Ryan and Ayn Randism mainstreamed

Old Hickory's Weblog

Ryan and Ayn Randism mainstreamed

Tristero rightly observed when Romney announced Paul Ryanas his Vice Presidential pick, interpreting advice he once got from Dave Neiwert ("Two Distinct Ideologies?" Are You Kidding? Hulabaloo 08/11/2012):

The problem is that elevating extremism to the level of serious discussion tends to confer enormous status on bad ideas and that makes it more difficult to fight against them. It also tends to move the discourse towards treating the bad ideas as reasonable ones - the Overton Window concept, more or less.

The standard conventional wisdom about the 1964 election was that the Republican Party embraced radicalism with the Barry Goldwater nomination, and since then they've stayed away from it, having learned their lesson.

Now that the mainstream press operates so reliably with "scripts" cooked up in the Washington Beltway, they continue to recite the notion that the Republican Party is composed of reasonable conservatives. And so they largely ignore the most defining feature of mainstream politics, the cycle of radicalization in which the Republican Party is caught. With no end in sight.

Paul Krugman in Romney/Ryan: The Real Target describes how that feature works in the Ryan case:

Like Bush in 2000, Ryan has a completely undeserved reputation in the media as a bluff, honest guy, in Ryan's case supplemented by a reputation as a serious policy wonk. None of this has any basis in reality; Ryan’s much-touted plan, far from being a real solution, relies crucially on stuff that is just pulled out of thin air — huge revenue increases from closing unspecified loopholes, huge spending cuts achieved in ways not mentioned. ...

So whence comes the Ryan reputation? As I said in my last post, it’s because many commentators want to tell a story about US politics that makes them feel and look good — a story in which both parties are equally at fault in our national stalemate, and in which said commentators stand above the fray. This story requires that there be good, honest, technically savvy conservative politicians, so that you can point to these politicians and say how much you admire them, even if you disagree with some of their ideas; after all, unless you lavish praise on some conservatives, you don’t come across as nobly even-handed.

The trouble, of course, is that it's really really hard to find any actual conservative politicians who deserve that praise. [my emphasis]

Even-the-liberal Kevin Drum at Mother Jones plays this game in Programming Note: Ryan 2013 Is Not Ryan 2012 08/17/2012, scolding liberals for not, uh, pretending Ryan's plan to end Medicare isn't completely sensible, someway somehow. KJ does make some good observations sometime. But ever since he played this liberal troll game in the lead-up to the Iraq War, this stuff coming from him has really annoyed me. Even a catastrophe like the Iraq War didn't persuade him to clean up his act. Basically, he tries to pretend that Ryan is the "bluff, honest guy" of Beltway scripting that Krugman analyzes so well.

Here is the eminently respectable PBS Newshour bringing us Sleepy Mark Shields and National Reviewer Rich Lowry talking about Paul Ryan, Shields and Lowry on GOP Veep Choice Paul Ryan, Medicare 08/17/2012 (with transcript): READ MORE