What the GOP Field’s Rightward Move Won’t Mean

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