{"id":4699,"date":"2012-04-08T11:24:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-08T17:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/?p=4699"},"modified":"2012-04-07T23:30:04","modified_gmt":"2012-04-08T05:30:04","slug":"the-rights-stealthy-coup-the-washington-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/election\/the-rights-stealthy-coup-the-washington-post\/","title":{"rendered":"The right’s stealthy coup – The Washington Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

The right\u2019s stealthy coup – The Washington Post<\/a> <\/p>\n

\n
By E.J. Dionne Jr.<\/a>, Published: April 1The Washington Post<\/h5>\n

Right before our eyes, American conservatism is becoming something very different from what it once was. Yet this transformation is happening by stealth because moderates are too afraid to acknowledge what all their senses tell them.<\/p>\n

Last week\u2019s Supreme Court oral arguments on health care were the most dramatic example of how radical tea partyism has displaced mainstream conservative thinking. It\u2019s not just that the law\u2019s individual mandate was, until very recently, a conservative idea<\/a>. Even conservative legal analysts were insisting it was impossible to imagine the court declaring the health-care mandate unconstitutional, given its past decisions. \u2026<\/p>\n

A brief look at history suggests how far to the right both the Republican Party and contemporary conservatism have moved. Today\u2019s conservatives almost never invoke one of our most successful Republican presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave us, among other things, federally guaranteed student loans and championed the interstate highway system.<\/font> <\/p>\n

Even more revealing is what Robert A. Taft, the leader of the conservative forces who opposed Eisenhower\u2019s nomination in 1952, had to say about government\u2019s role in American life. \u201cIf the free enterprise system does not do its best to prevent hardship and poverty,\u201d the Ohio Republican senator said in a 1945 speech, \u201cit will find itself superseded by a less progressive system which does.\u201d He urged Congress to \u201cundertake to put a floor under essential things, to give all a minimum standard of decent living, and to all children a fair opportunity to get a start in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who can doubt that today\u2019s right would declare his day\u2019s Mr. Republican and Mr. Conservative a socialist redistributionist? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The right\u2019s stealthy coup – The Washington Post<\/a><\/p>\n

From Paul Krugman 3\/19\/12:<\/p>\n

The solution \u2014 originally proposed, believe it or not, by analysts at the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation \u2014 is a three-legged stool of regulation and subsidies. As in New York, insurers are required to cover everyone; in return, everyone is required to buy insurance, so that healthy as well as sick people are in the risk pool. Finally, subsidies make those mandated insurance purchases affordable for lower-income families. <\/p>\n

Can such a system work? It\u2019s already working! Massachusetts enacted a very similar reform six years ago \u2014 yes, while Mitt Romney was governor. Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who played a key role in developing both the local and the national reforms (and has published an illustrated guide to reform) has surveyed the results \u2014 and finds that Romneycare is working pretty much as advertised. The number of people without insurance has dropped sharply, the quality of care hasn\u2019t suffered, and the program\u2019s cost has been very close to initial projections.
\nOh, and the budgetary cost per newly insured resident of Massachusetts was actually lower than the projected cost per American insured by the Affordable Care Act. <\/p>\n

Given this evidence, what\u2019s a virulent opponent of reform to do? The answer is, make stuff up. <\/p>\n

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The right\u2019s stealthy coup – The Washington Post By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: April 1The Washington Post Right before our eyes, American conservatism is becoming something very different from what it once was. Yet this transformation is happening by stealth because moderates are too afraid to acknowledge what all their senses tell them. Last week\u2019s … Continue reading The right’s stealthy coup – The Washington Post<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4699"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4701,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions\/4701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edgewiseblog.com\/mjh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}