Just what has Mitt Romney said by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate?
Trying to solve the puzzle of Paul Ryan, a politician he admires for his seriousness and despises for his core beliefs, the left-liberal writer Matthew Miller has written: “He is not a fiscal conservative. He’s a small-government conservative. These are very different things.”
Miller is right that these are two very different kinds of conservatives. But he’s wrong about Ryan — who has become the object of conservative adulation over the past three years in part because he’s managed to find a way to bring these disparate strands on the right together as no one has before.
He is the bridge between fiscal conservatism and small-government conservatism.
Both have been potent forces in the Republican Party for the past four decades or more. Both were key aspects of the insurgent reaction to President Obama’s wild spending spree that led to the birth of the Tea Party and triumphed with the stunning midterm election results in 2010 that decimated House Democrats.
But they are, as Miller said, “very different.” And those differences have often resulted in outright enmity.
Fiscal conservatives worry about the consequences of excess government spending on the good working order of the federal government. They have primarily concerned themselves with the budget deficit — the byproduct of the fact that government spends more than it takes in and has to borrow the rest. They worried that excess government borrowing would compete for capital with private industry, and the competition would lead to excessive rates of interest injurious to a healthy economy.
What they disliked morally about excess government spending was the absence of thrift — something that could be corrected by putting the government’s books in balance. As a result, they did and do not have a problem supporting certain types of tax increases.
Ultimately, they believed government was too big because it didn’t have enough resources to pay its own way: “We have more will than wallet,” said fiscal conservative George H.W. Bush. The will was admirable; if only the wallet could’ve been bigger!
The fatal flaw in fiscal conservatism is that government always finds a way to spend money gathered for fiscally conservative purposes. Make a deal to save Social Security through an increase in the payroll tax, as the fiscal conservatives did in 1983, and government will simply raid the trust fund for its capital and leave worthless IOUs in its place.
Actions like these and others are what led Newt Gingrich to dub fiscal conservative Bob Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state” back in the 1990s.
Small-government conservatives think the problem is not that the wallet is too small but that the will is misdirected. They are opposed to the growth of government philosophically — because they believe a larger government interferes with constitutional liberties even as it fosters a culture of dependency that creates perverse moral incentives.
Small-government conservatives have long made the broad case against Big Government, but have tended to stay away from the innards of Washington because they were repelled by what they considered the corrupted nature of the beast they opposed.
Fiscal conservatives interested themselves in the mechanics of the most tedious workings of government in order to understand how to control its size and manage its budget. Over time, they became known as the “green eyeshade guys” because they went over books like an actuary.
They’re annoyed with the moral disgust displayed by small-government conservatives; they find such talk hysterical and reckless. Allergic to ideology and more interested in statistics, they despise having ideology applied to their field of expertise.
The secret of Paul Ryan is that he is a blend of the two; philosophically a small-government conservative, managerially a fiscal conservative.
He wants to reduce the size of government for the reasons the Tea Party elucidated — that Big Government saps individual initiative and is a betrayal of the rights enumerated in the Constitution. But he has also mastered the language and the approach of the fiscal conservatives, and has used them to get very specific about the threat posed to the American future by the coming tsunami in entitlement spending.
Ryan is able to put on the green eyeshade of the fiscal conservatives while speaking in the moral frame of the small-government conservatives. Doesn’t sound like it’s that much of a challenge, but no one else has been able to pull it off with his clarity and grace.
That’s what’s new about Paul Ryan — and it’s why liberals have reason to fear the clarity and power of his message.