The media is building Ryan up as a serious thinker. Build him up even more, I say. Give him a Nobel Prize, like Obama's. Make him the face of the Republican Party. Progressives should want Ryan and Paul and the Cato Institute to define the next American right. That will ensure its minority status for decades.
Before Buckley and the movement conservatives took the right in another direction in the 1950s, this country had a libertarian, isolationist right, the right of Robert A. Taft and Alf Landon. Thanks to their opposition to the New Deal, U.S. entry in World War II and the Cold War, the libertarian isolationists turned the Republicans into the minority party between 1932 and 1968. The only Republican to be elected in that era, Dwight Eisenhower, ran for the presidency in 1952 to save the GOP from Taftian isolationism and dismissively rejected suggestions that the Republicans try to repeal New Deal programs like Social Security. (Source)
Lind makes the optimist's case that history is on the side of progressives. He says the neocons and the religious right are in eclipse and that the only potent force remaining in the old GOP coalition is the Randian Libertarians.
I'm not sure that he's right about the waning influence of the religious right or the neocons, but let's assume he is. Does it really matter? The question we need to ask is not whether more Americans lean toward the Dems or the GOP, but who holds the real power?
Think about it. Even if 75% of the electorate supported the Medicare buy-in or opposed the invasion of Iraq, do you think it would have made a significant difference? Do you think that even if such majorities wanted it, we'd be getting a single-payer system or that we would not have invaded? Voter preferences mean very little; insider preferences mean just about everything. The insiders decide what they want to do, do it, and assume, correctly, that the public will go along, no matter what its original opinions about it. And it's hard for me to see how that's going to change without some cataclysm that forces it to.
We live in a political culture in which majorities don't matter, because majorities aren't organized and focused enough to combat minorities who are organized and focused. That's why I think that the threat from the Right is more significant than Lind does. The New Deal period differed considerably from our situation now in that Government was more broadly perceived in the 1930s and into the 1960s to be on the side of the ordinary American. That's no longer the case–even, and for some especially, with Dems in power.
The impotent rage that so many people feel as a result is channeling rightward, and we're fools if that doesn't concern us.
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