Share Tweet. Related Topics: Paul Ryan. Continue Reading. Latest Popular Videos. Education 20 hours ago. The Slick 2 days ago. Pandemic Nation 3 days ago. The Pay Gap 4 days ago. Latest News 7 days ago. The Slick 4 weeks ago. Latest News 3 weeks ago. Education 2 weeks ago. Not totally. You could say that Trump sort returned to what Bush did in his first term, which is to say tax cuts for the business wing and more spending for voters who like spending.
But there was a clear and I think irreversible turn away from the Romney-Ryan proposal to reform Social Security and basically end entitlement-friendly conservatism. I think Trump killed that completely. I think the race stuff helped him build his base in the early going, but later it became a liability.
But if you want to understand how Trump won over a certain kind of white working-class voter who used to vote Democrat, or a certain kind of middle-class Hispanic or African-American voter, I think the fusion of populism and Apprentice-style celebrity was very powerful.
Reactionaries can sometimes be right. The grievance question is hard, though. There are conservatives like Julius Krein, who edits the American Affairs journal, that are trying to make something substantive out of Trumpism. Krein, for example, arggues that populists need technocrats, too. You need people who know how the government works and can take the somewhat inchoate grievances of the populists and turn them into a policy agenda that actually answers those grievances.
The problem for Republicans is they represent the grievances of 48 percent of the country. But the grievances of a not-quite-majority is a very different thing. I think it is very likely that a member of his family runs. Like if you ask me for odds that either he or Don Jr. Absent an alternative center of gravity for the out-of-power party, I think Trump could have a lot of success just casting himself as the leader of the opposition and having parts of the RNC and other institutions like that in his corner, whether they want to be or not.
Then the question is whether he can run a Tea Party-style insurgency campaign against people who he feels were insufficiently loyal to him.
Whoever takes the helm for the GOP will have to reflect Trumpism one way or the other. Who is best positioned to fill that vacuum? Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all. That mechanism is a huge reason why democracies are at all responsive to popular discontent. And the responsiveness cannot be only on the part of one of the two major parties. And from a comparative perspective, this is hardly an unreasonable path to imagine. Christian Democratic parties have traditionally anchored the center-right in Europe with a similar pro-business, socially conservative, but welfare state-accepting attitude.
As the US grew more ideologically polarized between its parties — and thus, in a sense, more European — it would be natural for the Republicans to emulate their counterparts across the Atlantic. Paul Ryan stood for more or less the exact opposite prescription for the party. The problem with the Bush administration, by his diagnosis, was not a neglect of middle-class interests in favor of laissez-faire but an excessive indulgence of big government and insufficient devotion to dismantling the welfare state.
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security would be largely or entirely privatized. The corporate income tax and all taxes on investment would be eliminated entirely.
It had no obvious popular appeal outside die-hard free marketers, who make up a vanishingly small portion of the voting public. Amazingly, the Republican Party wound up embracing this vision comprehensively. As House Budget Committee ranking member and then chair, Ryan wound up designing the economic policy vision that his whole caucus embraced. Rather than running from it in for fear that Democrats would rip him for supporting cuts to Medicare, Mitt Romney doubled down on Ryanism and picked him as a running mate.
Romney lost in , yes, but most challengers to incumbent presidents lose. Congressional Republicans gained in and , but the opposition party almost always gains in midterms. As the campaign progressed, more and more Republican down-ballot candidates distanced themselves from the Ryan budget or rejected it entirely for fear that it would doom them electorally.
It was not seen as a compelling message to voters. Instead, in , Republicans blanketed the airwaves with ads attacking Democrats for supporting Medicare cuts included in Obamacare. They were hardly championing the fact that their budget guru, Ryan, wanted even bigger cuts. Unique among his Republican primary challengers, Trump promised to protect Social Security and Medicare even Medicaid too, at first , and savagely attacked Republicans who sought to cut those programs as part of a broader austerity effort.
0コメント