I’ve been heartened by the conservative reassessment of the Bush years since the financial crisis, and by the increasing willingness of conservative politicians to think seriously about entitlement spending, misaligned incentives, rigid work rules, and other perennial public policy problems that tend to get ignored when times are flush. My basic view is that the first decade of this century was defined by a massive increase in public sector employment funded by surging state and local tax revenues drawn from a top-heavy income distribution. The problem with public sector bloat is that the public sector is nontradable and largely insulated from competition. It is governed by political rather than market imperatives. Though conservatives are far less stringent about national security spending than they should be, I tend to think the movement is getting better, which is to say more serious-minded and focused on what I think of as real issues rather than fake issues, though of course there are counter-trends, e.g., birtherism, etc.

But this turn towards what we might think of as a more rigorous, more pragmatic libertarianism, best captured in Rep. Paul Ryan’s efforts to illustrate what a world without heavy tax increases might look like, is balanced by operational populism.

In the modal scenario, a Republican candidate embraces extremely hardcore language about Freedom while saying nothing about Medicare and Social Security. He will rail against waste, fraud, and abuse, he will declare IPAB an unacceptable infringement on our liberties. But he will never publicly defend serious efforts to shift some responsibility for retirement and health security from the federal government to individuals, employers, and civil society. Though I am strongly inclined to embrace voluntary solutions to social problems, I’m often inclined to use less fiery rhetoric because I believe that what we’re really talking about in public policy debates are incremental changes, and it is important to at least try to build bridges to people who don’t share our gut instincts, values, etc. If we embrace an all or nothing pose, it is far more likely that we’ll get nothing.

Again, Ryanism promised something different. It gave the modal fiery conservative the opportunity to embrace a dramatic if not quite complete proposal to restructure the health safety net as a series of means-tested, risk-adjusted limited defined contributions towards the purchase of insurance.

One problem, as a good friend recently pointed out to me, is that we conservatives are often extremely defensive. The Ryan plan represented an improvement over status quo conservative discourse, but it wasn’t perfect, as Chairman Ryan would happily acknowledge. Yet many conservatives have pounced on even mild criticisms of the Ryan plan, seeing it as sacrilege. Criticisms like those from Newt Gingrich don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Criticisms that suggest that the Ryan plan might not prove sustainable in the face of political pressure, in contrast, should be welcomed as constructive.

Depressingly, it seems that all-or-nothingism is already asserting itself. Prominent Republicans, including House Speaker John Boehner, are already distancing themselves from the Ryan plan. And in the special election in New York’s 26th congressional district, we’ve seen even more pointed backsliding, as David Weigel reports:

It has the makings of a totally issue-based election. And this campaign is basically free of personal attacks and character attacks. But that’s not to say there has been an ideological debate over Medicare or entitlement spending. The Republican, Jane Corwin, answers the Medicare attack by saying no, seriously, she’ll work twice as hard to make sure it survives. The first election since the Ryan plan passed the House isn’t really a fight over the Ryan plan. It’s about which candidate loves Medicare more—or more accurately, about how the other candidate loves it less.

In fairness to Republican candidate Jane Corwin, she seems to have a fairly sophisticated command of the issues:

But Corwin doesn’t support keeping Medicare around in its current form. She supports turning it all into Medicare Part D. She gets some of the questions voters have asked, like: In this new Utopia of free-market plans, why exactly do insurers pick up, and not ignore, seniors with pre-existing conditions?
“Certainly I’d like to see pre-existing conditions and children staying on their parents’ plans,” she says.
If Corwin wins this district next Tuesday, after all the attention paid to the race, Republicans will offer her victory as proof that Republicans can endorse the Ryan plan and survive. That’d be too simplistic. If Corwin wins, it will be because the district has a seven-point registration advantage for Republicans over Democrats—and because she didn’t so much defend the Ryan plan as defend Medicare, and she did so by accusing her Democratic foe of defending it with lesser passion.

It is possible that there is some daylight between Corwin and Ryan, e.g., that Corwin would favor a growth rate for premium support that is somewhat more generous than the Ryan plan allows, and perhaps she’d be comfortable with a Medicare public option. I can’t really say. But Corwin recognizes that winning her district, with its older age profile, requires presenting herself as an ardent defender of the old-age safety net.

There is nothing wrong with defending an old-age safety net. I am of the view that putting the old-age safety net on a more sustainable footing by moving to a (well-designed) limited defined contribution model is the best way to defend it. Yet I think we’re generally better off if rhetoric and policy are aligned, i.e., if we tone down the fiery rhetoric and advance more substantively ambitious policy instead of embracing ultra-fiery rhetoric while retreating to status quo policy.