Paul Ryan has recently been touted as the Republican poster child for fiscal conservatism. He’s been presented by some as a serious man with serious intellectual ideas. In truth he’s nothing of the sort. Economically, he’s a radical extremist and a man to which the term conservatism, in general, and fiscal conservatism in particular, has no rightful belonging.
As a recent diary of mine discusses, one of the debates currently being held is whether or not Ryan actually is a fiscal conservative. As I argue in that diary, to even participate in the debate is to concede on some level that fiscal conservatism is virtuous. I won’t rehash it all here.
Here, I ignore the temptation to debate whether or not Ryan’s votes for TARP, Medicare-D, et al, evince that he is, like the vast majority of his party brethren, a FINO (fiscal-conservative-in-name-only.) Rather, I grant the premise in Ryan’s favor. Let’s say that Ryan is what he claims to be. Let’s say that he will enact all that he purports to. Let’s say that he can de-align himself from his pro-Bush voting record. Let’s say that he is a Randian Libertarian and not a Compassionate Conservative.
I still reject the notion that this makes him a fiscal conservative for one simple reason. I don’t think that there is anything remotely conservative about dismantling New Deal protections for workers, especially during a period of economic stress. If anything, the prospect is utterly and entirely fiscally reckless. What could possibly be considered conservative about undoing social programs that have been in place for 80 years? We’ve been down that road. Let’s not forget the impact of Gramm-Leach-Bliley.
Conservatism, for all its lack of altruism, has been pragmatic. It hasn’t been historically short-sighted. It has recognized at some level that in exchange for workers agreeing to participate in a capitalist system that has proven to be volatile and destructive some base level of protection is granted. This contract has been negotiated and renegotiated since it was put in place in the 1930s but always respected by everyone but radicals. To be sure, Conservatives have sought to reduce those protections as much as possible but only radicals have ever sought to eradicate them entirely.
That’s why guys like Goldwater were destroyed in elections. They were extremists who wanted to undo the contract. These radicals were maligned by Conservatives and Liberals alike—Liberals because they stood for worker’s protections and Conservatives because they wanted to keep capitalism in place.
Before the end of the Cold War there were viable alternatives to capitalism and Conservatives knew it. It was in no way guaranteed that capitalism would endure, especially given its limited appeal to workers who properly understood it to be potentially and periodically pernicious.
But now, 23 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, those on the Right with no notion of the past have forgotten the tenuous history of capitalism in America. These irresponsible shortsighted radicals threaten to undo the whole damn thing. Those who value capitalism understand this today just as men like Joseph Kennedy Sr. understood it in the 1930s. Famously, Kennedy said, “in those days I felt and said I would be willing to part with half of what I had if I could be sure of keeping, under law and order, the other half."
Paul Ryan has no concept of any of this. He is driven by ideology. History is meaningless to him. That fact in and of itself is the antithesis of Conservatism. And when you consider that his policies are designed to undo the capitalist contract in America, one that has stood for eighty years, it’s clear that he’s no fiscal conservative. Any voter seeking a fiscally conservative representative should look elsewhere. Paul Ryan is a radical.