Okay, I’ve been trying to get some sense of how the GOP intends to retake the White House in 2012 and not having a lot of luck. Now this nonsense with Newt Gingrich.
On Meet The Press he was asked what he thinks about Paul Ryan’s budget plans—plans which include massive eviscerations of social programs like Medicare—and he made one of his rare reasonable statements. He criticized the budget as, basically, right-wing social engineering and went on to say social engineering from the Right is as bad as social engineering from the Left. Think what you will about the merits of that in terms of national policy, it is nevertheless a self-consistent, reasonable statement. Ryan’s budget is counter to democratic expressions of support for some of these programs and Ryan and others in this Congress have been struggling to cast their efforts in terms of fiscal responsibility, which clearly has nothing to do with why they won’t axe the military budget or do anything about corporate welfare.
Be that as it may, here is Gingrich being reasonable and setting himself up as an independent thinker.
Then came the backlash. A big no-no to openly criticize a fellow Republican, especially someone who is seen to embody the Tea Party aesthetic of “gut the government!” And what does Gingrich do? Back pedals. Not only that, he makes a prepared statement to declare that anyone using the footage from that Meet The Press interview to claim that, (a), Gingrich believes the Ryan budget is bad or (b) Gingrich disagrees with the social conservative agenda or (c) that Gingrich himself is flip-flopping and kowtowing to the Party is lying.
So now I’m baffled. Because Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicare at least are unpopular, so how does aligning himself with a position Gingrich initially criticized make points with voters? How does coming out of the gate with confusion aid his campaign or reflect well on the GOP?
And what social engineering? The idea that a popularly elected government should do nothing to promote justice—and in this instance we’re talking about economic justice—and that people who need help should just either rely on charity or go away? Well, if you look at the out-front rhetoric of the most vocal segment of the GOP, the Tea Party, they seem to be backing an exhaustively libertarian approach. But even so, at the heart of it is a desire to reduce government to little more than a few offices on the Atlantic coast that deal with rubberstamping whatever the private sector wants and is capable of doing.
I’m still mulling some of this over, but even though I disagree with Gingrich about the nature of social engineering, I am disappointed that yet again we have someone campaigning to achieve the office and will say or do whatever it takes, front any idea, kiss any ass, subvert any consistency to reach that goal.
This whole social engineering thing, though, is starting to annoy me. It sounds ominous, but really, every society, if it has a common vision of itself, indulges social engineering, some more benignly than others. It must be so. Consensus is necessary to have a functional social mechanism. The notion that we can be free of social engineering is a utopian fantasy that is poorly thought through. Do you know what a country looks like that has no social engineering?
Somalia.
Food for thought.