Early last week in Richmond, VA., Liberty University rolled out the red carpet for Ted Cruz, who became the first Republican to officially announce his candidacy for the presidency in 2016. The first-term Texas senator enchanted the crowd with lofty conservative bromides and appeals to our glorious past—selective reading of history, to say the least. But as far as his platform goes, he revealed little more than a mish-mash of shopworn or downright loony proposals. If the Republican Party has been in a defensive crouch for the past several years, Ted Cruz is the guy crawling through the mud like a commando.
It’s not like he has a whole lot to work with. Since Obama was elected with a mandate to overhaul a dysfunctional healthcare system in 2008, the Republicans have become the “no” party: no to healthcare reform, no to immigration overhaul, no to environmental regulation, no to reproductive rights, and no to just about anything that involves the government doing something.
The party has become utterly regressive and this pattern of obstructionist thinking and nostalgia for a misremembered past has crippled their ability to come up with fresh ideas. Once you get past the prophetic visions of a Randian utopia where, according to Cruz, young people will be “coming out of school with four, five, six job offers,” (it reads like a fairytale) most concrete proposals from Republicans these days involve gutting this or that agency, dismantling long-standing regulations, or slashing government spending. Inspired yet?
A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed penned by Senate Republicans Paul Ryan, John Kline, and Fred Upton, in which they outline their alternative to Obamacare, illustrates the imagination deficit currently afflicting the party. Proposal number one: return to the old status quo by eliminating insurance mandates, presumably because these are “driving up costs” (in reality, they keep them lower by compelling healthy people to enroll, thus thinning out the liability to insurance companies).
Next come a series of ludicrously inconsequential fixes that insult the reader’s intelligence. Among them is letting people buy insurance across state lines to increase competition (seems kind of like a federal insurance exchange, doesn’t it?), which is apparently OK with the authors’ partisan colleagues who elsewhere wrote, in reference to Obamacare, “What works in Utah is different from what works in Tennessee or Wyoming.”
Then comes tort reform, aimed at limiting frivolous malpractice suits that, by some estimates, account for a mere half percent of total healthcare costs.
The proposal even includes repackaged components of Obamacare itself, namely patient protections, and tax credits (as opposed to subsidies) for health insurance.
And what grand ideas has this Republican Congress advanced with its newfound majority? A string of defunding measures and a dead-in-the-water approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that experts on both sides admit would have negligible impacts on both job creation and emissions. But if a Cruz presidency would send us racing backwards, Clinton 2.0 would merely keep us firmly planted in the status quo.
Although Hillary has yet to officially announce her candidacy, or reveal any hints about her platform, it’s safe to assume the Clinton juggernaut’s decades-long courtship of moneyed interests will preclude any tinkering with the loosely-regulated mechanisms of financial capitalism that have sent inequality soaring to levels unseen since the Gilded Age.
The CEOs of two Wall Street titans in particular, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, now household names for their role in bringing about a global financial meltdown, have made no secret of their fondness for Clinton, whom they regard as a “pragmatic problem-solver.” Expect a crusade against the “war on women” but not much else, although a deft hand in foreign policy would be a welcome change.
The threat of growing inequality is, climate change aside, the single greatest threat to American democracy. Its implications are global as well; in 2013 the United Nations published a report citing rising inequality as the source of political instability and slowing economic growth worldwide. Near-universal concern about the problem has forced politicians on both sides to talk about the issue, but not in particularly meaningful terms. Apparently, we either need to plunder the rich or blame Obama and hope it goes away.
Massive accumulation of wealth among a tiny class of plutocrats should inspire the visionary new directions from our politicians that could bring life to our stagnant parties.
But inequality has become much more of a talking point than a catalyst for the bold new thinking needed to revive a democracy in decline.