Hullabaloo

Thursday, April 26, 2012

 
Compassionate Randroid

by digby

This is the most interesting development in right wing framing I've seen in a while. Jamelle Bouie reports:

I’m not surprised that Michael Gerson, architect of “compassionate conservatism,” has convinced himself that this generation of Republican leaders is carrying on in his footsteps (via Mike Allen):

Obama’s overreach has also produced another conservative reaction – a Reform Conservatism. The key figure here is Paul Ryan … Its brain trust includes thinkers such as Yuval Levin, James Capretta and Peter Wehner. The reform movement … looks for ways to achieve the ends of the welfare state both through more private means and more efficient public means. … Speaker John Boehner has adopted Ryan’s reform approach as the de facto ideology of the House Republican majority.

The Ryan budget does a lot of things. It flattens the tax code and dramatically cuts taxes for high-income earners. It caps federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product, and it calls for higher military spending. It turns Medicaid into a block grant for the states, and gradually shifts Medicare to a private insurance plan.

He goes on to show just how absurd it is to claim that Ryan's budget will "achieve the ends of the welfare state through more private means and efficient public means." It's ridiculous on its face. Conservative philosophy doesn't believe that the ends of welfare state are even desirable, much less achievable. And Ryan's budget shows absolutely no such thing. It is a blueprint for shrinking the welfare state, period. If there's any idea that there will be a consequential private "fix" it's left to a combination of fairy dust and crossed fingers. Presumably, once the yoke of "government dependency" is removed everyone will be "free" to go out a get one of those fabulous, good paying jobs that are going unfilled.

But it's quite brilliant, nonetheless. What they are doing is appropriating the DLC mantra of the 90s.

The DLC “seeks to define and galvanize popular support for a new public philosophy built on progressive ideals, mainstream values, and innovative, non-bureaucratic, market-based solutions.

This rhetoric is still floating around in the ether, just waiting for the "compassionate conservatives" to pick it up in time for the election season. If Paul Ryan puts his imprimatur on it, I have little doubt that they think they can persuade some swing voters to their side. The groundwork has been well-laid by the DLC.

They know very well that it's going to be a fools game for Democrats to try to refute this concept by citing the specifics of Paul Ryan's plans. They'll sound just like liberals did back in the 90s --- boring and hidebound and tied to policies that have been proven not to work. Everyone says that Paul Ryan is a Very Serious Person and he doesn't look at all like a hardcore extremist. Let the fresh-faced young people with new ideas have a chance!

This sort of message is one that Mitt Romney can carry much better than the ultra-conservative message of the primary campaign. He's a "private sector problem solver" who can shrink government while "innovating" with "incentives" to create jobs and protect the vulnerable. We've seen this movie before.


Update: This is rich. From Sarah Posner:

Rep. Paul Ryan has decided that he doesn't like Ayn Rand after all, because she's an icky atheist. He told National Review's Robert Costa, in advance of his speech today at Georgetown University:

"I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them," Ryan says. "They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman," a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. "But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist."

"I reject her philosophy," Ryan says firmly. "It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas," who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. "Don’t give me Ayn Rand," he says.

Ryan enjoys bantering about dusty novels, but it’s not really his bailiwick. Philosophy, he tells me, is critical, but politics is about more than armchair musing. "This gets to the Jack Kemp in me, for the lack of a better phrase," he says — crafting public policy from broad ideas. "How do you produce prosperity and upward mobility?" he asks. "How do you attack the root causes of poverty instead of simply treating its symptoms? And how do you avoid a crisis that is going to hurt the vulnerable the most — a debt crisis — from ever happening?"

First, about that "dusty novel" Atlas Shrugged: here's Ryan in a 2009 video he posted on his own Facebook page, in which he claims that contemporary America is "like we're living in an Ayn Rand novel" and that "Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did a fantastic job explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and that, to me, is what matters most."

And let's not forget this.

Sarah surmises that this is also a new right wing frame: Real Catholics don't just hate abortion, they hate "statism" too.


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digby 4/26/2012 09:45:00 AM