Greenwich, Conn. PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.Read the rest here.
Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.
Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.
It gets even better. I don't know what his positions are on all of the various issues of the day. But Stockman is speaking my language in this op-ed piece. If he ever ran for public office I'd have to give serious thought to voting for him.
Great piece, only Kristol's neo-cons aren't ex-Trotskyites. They're still Trotskyites all the way, they just hide it under the veneer of patriotism.
ReplyDeleteStockman doesn't know his history. Hoover is closer to FDR than the pantheon of Coolidge, Dwight and co.
ReplyDeleteIt's still the Progressive, elitist ideology started by TR and Woodrow Wilson, and now so embodied by Obama, against the rest of us.
Stephen
ReplyDeleteI think he was referring to Hoover's foreign policy. But yeah in domestic policies Hoover was a liberal Republican.
And in his upbringing, world-view and actions, Hoover was cut from the same elitist, Progressive cloth as Wilson, FDR, JFK, the Bushies, Clinton and Obama.
ReplyDeletePart of Clinton's enduring popularity is due in part to his continued ability to switch clothing and be from Arkansas from time to time.
I could dig Clinton's astroturf bedliner.
ReplyDeleteExactly what is "elitist"?
ReplyDeleteI greatly appreciated Stockman in his day. But this piece was a huge disappointment. He has clearly taken on the shrill tone so prevalent in today's media. And while he spent little time on Obamanomics he definately hinted that he's no fan of that either - I can't fathom that he would be. He did have some good points but I don't see those points in opposition to what Ryan is saying. It's a shame he had to lower himself to the crude attitudes of other commentators.
ReplyDeleteNikolaus