Good Populism, Bad Populism and the Shutdown

The big D.C. news today, of sorts, is Paul Ryan’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, sketching out what might be the G.O.P.’s leadership’s hoped-for path out of this mess: Negotiations to trade “relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs,” presumably tied to some sort of short-term continuing resolution/debt limit lift. Notably, the piece does not mention Obamacare, which prompted much snark from pro-shutdown voices on Twitter last night, and then this broadside from Ben Domenech, prince of the libertarian populists, in this morning’s edition of The Transom:

It’s unfair to call Paul Ryan’s oped a cave or a surrender, as many on Twitter are accusing. It’s not that. It’s simply an indication of where we’d be if not for the conservative caucus’s insistence on fighting over Obamacare: once again talking about bargains over debt ceiling brinkmanship no one buys, while moving toward trading small ball cuts in more popular entitlements for tax increases on the people who fund those entitlements. It’s picking a different goal and enemy at a time when all fire should be concentrated on the unpopular entitlement which is stumbling out of the gate. It’s nonsensical: “Nobody trusts Republicans on anything, so they should totally just start cutting Medicare. That’s a great thing to target at a time like this, and certainly doesn’t muddy the messaging waters at all!” A supercommittee designed to negotiate on Chained CPI and a medical device tax rollback is arguably worse than getting nothing out of the shutdown – even worse than the fig leaf of Vitter. It actively undercuts the most basic idea of a remade Republican priority list which doesn’t involve running to whatever Wall Street and industry lobbyists want over the impact of policies on the populace. Even a fight for employer mandate repeal would be better ground, given the work hour cutbacks. The populist message of injustice which Jon Stewart delivered multiple times in the space of a half hour show on Monday is apparently too hard for House Republicans to grasp.

I think Domenech is being a little unfair to the substance of Ryan’s op-ed, which mentions several Medicare reforms as possible substitutes for sequester cuts, and doesn’t mention either chained C.P.I. or the medical device tax. But I agree with his broader point: Even when they make sense on the merits, the kind of deals the party’s congressional leadership wants to cut would not, as a general rule, obviously realign the party’s messaging and policy positions with the interests of the American middle class — and if you’re interested in that kind of realignment, the G.O.P.’s populists often have better instincts and/or more interesting proposals than their more responsible, consensus-oriented rivals within the party. Fighting Obamacare is more popular than cutting Social Security to pay for defense spending, and fighting to delay the individual mandate would be much more popular than horse-trading your way to K Street’s dream of medical device tax repeal. Rand Paul is more in touch with the public mood on national security issues than a lot of G.O.P. foreign policy hands, Mike Lee has a better tax plan than any of his fellow Republican senators, Heritage Action is absolutely right about farm subsidies and the House G.O.P. leadership is wrong … I’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating: If you’re looking for policy innovation on the right, the populist wing is mostly where the action is.

And yet none of this matters right now, because the current populist strategy isn’t going to work, isn’t going to make the populist’s ideas or the Republican Party more popular, and has marched the entire party into a cul-de-sac from which, it seems, only the uncourageous dealmaking K Street-friendly leadership types can rescue it. There was, as I’ve noted before, some kind of plausible populist case for threatening a shutdown around the health care law, as a kind of exercise in noisemaking and base mobilization. But the shutdown itself is just a classic march of folly. From RedState to Heritage to all the various pro-shutdown voices in the House, nobody-but-nobody has sketched out a remotely plausible scenario in which a continued government shutdown leads to any meaningful, worth-the-fighting-for concessions on Obamacare — or to anything, really, save gradually-building pain for the few House Republicans who actually have to fight to win re-election in 2014, and the ratification of the public’s pre-existing sense that the G.O.P. can’t really be trusted with the reins of government.

Sure, the polling could be worse. Sure, assuming cooler heads ultimately prevail, it’s not likely to be an irrecoverable disaster. But something can be less than a disaster and still not make a lick of sense. And that’s what we have here: A case study, for the right’s populists, in how all the good ideas and sound impulses in the world don’t matter if you decide to fight on ground where you simply cannot win.