Henry Olsen: The Latest Republican Budget Is a Revival of Paul Ryan-ism

Public opinion has shifted.

The Republican electorate has dramatically changed.

Republican politicians and Conservatism, Inc. have not changed. This fact is currently the best shot that the Democrats have of holding onto Congress in the 2022 midterms.

Washington Post:

“There has been a lot of talk recently about the Republican Party searching for a post-Trump ideological future. The annual alternative budget released Wednesday by the 152-member House Republican Study Committee shows how difficult it will be for the party to square its old, entitlement-cutting mind-set with its newer, populist faction.

The document is essentially an update of former House speaker Paul Ryan’s 2008 “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a libertarian-inspired vision of what the federal government would do if taxes were never raised. The Republican Study Committee sets out to balance the federal budget through spending cuts alone and keep it balanced well into the future. The result is a dramatic reduction in what the federal government does across the board. …

Trade is another fault line between the old orthodoxy and the new GOP voter. The RSC budget declares that “free trade is how we put America first.” But the EPPC-YouGov poll found that 60 percent of Trump voters believe free trade costs American jobs, including 68 percent of Obama-Trump voters. The 2017 study also found substantial anti-trade sentiment among Trump voters, especially among the blue-collar American Preservationists.

Today’s party is united by cultural issues and divided by economic ones, with the party’s new working-class voters particularly likely to dissent from old, libertarian-tinged orthodoxy. That’s a political fact that free-market Republicans need to come to terms with if they want to help build a working-class-friendly GOP. …”

Pedro Gonzalez gets it.

You can find reasons for optimism at just about every level – the median GOP voter, the corporate fundraising spigot being cut off, the growth in small dollar donations, the changing nature of the Democrat coalition, shifts in public opinion, foreign precedent, younger Republican voters, a growing new ideological consensus – EXCEPT where it matters the most which is at the very top of the party. People like Mitch McConnell look at all of this and conclude, no, our red line is the 2017 tax cuts and the $600 stimulus check. This is why the Labour Party has been crushed, but the Democrats are in power.

American Greatness:

“Republican Party doesn’t seem to feel the slightest pang of conscience as it schizophrenically alternates between paying lip service to the virtues of everyday Americans and treating them like a proletariat whose blood and guts must grease the wheels of the economy. The latest Labor Department jobs report touched off a debate over Joe Biden’s road map to post-pandemic economic recovery that illustrates this dissonance.

Reacting to the less-than-stellar figures, business groups and Republicans blame unemployment benefits for the perceived labor shortage and slow recovery.

Yet “administration officials say there is no evidence in the report—which found the economy added 266,000 jobs in April, well below the one million jobs many economists expected—that hiring has been slowed by the additional $300 per week that unemployed Americans are currently eligible to receive under the $1.9 trillion economic aid bill that Mr. Biden signed into law in March,” the New York Times reported.

Of course, no one should take the Biden Administration at its word, but that is peripheral to how the GOP continues to approach and interpret every issue through the lens of its economic orthodoxy. One does not have to defend every aspect of the unemployment benefits to see the GOP’s hypocrisy at play. …”

In a nutshell, this is what you find on this website.

We’re angry with Joe Biden and the Democrats, optimistic about Republican voters, intrigued by all this talk about a “working class Republican Party” but also deeply skeptical of Republican politicians based on past experience. Congress is full of geriatrics who are throwbacks to the 1980s.

I have zero interest in engaging in another futile round of backlash politics in order to prop up Reaganite conservatism. In light of these two options, I am focused on trying to articulate our own positions on various issues and movement building and stop well short of saying vote for the Republicans in the 2022 midterms. Some people will undoubtedly do that. Some people will undoubtedly not do that. We’re not running for political office though so it really isn’t our problem to figure out.