What the GOP Field’s Rightward Move
Won’t Mean
Posted by Anthony Gregory on May 30,
2011
It happens in every presidential primary, and is for some reason more
emphasized among Republicans: In their case the candidates all “move to
the right” until the primary season ends, at which point the nominee
“moves to the center” to compete with the Democrat. The news media make a
big deal of this. It is Talking Points 101, as far as the chattering
commentators are concerned. You cannot be a talking head on news shows
without a command of this supposedly profound point.
And
so we are hearing now that the Republican candidates are embracing
their inner conservatives, to compete with one another over their base
voters. On climate change and Medicare reform, the candidates are moving
away from the centrist GOP positions touted in 2008 -- which isn’t so
difficult when you realize those positions were almost identical to those
of the Democrats.
A little political maneuvering is to be expected, and to the extent that
the candidates pander by offering up some policy prescriptions, even on a
handful of issues, that appear substantively different from Obama’s, we
can rest assured that by 2012 or, if the Republican wins, 2013, even
these distinctions on a half dozen token hot buttons, will not be as
sharp as they sound during the primary. We could say, however, that it is
encouraging to see some vocal challenges to the Democratic establishment
on some things.
Yet there are quite a few areas where the fiscal conservatism and anti-DC
spirit of the Tea Parties will not translate into nearly the type of
dissent from the status quo that we desperately need. Even if the primary
contest is largely about rhetoric, even on a purely rhetorical front, I
am not getting my hopes up about how far to the “right” these candidates
will go. With the exception of Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, both of whom
are not at all attempting to sound more typically “conservative” than
their opponents, I am not holding my breath to hear about real solutions
and principled proposals of the sort we really do need to hear. Some
examples:
Entitlements: We will hear a tiny bit about reform, block grants,
maybe even transitions toward eventual private accounts or phase-outs,
but we will not hear it emphasized loud enough that the entire
entitlement state is fundamentally insolvent. The unfunded liabilities
over the next few decades rival the collective annual income of the
world. This is a monstrosity that will collapse eventually, one way or
another. If we are going to smooth out the painful transition, we need to
be honest with young Americans that they should expect nothing from the
future welfare state, even as they are forced to pay to maintain even a
fraction of the payments promised by Washington over the next 20 years.
We can minimize the harm and inter-generational resentment if Washington
allows the young to opt out and slashes benefits as much as possible to
alleviate the stress. Medicare and Social Security are shell games that
will eventually tear us apart. The sooner we recognize it, the better.
But the media’s favorites in the Republican field will never admit it is
this bad.
The dollar crisis: The Fed has created trillions of dollars since
the 2008 financial crisis. It is not all liquid, thank goodnessit is
mostly sitting in the reserves of the once-troubled financial
institutions. If in the attempt to keep reinflating our bubble economy,
politicians and their banking elite buddies decide to actually flood the
market with this money, the economy will be sunk. Hyperinflation in the
technical sense may never come, despite what some fear, but even if it
doesn’t, we are looking at a potentially disastrous level of
stagflationever declining value of the dollar coupled with persistent
recession. This is all a consequence of the government’s boom and bust
economic planning, and especially the Federal Reserve printing press.
This all needs to be reined in, and the central bank eventually
abolished, to put a final end to the massively destructive business
cycle. This is as important as any other economic question, but don’t
expect Tim Pawlenty to sound the alarm.
The Bush years were socialistic too: It is easy for Republicans to
cheer on the free market and Constitution under a failed Democratic
administration, because they never have to define what they consider to
be a true alternative. They can attack Obama’s plans as being socialistic
and in tension with the Constitution, but they will almost never concede
that almost everything we have seen implemented under Bush and all modern
presidents falls under the same categories. So we will not hear about how
No Child Left Behind and all federal interventions in education enacted
beforehand have to go. We will not hear that Bush’s Medicare D was a
disaster that no conservative should have backed, and that we need to
abolish federal controls over health carethe FDA, licensing, subsidies
and regulationsif we want to avert the health care crisis. We will not
hear a comprehensive and thoughtful critique of the bailouts and stimulus
programs, since Republicans are about as guilty as Democrats. We will not
hear that the EPA needs to be abolished, not just “reined in,” as it was
created, after all, by a Republican president. We will not hear that the
entire regulatory state, including Bush’s egregious Sarbenes-Oxley
abomination, is strangling the economy and must be scrapped. Good luck
seeing Newt Gingrich even approach such issues with a ten-foot
pole.
Conservative red meat, medium rare: Even though conservative
voters can be counted on to claim the high ground of liberty on some key
issues, Republicans like Mitt Romney will never “pander” to them nearly
enough on these. We will hear a little lip service to the Second
Amendment, but not the truth: That all federal gun laws are
unconstitutional, all should be repealed, and in the meantime, none
should be enforced. Bush increased firearms prosecutions. A president
serious about gun rights would pardon all these people. We will not hear
the truth about how the feds have no business at all -- none --
interfering in faith and family, that the ATF should be shut down (as
Reagan promised in the 1970s), that the income tax has to be eliminated
entirely if we want America remotely to resemble a free country, and that
it’s none of Washington’s business to override the constitutionally
protected choices of how local communities govern themselves.
The police and military are flawed government bodies too: All of
the above are points that any red-blooded conservative should sympathize
with. The most thoughtful and consistent, however, will also take their
constitutional and anti-government critiques to some areas thought sacred
in Republican politics. The mainstream Republicans will never admit that:
Federal police have gotten out of control in many areas, the war on drugs
at the federal level is unconstitutional, unaffordable and unsustainable,
the Patriot Act and other war on terror programs compromise sacred
constitutional liberties, the TSA (a Bush program) should be abandoned
totally, the Fourth Amendment is as important as the Second, big Pentagon
expenditures are as wasteful as big domestic boondoggles, the empire is
bankrupting us even faster than most social programs loved by the
Democrats, and war is a government program with all the flaws of any
other. I wouldn’t expect any of this type of talk anyway, but it would be
refreshing if conservatives embraced the consistent application of
anti-statism and constitutional principle.
Even putting aside the controversial positions of the preceding
paragraph, the material in this post above should be the common fodder
even for Republican mainstream candidates, so long as they take the Tea
Party rhetoric seriously, at least in a primary when they are supposedly
“moving to the right.” Yet we will hear nothing principled about the evil
of the income tax, the socialism of the entire domestic welfare state,
the tyrannical nature of all federal gun laws, the need to scale DC back
far smaller than it was under Bush II, Bush I, Reagan or Nixon.
Goldwater, after all, thought government was way out of control in 1964,
and he was rightand this was before the Great Society hit its
height.
The “move to the right” will amount to nothing but unconvincing apologies
for past support for cap and trade and some lukewarm homages to free
enterprise, so long as the conservative voting base doesn’t demand better
of the Republicans. It is a shame that even during the short primary
period, when Republicans are supposed to feel free to sound as
“conservative” as they want, when we all know they’re not going to be
held to their promises anyway should they win the nomination much less
the presidency, when the media make the biggest deal of just how much
they cater to their rightwing base, they still sound almost the same as
Obama.
http://johndennisreport.com/federal-budget/what-the-gop-fields-rightward-move-wont-mean
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