Triumph of the Neocons: Paul Ryan to Tea Party: You are the problem

As neoconservatives struggle to destroy the remaining libertarian and paleoconservative influence in the GOP and permanently enthrone neoconservatism as the dominant form of established reaction in US politics via the Republican Party, good soldier Paul Ryan declares war on the no longer "useful" tea party movement:

(Washington Post) - Today, Paul Ryan gave a fascinating speech at Heritage Action, a tea party-allied organization that has fashioned itself as the guardian of conservative purity. The speech called for unity. “To quote William Wallace in Braveheart,” he said, “we have to unite the clans.”

But his speech was actually a repudiation of everything the tea party has done. Not only that, Ryan also took shots at the congressional Republican leadership, and even the current GOP presidential candidates. He didn’t call anyone out by name, but if you understand what’s happening now and the conflict that has roiled the Republican Party for the last seven years, the critique was hard to miss.

[Hillary Clinton barely survived Iowa. Top Democrats say she must learn from it.]

Not surprisingly, for much of the speech he blamed conservatives’ own sins on progressives, Democrats, and Barack Obama. That has become a familiar refrain — It’s their fault that we’ve become such monsters! — but when you say that, you’re still acknowledging that the sins exist. Let’s start here:

“My theory of the case is this: We win when we have an ideas contest. We lose when we have a personality contest. We can’t fall into the progressives’ trap of acting like angry reactionaries. The Left would love nothing more than for a fragmented conservative movement to stand in a circular firing squad, so the progressives can win by default.

“This president is struggling to remain relevant in an election year when he’s not on the ballot. He is going to do all he can to elect another progressive by distracting the American people. So he’s going to try to get us talking about guns or some other hot-button issue and not about his failures on ISIS or the economy or national security. He’s going to try to knock us off our game. We have to understand his distractions for what they are. Otherwise, we’re going to have a distraction this week, next week, and the week after that. And that’s going to be the Obama playbook all year long.”

Yes, the party of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, cares not for “personality.” And look, nobody “trapped” Republicans into “acting like angry reactionaries.” They did that all on their own. But it’s interesting that Ryan cites guns as a distracting hot-button issue that is important only because Barack Obama is forcing conservatives to talk about it against their will. Last time I checked, lots of Republicans thought the gun issue is absolutely vital to maintaining liberty. The same is true of any other hot-button issue you could name, whether it’s abortion or same-sex marriage or something else: the issue might or might not be advantageous to Democrats, but it’s also very important to at least a significant chunk of the Republican electorate. It’s hard to tell where Ryan draws the line between real issues and distractions, but every time you define an issue as the latter, you’re telling some major Republican constituency to shut its mouth. Read more.