I'm always a little confounded by your love of Paul Ryan. To turn his own quip, he's obtained personal success without being interesting or effective.
As a political leader, he did nothing of import even when he had the (voting) numbers to do so. No vision, no accomplishment on any front I can recall. Rather, he quit! Post-Congress, he seems like he's another DC swamp denizen.
I mean, he seems like a nice guy as far as politicians go, but if anything did enormous damage to the "cause" of being a normal, somewhat libertarian politician by getting into a position to have some real influence but then revealing himself as a do-nothing lightweight. In that respect, he might be an accurate icon of libertarians in general. Once it comes to practical governance, they don't seem to have any ability whatsoever.
"To turn his own quip, he's obtained personal success without being interesting or effective."
Right. What exactly did Mr. Serious Normie Ryan accomplish so effectively besides issue a bunch of think-tank-like slick-looking pamphlets? And he was able to leverage the fame (or favors done) deriving from the prominence of his position to get a seat on Fox's Board of Directors immediately after leaving congress. That's pretty much the definition of achieving personal success without having been effective in actually doing anything.
Ryan was successful in getting Trump's HUGE tax cuts thru a Rep controlled Congress - which helped a lot getting the US private sector to spend more of the dollars they had earned to make more stuff and jobs and profits in America. Tax cuts so as to continue deficit spending was better then cutting gov't spending would have been.
He totally failed to get money for Trump's Wall - like so many GOPe, he didn't really want to stop illegals.
The next Rep Speaker is likely to be far far more active, mostly for better.
I'm no fan of anti-liberal conservatism, but Brooks is making a good argument for these NatCon folks:
> The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone that was the dominating emotional register of this conference
It's isn't so much that Brooks is inadvetently making a case for NatCon in particular, as he is reciting just a few of a list of many facts that demonstrate the *total inadequacy* of "Late 20th Century Respectable American Republican Thinking" to the challenges of the present moment, especially in terms of being a workable platform to coordinate around serving the interests of a viable coalition of the various opponents of the agenda of the progressive juggernaut. An inadequacy not just in terms of ideas or in theory but of one proven by the experience of repeated defeats and failures.
It isn't so much that Brooks and Ryan and GOPe / Trump-averse folks are 'has-beens' in terms of lacking their former capabilities, it's that, at best, they remain wedded to defunct or obsolete notions of which ideas to champion and how to pursue them, even though those strategies and suggesstions were already easy prey for the progressives, and at worst they just surrendered and became apostates and converted to some aspect of that progressvisim without admitting as much.
This is the basis of the 'zombie' characterization, an aspersion that, for example, the Reformicons cast - I think unfairly - in the form of "Zombie Reaganism". Well, look, it's all Zombies all the way down now, and people are desperately grasping for some kind of salient and coherent reformulation that stands any chance of actually making any difference..
There is a lot of overuse of the word 'radicalization' lately, but I think it is actually the completely correct term to use to describe those "normie conservatives mugges by reality" when they realize just how bad things have gotten with every key institution in society, how much the deck has been rigged against them, and how absolutely unserious the party that purports to represent their interests is when it comes time to ask what they plan to do about any of this, the answer usually being nothing beyond more conspicuous but cynical whining.
So, sure, if you haven't genuinely woken up to the depth of the problem, radicals who have become justifiably extreme rejectionists of the status quo and who are willing to start burning things down and starting over with new institutions if that's what it takes, well, those people seem 'dark' and 'scary'! Oh no! Well, better to be seen as dark and scary than as hopelessly naive and Panglossian and an aplogist for our absurdly and astonishingly predatory, corrupt, and incompetent status-quo institutions.
2017, was Paul Ryan's time to shine and the time to cheer for Paul Ryan. 2017 was when Paul Ryan was actively leading the Republican Party specifically on the issue of health care, with a strong voter mandate, control of the Presidency, and majorities in both branches of Congress.
In 2017, Kling, and every other free market health care advocate I read was not the least bit interested in Paul Ryan's health care initiatives. Skimming through Kling's blog archives of 2017 confirms that recollection. Four years later, in 2021, Kling is resurrecting Ryan and trying to paint him as some noble stalwart of fiscal responsible policy.
If Paul Ryan led a brilliant campaign that narrowly failed by a few votes, I'd be sympathetic, but he didn't. Democrats made the predictable charge that Republicans just wanted to take away everyone's health care, and Republicans under Paul Ryan made absolutely no attempt to convince anyone otherwise. Paul Ryan had larger majorities to work with than the Democrats have now, and was able to accomplish much less. He took big election victories and threw them away to deliver nothing.
He delivered a big sloppy wet tax cut to millionaires and billionaires. Thanks!
Also...big majorities? Maybe. But most ppl voted against the Republicans. The fact that they won the presidency is an artifact of our strange constitution. There wasn't much stomach to repeal the ACA and replace it with nothing.
Republicans capped the SALT deduction which overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy. Democrats are trying to remove that to benefit their wealthy constituents. The Democrats are the party of the rich, but they have dominated public perception to convince people of the opposite.
The ACA was unpopular with the public. Each side of the issue can phrase poll questions to create the illusion of public opinion backing their desired outcome. But it's somewhat safe to say that there was an electoral backlash to ACA, the public got over it, lost their appetite to push for repeal, and now they want to keep it. Someone likened the public to a toddler who doesn't want to get in the bathtub, but after a long fight, he gets in, and then, he doesn't want to get out.
As for replacing the ACA with nothing? That's the rhetorical framing of the left. The right have no ideas about health care and just want to take away the ACA and replace it with nothing. Of course, most advocates of free market health care have a more generous characterization. But under Paul Ryan's leadership Republicans made zero serious efforts of convincing the public.
There is as far as I know no distinction between Paul Ryan and nationalist conservatives on the axis of monetary policy, the debt, etc. Nationalist conservatives instead differ from Paul Ryan by being against foreign military entanglements and in favor of immigration enforcement. Paul Ryan's problem is that he still wants to invade the world and invite the world—in this context, it is secondary whether he would also have us in hock to the world.
Fiscal responsibility means reducing the structural deficit. That is going to include some increases in taxes unless Republicans discover a kind of expenditure to cut.
These are the first years of an intellectual movement that is very diverse. Intellectually some of its manifestations are worse and others are better. But I think that such a "high variance" right will be instrumental in crystallizing positions that even Mr. Kling will come to appreciate. Much depends on how politically effective the "anti-Woke" coalition will be and whether Natcons can shape its course, and, most importantly, which elements within National Conservatism will prove to be most dynamic. I'm betting on the Thiel/Masters/Vance lign. And hope for it.
>>Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a “totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.”
The atmosphere is electric. She’s giving the best synopsis of national conservatism I’ve heard at the conference we’re attending—and with flair! <<
I've long been anti-PC, and anti-Woke, and am becoming proud to be anti-elite - tho it's the Democrat elites, not the (never on the ballot) "Left".
The optimal society will be the one whose laws and customs are optimal for the slightly below average in intelligence people who are, nevertheless, good "Boy Scout" types. Not necessarily the Scout mindset of Galef, which is excellent, but the Boy Scout virtues:
I note these explicitly because so many flabby pundits talk about vague virtues or ideas with too clarity about what they really mean.
You don't need no college, w/ or w/o a diploma, to be a good Scout; Forrest Gump could be one. Blue-collar workers value these virtues more than education. College grads increasingly don't. Funny how I'm so often agreeing now with Freddie deBoer (The Cult of Smart) about the need for dignity for the less educated, and many of his other critiques, while wholly opposing his Marxist solutions.
Yes, Arnold. The ground has shifted: the barbarians are succeeding in taking over your country, a little piece every day. And you don't want to accept it. You prefer to deny them but soon they will finish taking over Montgomery County (I used to live there and I'm not surprised because too many bureaucrats and rent-seekers live there).
IIRC, National Greatness was inclined toward foreign intervention, thinking that our nation was so great that it could and should impose its greatness elsewhere. So that's a big difference with Trumpism. Also, when it comes to culture,, Brooks sides with white-collar people and their values. The "Ivy League populists" take sides with blue-collar values.
He supported the Iraq war and the Iraq Surge. He was still increasing the budget for the war in Afghanistan in 2012. He's got a long list of hawkish foreign policy statements and positions. Maybe if we hadn't blown trillions on wars he supported we wouldn't need to cut Social Security...
He is the big fiscal conservative that wants to fix Medicare, but he voted to create Medicare Part D.
It seems like he's got a not so great record as a politician and the stuff you like are things he claims to support but never accomplished.
I'm always a little confounded by your love of Paul Ryan. To turn his own quip, he's obtained personal success without being interesting or effective.
As a political leader, he did nothing of import even when he had the (voting) numbers to do so. No vision, no accomplishment on any front I can recall. Rather, he quit! Post-Congress, he seems like he's another DC swamp denizen.
I mean, he seems like a nice guy as far as politicians go, but if anything did enormous damage to the "cause" of being a normal, somewhat libertarian politician by getting into a position to have some real influence but then revealing himself as a do-nothing lightweight. In that respect, he might be an accurate icon of libertarians in general. Once it comes to practical governance, they don't seem to have any ability whatsoever.
"To turn his own quip, he's obtained personal success without being interesting or effective."
Right. What exactly did Mr. Serious Normie Ryan accomplish so effectively besides issue a bunch of think-tank-like slick-looking pamphlets? And he was able to leverage the fame (or favors done) deriving from the prominence of his position to get a seat on Fox's Board of Directors immediately after leaving congress. That's pretty much the definition of achieving personal success without having been effective in actually doing anything.
Ryan could have done more to harness the populist energy Trump delivered while still accomplishing his agenda in the the long term.
Ryan was successful in getting Trump's HUGE tax cuts thru a Rep controlled Congress - which helped a lot getting the US private sector to spend more of the dollars they had earned to make more stuff and jobs and profits in America. Tax cuts so as to continue deficit spending was better then cutting gov't spending would have been.
He totally failed to get money for Trump's Wall - like so many GOPe, he didn't really want to stop illegals.
The next Rep Speaker is likely to be far far more active, mostly for better.
Tax cuts which might all be reversed soon.
I'm no fan of anti-liberal conservatism, but Brooks is making a good argument for these NatCon folks:
> The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone that was the dominating emotional register of this conference
You don't say.
It's isn't so much that Brooks is inadvetently making a case for NatCon in particular, as he is reciting just a few of a list of many facts that demonstrate the *total inadequacy* of "Late 20th Century Respectable American Republican Thinking" to the challenges of the present moment, especially in terms of being a workable platform to coordinate around serving the interests of a viable coalition of the various opponents of the agenda of the progressive juggernaut. An inadequacy not just in terms of ideas or in theory but of one proven by the experience of repeated defeats and failures.
It isn't so much that Brooks and Ryan and GOPe / Trump-averse folks are 'has-beens' in terms of lacking their former capabilities, it's that, at best, they remain wedded to defunct or obsolete notions of which ideas to champion and how to pursue them, even though those strategies and suggesstions were already easy prey for the progressives, and at worst they just surrendered and became apostates and converted to some aspect of that progressvisim without admitting as much.
This is the basis of the 'zombie' characterization, an aspersion that, for example, the Reformicons cast - I think unfairly - in the form of "Zombie Reaganism". Well, look, it's all Zombies all the way down now, and people are desperately grasping for some kind of salient and coherent reformulation that stands any chance of actually making any difference..
There is a lot of overuse of the word 'radicalization' lately, but I think it is actually the completely correct term to use to describe those "normie conservatives mugges by reality" when they realize just how bad things have gotten with every key institution in society, how much the deck has been rigged against them, and how absolutely unserious the party that purports to represent their interests is when it comes time to ask what they plan to do about any of this, the answer usually being nothing beyond more conspicuous but cynical whining.
So, sure, if you haven't genuinely woken up to the depth of the problem, radicals who have become justifiably extreme rejectionists of the status quo and who are willing to start burning things down and starting over with new institutions if that's what it takes, well, those people seem 'dark' and 'scary'! Oh no! Well, better to be seen as dark and scary than as hopelessly naive and Panglossian and an aplogist for our absurdly and astonishingly predatory, corrupt, and incompetent status-quo institutions.
2017, was Paul Ryan's time to shine and the time to cheer for Paul Ryan. 2017 was when Paul Ryan was actively leading the Republican Party specifically on the issue of health care, with a strong voter mandate, control of the Presidency, and majorities in both branches of Congress.
In 2017, Kling, and every other free market health care advocate I read was not the least bit interested in Paul Ryan's health care initiatives. Skimming through Kling's blog archives of 2017 confirms that recollection. Four years later, in 2021, Kling is resurrecting Ryan and trying to paint him as some noble stalwart of fiscal responsible policy.
If Paul Ryan led a brilliant campaign that narrowly failed by a few votes, I'd be sympathetic, but he didn't. Democrats made the predictable charge that Republicans just wanted to take away everyone's health care, and Republicans under Paul Ryan made absolutely no attempt to convince anyone otherwise. Paul Ryan had larger majorities to work with than the Democrats have now, and was able to accomplish much less. He took big election victories and threw them away to deliver nothing.
He delivered a big sloppy wet tax cut to millionaires and billionaires. Thanks!
Also...big majorities? Maybe. But most ppl voted against the Republicans. The fact that they won the presidency is an artifact of our strange constitution. There wasn't much stomach to repeal the ACA and replace it with nothing.
Republicans capped the SALT deduction which overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy. Democrats are trying to remove that to benefit their wealthy constituents. The Democrats are the party of the rich, but they have dominated public perception to convince people of the opposite.
The ACA was unpopular with the public. Each side of the issue can phrase poll questions to create the illusion of public opinion backing their desired outcome. But it's somewhat safe to say that there was an electoral backlash to ACA, the public got over it, lost their appetite to push for repeal, and now they want to keep it. Someone likened the public to a toddler who doesn't want to get in the bathtub, but after a long fight, he gets in, and then, he doesn't want to get out.
As for replacing the ACA with nothing? That's the rhetorical framing of the left. The right have no ideas about health care and just want to take away the ACA and replace it with nothing. Of course, most advocates of free market health care have a more generous characterization. But under Paul Ryan's leadership Republicans made zero serious efforts of convincing the public.
What was the replacement bill? Ill read up on it.
There is as far as I know no distinction between Paul Ryan and nationalist conservatives on the axis of monetary policy, the debt, etc. Nationalist conservatives instead differ from Paul Ryan by being against foreign military entanglements and in favor of immigration enforcement. Paul Ryan's problem is that he still wants to invade the world and invite the world—in this context, it is secondary whether he would also have us in hock to the world.
Fiscal responsibility means reducing the structural deficit. That is going to include some increases in taxes unless Republicans discover a kind of expenditure to cut.
These are the first years of an intellectual movement that is very diverse. Intellectually some of its manifestations are worse and others are better. But I think that such a "high variance" right will be instrumental in crystallizing positions that even Mr. Kling will come to appreciate. Much depends on how politically effective the "anti-Woke" coalition will be and whether Natcons can shape its course, and, most importantly, which elements within National Conservatism will prove to be most dynamic. I'm betting on the Thiel/Masters/Vance lign. And hope for it.
Rod Dreher's take on David is better, tho a lot longer.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/david-brooks-among-the-national-conservatives/
Rod quotes David about Rachael Bovard's speech:
>>Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a “totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.”
The atmosphere is electric. She’s giving the best synopsis of national conservatism I’ve heard at the conference we’re attending—and with flair! <<
I've long been anti-PC, and anti-Woke, and am becoming proud to be anti-elite - tho it's the Democrat elites, not the (never on the ballot) "Left".
The optimal society will be the one whose laws and customs are optimal for the slightly below average in intelligence people who are, nevertheless, good "Boy Scout" types. Not necessarily the Scout mindset of Galef, which is excellent, but the Boy Scout virtues:
Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind,
Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, Reverent.
I note these explicitly because so many flabby pundits talk about vague virtues or ideas with too clarity about what they really mean.
You don't need no college, w/ or w/o a diploma, to be a good Scout; Forrest Gump could be one. Blue-collar workers value these virtues more than education. College grads increasingly don't. Funny how I'm so often agreeing now with Freddie deBoer (The Cult of Smart) about the need for dignity for the less educated, and many of his other critiques, while wholly opposing his Marxist solutions.
with too little clarity
-- or perhaps too little editing.
Yes, Arnold. The ground has shifted: the barbarians are succeeding in taking over your country, a little piece every day. And you don't want to accept it. You prefer to deny them but soon they will finish taking over Montgomery County (I used to live there and I'm not surprised because too many bureaucrats and rent-seekers live there).
IIRC, National Greatness was inclined toward foreign intervention, thinking that our nation was so great that it could and should impose its greatness elsewhere. So that's a big difference with Trumpism. Also, when it comes to culture,, Brooks sides with white-collar people and their values. The "Ivy League populists" take sides with blue-collar values.
So NC is NGC without the warmongering and elitism.
Sign me up.
Trump seems to have wanted to impose US greatness on China through trade barriers.
It is hard to tell how much anti-Trumpism is actually hatred against Trump vs hatred of his (rather large) base of support.
Let's look at Paul Ryan's record:
He supported the Iraq war and the Iraq Surge. He was still increasing the budget for the war in Afghanistan in 2012. He's got a long list of hawkish foreign policy statements and positions. Maybe if we hadn't blown trillions on wars he supported we wouldn't need to cut Social Security...
He is the big fiscal conservative that wants to fix Medicare, but he voted to create Medicare Part D.
It seems like he's got a not so great record as a politician and the stuff you like are things he claims to support but never accomplished.