Are voters about to kick Paul Ryan out of Congress?
It might seem crazy for a widely respected, newly installed speaker of the House of Representatives to be shown the door. But according to one recent poll, it just might happen.
This is still highly unlikely. But it's not impossible. And even more than Donald Trump's improbable victory in the GOP primaries, a Ryan loss would signal a fundamental shift in the ideological orientation of the Republican Party.
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To be fair, the poll (which shows Ryan down to just 43 percent support in his Wisconsin district, a drop of 30 percentage points from polling conducted earlier this year) is a bit of an odd duck. It was commissioned by Ryan's primary challenger, businessman Paul Nehlen. That raises questions about its reliability — as does the fact that respondents skew extremely old, with 28 percent coming from the 50-64 age bracket and a massive 61 percent describing themselves as over 65.
So take it with several grains of salt.
But what if it's true? After all, if Trump really has tapped into and energized something real in the Republican base — a populist hostility to party elites and the policies they've been pushing with ever-greater consistency and rigor for several decades, including open immigration, free trade, and massive tax cuts for the rich — then you'd expect Ryan to be having a hard time.
Indeed, more than any Republican of national stature, Ryan has made himself the face of, and the wonky brain behind, those very policies.
The party's establishment and its wealthiest donors adore the trickle-down ideology that Ryan embraces, and it's easy to see why. In purely political terms, it's proven to be enduringly potent. Like classical Marxism, it derives a good part of its power from its dialectical deployment of paradox. Instead of predicting linear progress toward more benefits for the working class, Marx held that capitalism must first reach a crisis point at which working-class suffering actually increases.
Things need to get worse for the poor before they get better.
Likewise, although from the opposite ideological standpoint, trickle-down economics maintains not just that massive upper-income tax cuts benefit the wealthy, but also (and more crucially) that such cuts eventually benefit everyone — perhaps the poor and middle classes most of all, and certainly more than they would benefit from government programs and direct transfer payments.
Things need to get better for the wealthy before they can get better for everyone else.
Ronald Reagan (and his policy forerunners, like Jack Kemp, Arthur Laffer, George Glider, Bruce Bartlett, and David Stockman) first made the case for such policies at a time when the top marginal income tax rate was 70 percent. The idea was that a drastic cut in the rate would put more money into the pockets of high-income earners, who would use it to start or expand businesses that would hire workers, who would earn more money and pay more in taxes while also increasing their spending, which would stimulate the economy, leading to increased growth and even higher tax revenues down the road.
In this way, cutting taxes would be good for everyone, including the Department of the Treasury, which would bring in more revenue while lowering rates.
Things didn't work out precisely as planned. The economy took off in the wake of Reagan's tax cuts, but federal budget deficits increased when tax rates were slashed. And then there were lessons for the future. Insisting that the Reagan recipe of stimulating strong growth with upper-income tax cuts was more than a policy especially well-suited to a moment when tax rates were set too high, Republicans and their conservative cheerleaders began to treat tax cuts for the wealthy as an economic cure-all perfectly suited to any situation — and tax hikes as equally certain economic poison.
So when the top rate rose under Bill Clinton from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, Republicans predicted it would lead to an economic downturn. (It didn't.) And when the rate dropped under George W. Bush to 35 percent, Republicans predicted it would produce a sharp uptick in growth. (It didn't.) And when the rate went back up to 39.6 percent under Barack Obama, Republicans once again claimed it would stymie growth. (It hasn't.)
Still, these ideas retain a tight grip on the conservative imagination. Paul Ryan was the most articulate congressional champion of trickle-down economics during the late 2000s, which is why he was a perfect choice to serve as a running mate for Mitt Romney, whose 2012 campaign pushed a particularly brittle version of the old trickle-down gospel: Cut taxes and regulations on America's job-creating entrepreneurs (the makers) and soon everyone else (the takers) will be bringing home bigger paychecks and fulfilling the American Dream.
Things have changed an awful lot since 2012. We now live in the age of Trump. But Paul Ryan's priorities haven't budged.
While expressing grudging support for the presumptive Republican nominee (despite Trump's refusal to toe the trickle-down line, and his hostility to Mexican and Muslim immigrants, and his opposition to free trade, and his flirtations with outright racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism), Ryan has continued to propose variations on the tried-and-true trickle-down formula: massive tax cuts for high earners, including cuts to the top marginal income tax rate, capital gains taxes, and dividend taxes, and the complete elimination of the estate tax. Sure, these cuts would supposedly be paired with unspecified closures to tax loopholes (deductions) that would compensate for some of the lost revenue, but there is literally nothing in the record of the last 36 years to give anyone confidence that these would amount to anything like a revenue-neutral swap.
The question is whether Republicans — and in particular, the Republicans of Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District — have finally had enough of fairy tales in which doing the bidding of the wealthy magically produces benefits for everyone else. We'll receive an answer of sorts on Aug. 9, the date when Ryan's district will decide his fate at the polls.
And for anyone who thinks a nationally known party leader embraced by the wealthy and elite can't be unceremoniously dumped in a primary, well, think again.
