Go left, young Marco. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images In the spring of 2008, Barack Obama announced his bid to become the next Ronald Reagan. During an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal, the Democratic candidate predicted that his election would change America’s economic policy paradigm as thoroughly as the Gipper’s victory had three decades earlier.
It took eight months for Obama’s words to attain the aura of prophecy. By the day of his inauguration, Reagan-era orthodoxies had apparently driven the global financial system and conservative movement to the brink of collapse. Even America’s high priests of supply-side gospel had fallen into crises of faith. Alan Greenspan told Congress that the crash had exposed a “flaw” in his worldview so profound, its exposure had left him in a “state of shocked disbelief.
Now, 12 years after the financial crisis, and three years into Donald Trump’s post-truth presidency, there are mounting signs that these empirical realities are finally making a dent in political ones — that Obama’s prophesied realignment may be making its belated arrival. Romney’s change of heart on the propriety of cajoling indigent parents into the labor force by condemning their children to poverty is idiosyncratic in Washington; no other Republican has signed onto his bill. But it is nevertheless indicative of a broader, leftward current in GOP economic policy thinking.
The GOP is not becoming any less interested in taking from the poor to give to its top shareholders. The party’s influence peddling remains unconstrained by egalitarian inhibitions. But its economic policy-making is becoming a bit less constrained by Ayn Randian scruples. Romney is alone in supporting refundable child tax credits for the nonworking poor.
Given the biases of the Senate, the significance of the Democratic field’s leftward lurch largely hinges on whether the party’s most conservative senators start bending in the same direction. And when Mitt Romney makes unconditional assistance to poor families a bipartisan concept, or House Republicans tacitly affirm the need for Uncle Sam to “pick winners and losers” in the energy market, it becomes a bit easier for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to swim with the progressive tide.
EricLevitz
EricLevitz If Bernie has an anti-woke moment, he can take the thing ...