Doubling down on W (by Paul Krugman)
2015 was, of course, the year of Donald Trump, whose rise has inspired horror among establishment Republicans and, lets face it, glee call it Trumpenfreude among many Democrats. But Trumpism has in one way worked to the G.O.P. establishments advantage: it has distracted pundits and the press from the hard right turn even conventional Republican candidates have taken, a turn whose radicalism would have seemed implausible not long ago.
After all, you might have expected the debacle of George W. Bushs presidency a debacle not just for the nation, but for the Republican Party, which saw Democrats both take the White House and achieve some major parts of their agenda to inspire some reconsideration of W-type policies. What weve seen instead is a doubling down, a determination to take whatever didnt work from 2001 to 2008 and do it again, in a more extreme form.
Start with the example thats easiest to quantify, tax cuts.
Big tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy were the Bush administrations signature domestic policy. They were sold at the time as fiscally responsible, a matter of giving back part of the budget surplus America was running when W took office. (Alan Greenspan infamously argued that tax cuts were needed to avoid paying off federal debt too fast.) Since then, however, over-the-top warnings about the evils of debt and deficits have become a routine part of Republican rhetoric; and even conservatives occasionally admit that soaring inequality is a problem.
Moreover, its harder than ever to claim that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. At this point the private sector has added more than twice as many jobs under President Obama as it did over the corresponding period under W, a period that doesnt include the Great Recession. You might think, then, that Bush-style tax cuts would be out of favor. In fact, however, establishment candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are proposing much bigger tax cuts than W ever did. And independent analysis of Jebs proposal shows that its even more tilted toward the wealthy than anything his brother did.
What about other economic policies? The Bush administrations determination to dismantle any restraints on banks at one staged event, a top official used a chain saw on stacks of regulations looks remarkably bad in retrospect. But conservatives have bought into the thoroughly debunked narrative that government somehow caused the Great Recession, and all of the Republican candidates have declared their determination to repeal Dodd-Frank, the fairly modest set of regulations imposed after the financial crisis.
The only real move away from W-era economic ideology has been on monetary policy, and it has been a move toward right-wing fantasyland. True, Ted Cruz is alone among the top contenders in calling explicitly for a return to the gold standard you could say that he wants to Cruzify mankind upon a cross of gold. (Sorry.) But where the Bush administration once endorsed aggressive monetary policy to fight recessions, these days hostility toward the Feds efforts to help the economy is G.O.P. orthodoxy, even though the rights warnings about imminent inflation have been wrong again and again.
Last but not least, theres foreign policy. You might have imagined that the story of the Iraq war, where we were not, in fact, welcomed as liberators, where a vast expenditure of blood and treasure left the Middle East less stable than before, would inspire some caution about military force as the policy of first resort. Yet swagger-and-bomb posturing is more or less universal among the leading candidates. And lets not forget that back when Jeb Bush was considered the front-runner, he assembled a foreign-policy team literally dominated by the architects of debacle in Iraq.
Why does this matter? It's important to realize that not being Donald Trump doesnt make someone a moderate, or even halfway reasonable. The truth is that there are no moderates in the Republican primary, and being reasonable appears to be a disqualifying characteristic for anyone seeking the partys nod.
At: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/opinion/doubling-down-on-w.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
underpants
(182,777 posts)And, they have to play their greatest hits or the base will not follow them. They simplified their message to a point that doesn't allow them any room to move.
forest444
(5,902 posts)Their rhetoric becomes so inflexible, oversimplified, and extreme, that eventually none of its followers, or even leaders, truly "qualify." Like a snake eating its proverbial tail.
Coincidentally, this was my post number 1,984.
underpants
(182,777 posts)Congrats
CTyankee
(63,903 posts)forest444
(5,902 posts)there is a shining example to the world called the United States of America, whose humane sense of equality puts Scandinavia to shame, whose President is Bernie Sanders, whose Federal Reserve truly is an independent government body, and whose Chairman is Paul Krugman.
(well, a man dream can't he).
lastlib
(23,216 posts)Essentially, the current GOP theme is, it didn't work under GWB, so we have to do it more and bigger! (They're gambling that fewer than half of the voters will be able to figure out that more of a disastrous policy only produces greater disaster.) It's what I posited as Bush's Law back in the 1988 campaign, illustrated by Poppy Bush: "A politician will be successful in direct proportion to his ability to persuade a majority of voters that the bullshit he is feeding them is actually whipped cream."
Midnight Writer
(21,751 posts)Faith in the resurrection of the Smiling Saint Ronald Reagan. All that is needed is an invocation of the Great Saint's name, and millions of the faithful will flock in support.
No thought need be involved; just believe with all of your heart and you will surely be trickled down upon.
xocet
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