Michael Lind has written a long article in Politico (where he is a contributing editor) on the future of the Republican Party. I’ll save you the trouble of reading all of it. At the end, it suggests that the rational thing for the party to do is to accept today’s “progressive” welfare state, but just try to tilt the government payments to white middle class workers and businesses, in other words the core voters and the core financiers of the party. The aim should not be to abolish today’s crony capitalist pork system, but to be sure that Republicans get more of the swill.
Lind describes this as a new and more “rational” approach for the party. He contrasts it to what he characterizes as the old and now shopworn and increasingly discredited conservatism we have had since the election of George W. Bush. Lind can call this rational if he wishes, it’s a free country as people used to say, but “new” it is not. It would actually seem to be just a continuation of the GOP status quo. Work within the Rooseveltian system, even “co-opt” and “triangulate” by expanding it more than the Democrats, but try to keep the spoils heading in the right direction.
This is all very standard stuff. We hear it often from establishment voices. If you are a Republican and support today’s thoroughly corrupted progressivism, you are “sane,” “ sound,” and “sensible.” If you don’t, you are a wild eyed dreamer and radical who will never accomplish anything.
Never mind that people of Lind’s ilk are actually pursuing policies today that would have astonished and horrified their progressive forefathers. Not only does the President ignore the law he is sworn to uphold. Even his appointees at the Federal Reserve ignore the Federal Reserve Act and engage in the most reckless and destructive monetary experimentation. Based on Janet Yellen’s recent testimony, the Fed is not the slightest bit chastened by its failure and could launch yet another round of even more extreme monetary radicalism grounded in neither fact nor logic.
