12 August 12
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Ryan is the reverse of Sarah Palin. She was all right-wing flash
without much substance. He's all right-wing substance without much
flash.
Ryan is not a firebrand. He's not smarmy. He doesn't
ooze contempt for opponents or ridicule those who disagree with him. In
style and tone, he doesn't even sound like an ideologue - until you
listen to what he has to say.
It's here - in Ryan's views and policy judgments - we
find the true ideologue. More than any other politician today, Paul Ryan
exemplifies the social Darwinism at the core of today's Republican
Party: Reward the rich, penalize the poor, let everyone else fend for
themselves. Dog eat dog.
Ryan's views are crystallized in the budget he
produced for House Republicans last March as chairman of the House
Budget committee. That budget would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income
programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid,
which provides healthcare for the nation's poor - forcing states to drop
coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income people,
according to the on-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Ryan's budget would also reduce food stamps for poor
families by 17 percent ($135 billion) over the decade, leading to a
significant increase in hunger - particularly among children. It would
also reduce housing assistance, job training, and Pell grants for
college tuition.
In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts proposed by Ryan would come from low-income programs.
The Ryan plan would also turn Medicare into vouchers
whose value won't possibly keep up with rising health-care costs -
thereby shifting those costs on to seniors.
At the same time, Ryan would provide a substantial tax cut to the very rich - who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation's total income. Today's 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.
Ryan's views are pure social Darwinism. As William
Graham Sumner, the progenitor of social Darwinism in America, put it in
the 1880s: "Civilization has a simple choice." It's either "liberty,
inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival
of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its
best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its
worst members."
Is this Mitt Romney's view as well?
Some believe Romney chose Ryan solely in order to drum up enthusiasm on the right. Since most Americans have already made up their minds about whom
they'll vote for, and the polls show Americans highly polarized - with
an almost equal number supporting Romney as Obama - the winner will be
determined by how many on either side take the trouble to vote. So in
picking Ryan, Romney is motivating his rightwing base to get to the
polls, and pull everyone else they can along with them.
But there's reason to believe Romney also agrees with
Ryan's social Darwinism. Romney accuses President Obama of creating an
"entitlement society" and thinks government shouldn't help distressed
homeowners but instead let the market "hit the bottom." And although
Romney has carefully avoided specifics in his own economic plan, he has
said he's "very supportive" of Ryan's budget plan. "It's a bold and
exciting effort, an excellent piece of work, very much needed … very
consistent with what I put out earlier."
Romney hasn't put out much but the budget he's
proposed would, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
throw ten million low-income people off the benefits rolls for food
stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or both.
At the same time, Romney wants to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy, reduce corporate income taxes, and eliminate the estate tax. These tax reductions would increase the incomes of people earning more than $1 million a year by an average of $295,874 annually, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center.
Oh, did I say that Romney and Ryan also want to repeal
President Obama's healthcare law, thereby leaving fifty million
Americans without health insurance?
Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the
wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It
allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he
accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was "merely a survival
of the fittest… the working out of a law of nature and of God."
The social Darwinism of that era also undermined all
efforts to build a more broadly based prosperity and rescue our
democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by
the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government
shouldn't do much of anything.
Not until the twentieth century did America reject
social Darwinism. We created a large middle class that became the engine
of our economy and our democracy. We built safety nets to catch
Americans who fell downward, often through no fault of their own.
We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods - public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health - that made us all better off.
In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on our own in a competitive contest for survival.
But choosing Ryan, Romney has raised for the nation
the starkest of choices: Do we want to return to that earlier time, or
are we willing and able to move forward - toward a democracy and an
economy that works for us all?
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public
Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of
Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the
ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has
written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The
Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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