Collective Conscious

Last year I noticed that Paul Ryan was finally being taken seriously:

Bet­ter that he is. He’s one of the more hon­est pro­po­nents of the true mean­ing of con­ser­vatism that the GOP has got in the bullpen. While I won’t debate the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples of his bud­get plan here, it’s a dis­cus­sion worth hav­ing and one that his ideas ought to be a part of. They should be brought to the pub­lic, too. A town hall full of seniors fac­ing the effec­tive abo­li­tion of Medicare and Social Secu­rity would greatly help the ide­o­log­i­cal trans­parency of the Repub­li­can Party. Dontcha think?

And soon Amer­ica will very much get their first real glimpse of the plan:

When con­gres­sional Repub­li­cans tapped House Bud­get Com­mit­tee Chair­man Paul Ryan (R-​​Wis.) to deliv­ered the GOP’s response to the State of the Union, it prob­a­bly struck the party as an uncon­tro­ver­sial move. The Wis­con­sin Repub­li­can is a mild-​​mannered law­maker, adored by the media, who’ll very likely avoid the Jindal-​​like embar­rass­ment we saw two years ago.

But Ryan’s selec­tion car­ries a broader sig­nif­i­cance. He is, after all, the archi­tect of a veryrad­i­cal bud­get “roadmap,” and the more Repub­li­can lead­ers rally behind Ryan, the more they take own­er­ship of his extrem­ist blueprint.

Indeed, this morn­ing, the perpetually-​​confused, House Major­ity Leader, Eric Can­tor (R-​​Va.), said on “Meet the Press” that “the direc­tion in which the roadmap goes is some­thing we need to embrace.”

The word­ing of that endorse­ment is obvi­ously pretty awk­ward, but the sen­ti­ment is unmis­tak­able. This strikes me as pretty impor­tant — before the midterm elec­tions, Eric Can­tor notably refused to endorse Paul Ryan’s roadmap. Now he thinks the bud­get blue­print is “some­thing we need to embrace.”

Ezra Klein noted the larger dan­gers the other day.

…The more they ele­vate Ryan, the more they ele­vate Ryan’s Roadmap. And that doc­u­ment is a time­bomb for them: It doesn’t just pri­va­tize Medicare, but it holds costs down by giv­ing seniors checks that won’t keep up with the price of health care. It pri­va­tizes much of Social Secu­rity. It cuts taxes on the rich while rais­ing them on many in the mid­dle class. […]

Putting Ryan up as the face of the party sug­gests they know how impor­tant it is to seem like they have a plan. With­out one, how­ever, they’re going to end up answer­ing for his.

Ezra wrote this on Fri­day, before Can­tor told a national tele­vi­sion audi­ence he agreed with the “direc­tion” of Ryan’s rad­i­cal plan.

In other words, we’re enter­ing the phase in which Repub­li­cans are no longer able to cred­i­bly dis­tance them­selves from Ryan’s roadmap, and they’re appar­ently pre­pared to stop even trying.

For Democ­rats, that’s actu­ally excel­lent news. For the bet­ter part of two years, the GOP hasn’t offered Dems any­thing but vague tar­gets to crit­i­cize, because Repub­li­cans didn’t have a pol­icy agenda with any meat on the bones. If, as Can­tor sees it, it’s time for his party to “embrace” the roadmap, then it changes the conversation.

And what a con­ver­sa­tion it is. Every fair-​​minded analy­sis makes clear that Ryan’s roadmap is a right-​​wing fan­tasy, slash­ing taxes on the rich while rais­ing taxes for every­one else. The plan calls for pri­va­tiz­ing Social Secu­rity and gut­ting Medicare, and fails mis­er­ably in its intended goal — cut­ting the deficit. As Paul Krug­man explained, the Ryan plan “is a fraud that makes no use­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the debate over America’s fis­cal future.”

When Repub­li­can can­di­dates embrace this plan to rad­i­cally trans­form gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions and Amer­i­cans’ way of life, they’re endors­ing a Repub­li­can vision of gov­ern­ing more extreme than any­thing we’ve seen in the mod­ern polit­i­cal era.

And as of this morn­ing, the House Major­ity Leader believes it’s a vision the Repub­li­can Party needs “needs to embrace.”

Let the debate begin. It’s one the GOP will lose, whether Can­tor real­izes it or not.

Clearly the GOP is seri­ous about imple­ment­ing their plan to reduce the US to a national-​​security sta­tism. Let’s see how clearly that comes through in Mr. Ryan’s speech.

Update: CBPP adds some extra analy­sis, call­ing the plan “reverse-​​Robin-​​Hood”.