The budget deal “negotiated” by Paul Ryan is a good example of why the GOP is struggling. The deal itself is mostly just some tinkering with minor elements of the overall budget. Spending does not change, taxes go up a tiny bit and some formula for hiking pensions is altered in a trivial way popular with people in the ruling class. This has the added benefit of allowing people claiming to be experts to get jobs in the bureaucracy, figuring how the new rules can be implemented. Regulation is a jobs program.
In reality, the reforms do nothing and the experts are just functionaries. The American system of government is designed to make change difficult even when the ruling class wants to make changes. When that intentionally sclerotic political system sits atop a massive continent-wide bureaucracy, change is damn near impossible. It’s like steering a super tanker with an oar. Maybe it can be nudged a bit, but the effects takes years for anyone to notice. When they are defending the status quo, change is impossible.
That’s the problem for the GOP. Historically, they have been the party of good management. They appeal to the middle class largely by promising stable, sensible management of the state. They are the squares. Radical change is not their thing. Even when it is their thing, like it was 30 years ago, it was more like the parents coming home to discover the remains of a house party. They make the kids clean up the mess and put the house back into its original order, or something close to it.
The trouble comes when a significant portion of their base has become radicalized. Guys like David Stockman and Rick Santelli make a living appealing to that growing segment of the population. Multiculturalism and globalism are creating two types of radicals in American politics. There are those who want to press the gas and drive society over the multicultural cliff, while another segment wants to grab the wheel and steer the car in another direction, without really knowing where to go or how to do it.
The Middle American Radical is restless. The country has been overrun by lunatics and they want something done about it. The trouble is the lunatics have a political party of their own called the Democrat Party. The MARs have tried over the decades to transform the GOP into a fighting force willing to take on the lunatics. The trouble with that is the GOP establishment is not radical. It is a collection of squares, chamber of commerce types and financial elites. Mitt Romney and John McCain are not radicals by any definition of the word. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are stay the course Republicans.
These folks know their constituency is not interested in radical change. They like things the way they are right now. Their constituents, of course, are the donors who bankroll their campaigns and the Republican Party. The donor class may be small in number, but they control most of the cash. You’ll note that the same people underwriting the GOP underwrite much of the Democrat Party and underwrite organizations promoting forever war in the Middle East. They are not interested in making any changes.
The Reagan Revolution was about rollback. In some important ways, the Left was pushed back, but in other more important ways, the Left prevailed. The MARs, being sensible people, accepted that you can’t win every fight. You come back another day and they did in 1994 with the Contract with America. They forced some reforms onto Clinton, but lost most fights. Again, win some lose some but live on to fight another day, which was supposed to happen when Bush was elected. That never happened.
Instead it was mostly a stalemate over foreign policy while the Left swept the field on the domestic side. The MARs began to question their allegiance to the GOP and started to walk away from the party. Mitt Romney lost because a whole lot of folks, supposedly in the GOP base, walked away. The ridiculousness of Mitt Romney, a liberal from a weird religious cult, being the standard bearer for a party that allegedly represents the interests of white people, is one of those things that will be studied for a long time.
That brings us back to the budget deal. Doing this deal is good tactics. As a party, the GOP needs to stand aside right now and let the clown show unfold. ObamaCare is a disaster that is cratering support for the Democrats. It is not going away either. In fact, it promises to get worse next year. That will impact the economy, no matter how much the BLS fakes the numbers. Sometime in the spring they can roll out a list of promises that are reasonable and current. Then they can sail to another midterm victory.
That’s the problem though. Good tactics are not what their voters want. This theater of the Left making demands, while the reasonable boys in the GOP meets them half way and finds a way to make it work is not selling. Those Middle American Radicals stayed home in 2012 in enough numbers to tank the election for Romney. In the 2016 election, they may just show up and vote for some outsider who promises to nuke the whole thing. At that point, the party is over for Conservative Inc and the party of squares.
