-brimstone preachers, the era in which an oil executive underwrote a set of Sunday school lesson plans called “The Fundamentals of the Christian Faith”. An era of prayer in public schools and celebration of American as a Christian nation bringing light to the heathen through Christian missions to India, China, and Africa.
But the intent is not nostalgic.
And the distance from public opinion indicates that this is the opening shot of a media campaign that is going to swamp the US for the next 19 months. For as we have found for years with FoxNews, consensus can be manufactured if you put enough media bucks into the task.
Representative government is seriously broken, and what we have left is a one-dollar, one-vote system. And that means that the top 400 families have a majority voice, having more dollars than half of everyone else.
An excellent article, Booman. The problem, as I see it, is the media’s relentless pushing of the thesis that the government is broke and extreme measures are needed to save the economy. As I was waiting in line to vote yesterday, an old guy (probably ten years older than me, say mid-70’s) was complaining about union contracts causing Illinois budget mess. He was highly indignant that contracts provide for a 3% annual raise. I don’t know if they really do or not and didn’t want to argue at the polling place so I just said, “Then I guess management shouldn’t have signed that contract, shouldn’t they.”
It seems that (at least according to William Hogeland) the “divine right of owners” was baked into the U.S. Constitution. In the 20th century as investment was peddled to “individual investors”, that divine right devolved on management.
Isn’t that the assumption that your child of the Great Depression (born around 1935) who came of age in the era of Eisenhower (the era of the Organization Man) was arguing.
Thanks for the link to a very interesting site.
For another view of SS/Medicare recipients supporting cuts to the safety net see:Yahoo Finance : Ryan’s Hope
The yahoo comments are interesting too, but, as always, also a sad commentary on the state of American education, from economics to grammar.
Heh.