No Longer the Party of ideas

Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

In my essay in The Elephant in the Room, I write: "Trumpism reversed Lyndon Johnson's famous summary of the Great Society: he was against a lot of things and in favor of mighty few.'"

E.J. Dionne at WP:

Donald Trump has proposed shooting shoplifters, as NBC News noted in a report on GOP “bloodlust.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has pledged to kill drug smugglers who cross the Mexican border. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, in more organized fashion, proposed sending Special Forces into Mexico to go after drug cartels. Oh, and DeSantis said last August that he wanted to “slit the throats” of federal bureaucrats on Day 1 of his administration. But don’t be alarmed, civil servants. He explained later that he was “being colorful.”

If killing various kinds of people is a legitimate solution for various problems, then sure, the party’s presidential candidates have plenty of policies to offer.

Occasionally, the party’s hopefuls go beyond vague but sweeping calls for cuts in government spending to spar about something substantive. At a debate earlier this month, Haley proposed raising the retirement age for younger workers, while DeSantis said he wouldn’t. Some deficit hawks will no doubt cheer Haley, but there’s nothing pathbreaking about this argument.

Beyond that, the party is offering little in the way of problem-solving and policy innovation. Culture war battle cries and symbolism are the order of the day.

The Grand Nihilist Party

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

The state of the GOP is not good. 

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic:

The survival instinct that this white-minority rage has triggered in craven Republican politicians is how the GOP mutated from a party championing individual liberty into a movement pushing monstrously statist authoritarianism. It is how the party of limited government began agitating for government truth ministries. It is how the party of exuberant free marketeers became a cabal of crony capitalists and knee-jerk protectionists. It is how the party that once fought Kremlin expansionism provided top cover for Russian intelligence attacks against U.S. institutions.

Republicans have tried to argue that if they are not in power, the Democrats and their ultraliberal allies will destroy our system of government and create a majoritarian nightmare. We must stay in power, they mewl, so that democracy itself will survive long enough to outlive the encroaching authoritarianism of the left.

These defenses are risible nonsense in the wake of Trump’s constitutional mayhem and the GOP’s descent into conspiratorial lunacy. But even on their own terms, Republican excuses are little more than lightly veiled defenses of minority rule. The GOP long ago abandoned any effort to convince women, people of color, immigrants, and others that the party had a place for them. Instead, Republicans in Congress have surrendered to the ignorance and racism of their most extreme voters in exchange for a continued life of privilege inside the comforting embrace of the Capital Beltway.

The Republicans, facing an investigation into an insurrection provoked by their own leader, have armored up and gone into armadillo mode. They will protect their own—rather than their nation and the Constitution they swore to defend. This behavior should serve as a warning: A party that doesn’t believe in anything ends up believing only in its right to rule. And a movement that believes only in its own power is a deadly enemy of constitutional democracy.

Anti-Intellectualism on the Right

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

The state of the GOP is not good.

Bruce Bartlett last year at TNR:

Although Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan also adopted anti-intellectualism as a political strategy, for them it was just a cynical way to cater to widespread distrust of expertise and learning as a brand of elitism. As president, they routinely deferred to experts, scientists, and other intellectuals in developing and implementing their policies. Nixon famously reached out to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a professor of government at Harvard and well-known Democrat, to work for him in the White House. According to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, he used the columnist George Will, who studied at Oxford and holds a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton, as a sort of emissary to the intellectual community. And George W. Bush had as his vice president Dick Cheney, a man who had pursued a doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin, where his wife, Lynne, got a Ph.D. in British literature.

...
The problem is that adopting faux populism and anti-intellectualism for purely political purposes eventually leads practitioners to take their own rhetoric literally and denigrate expertise as something to be distrusted per se. This is why the great conservative philosopher Russell Kirk rejected populist rhetoric as a path for conservative victory, even though the populist message might overlap with the conservative program to some extent. As he explained in a 1988 lecture at the Heritage Foundation:

Populism is a revolt against the Smart Guys. I am very ready to confess that the present Smart Guys, as represented by the dominant mentality of the Academy and of what [sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger] call the Knowledge Class today, are insufficiently endowed with right reason and moral imagination. But it would not be an improvement to supplant them by persons of thoroughgoing ignorance and incompetence.

In a forthcoming article in Public Opinion Quarterly, political scientist Eric Merkley explains how populism and anti-intellectualism lend themselves naturally to the rejection of scientific expertise. As Republicans have tied themselves to the pseudo-populist Tea Party movement over the last decade, as well as to evangelicals and other fundamentalist Christians, their trust in scientific expertise has fallen. According to a 2019 article in Public Opinion Quarterly, in 1973 more Republicans had a great deal of trust in scientists than did Democrats (41 percent of the former, 35 percent of the latter). But by 2016, those percentages had reversed. The latest data from Pew show that 43 percent of Democrats have a great deal confidence in scientists to act in the best interests of the public, while only 27 percent of Republicans do. 

 

a depressingly accurate account of the deterioration if not eradication of intellectualism on the right. It truly is the know-nothing party. https://t.co/xmiDlFwq5t

— Jennifer 'pro-voting' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) March 24, 2021

Democrats to the Left

Some academics claim that polarization stems mostly from the GOP. Republicans, they claim, have more much farther to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. That argument was always dubious: in Congress, for instance, party unity scores have risen in tandem. And the 2016 election consigns it to the dustbin of intellectual history.

Dan Balz writes at The Washington Post:

Bill Clinton was the original New Democrat. On Tuesday, he was speaking to a party that had just adopted the most liberal platform in the party’s history. At times in this campaign, he has seemed caught between the then and the now, grappling with the forces that have been buffeting the party’s coalition and altering its priorities. But it is Hillary Clinton who has most had to adapt.
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Nothing symbolizes the change in the party more than the issue of trade, although because of organized labor’s power within the Democratic coalition, the base of the party has long stood in opposition to most trade agreements.

In 1992, Bill Clinton challenged those conventions, advocating for a North American Free Trade Agreement in union halls in states such as Michigan and eventually steering the agreement through Congress.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor Sanders has done anything close to that, even though most presidents, including President Obama, have supported major trade treaties.

Opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement was at the heart of Sanders’s critique of an economic system that he said has favored the richest Americans over everyone else. Hillary Clinton, who had championed the possible benefits of a TPP as secretary of state, opposed it as a candidate, recognizing that to do otherwise would have carried a sizable political risk.
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California Gov. Jerry Brown, who lost to Bill Clinton in the 1992 Democratic primaries and whose views then on trade and other issues clashed with those of the former Arkansas governor, described the DLC during a Tuesday interview as “a remnant of another period.”

Reflecting on the centrist views of government’s role vs. the views of Democrats today, Brown said: “They [today’s Democrats] want more interventionist government to make things more fair. They want the instrumentality of government. There’s more belief that more can be done. No one’s going to say government is the problem, not the solution. They’re not going to say that.”

The Iron Law of Emulation is at work.  Just as the right built its network....

At The New York Times, Gideon Lewis-Kraus reports on The Roosevelt Institute:

The progressive organizations in [Felicia] Wong’s rotation take as a matter of course the idea that the Obama administration was a significant missed opportunity for transformation on that order. They do not entirely blame Obama. He had his legislative victories — most importantly in the Affordable Care Act — but one lesson they drew from his time in office was that liberals had long been overly fixated on legislative success. (Johnson had a Congress he could work with; Obama mostly did not, and the next president probably won’t, either.) The right has set the agenda for the past 35 years because they built their economic movement deductively (from the first principle of the unregulated market) and took their victories where they could find them. The left, by comparison, tended to moralize, and spoke in the language of justice instead of growth. When they did talk about economics, it took the form of individual issues — minimum wage, student debt, paid family and sick leave — rather than overarching pronouncements. This muddle worsened during the Bush era, when urgent noneconomic concerns forced the left to privilege short-term electoral tactics over long-term strategy.

Roosevelt was designed to be a place, independent of the party establishment, to unite all of these factions under the banner of long-term, coherent economic thinking. Had such a movement existed in 2008, it might have seized on the financial crisis as an opportunity for structural economic reform. Obama’s recovery model, to the group’s lasting dismay, remained in thrall to old superstitions about growth. The goal of the bailout was to fix the existing financial system and get credit flowing back into the economy while keeping an eye on deficit spending. But today, though high-level macroeconomic numbers like monthly job growth or the headline unemployment rate have improved, almost half of the new jobs created in the first five years of the recovery were poverty-level. Repaired with a kludge, the system went right back to doing exactly what it did before: allowing the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of the few to dominate the prospects of the many.

GOP Base v. Conservatism

It may be that the GOP's base never defined conservatism in the same way as the party's intellectuals. 

Peggy Noonan writes:

The Trump phenomenon itself would normally be big enough for any political cycle, but another story of equal size isn’t being sufficiently noticed and deserves mention. The Democratic base has become more liberal—we all know this part—but in a way the Republican base has, too. Or rather it is certainly busy updating what conservative means. The past few months, in state after state, one thing kept jumping out at me in primary exit polls. Democrats consistently characterize themselves as more liberal than in 2008, a big liberal year. This week in Indiana, 68% of Democratic voters called themselves liberal or very liberal. In 2008 that number was 39%. That’s a huge increase.

In South Carolina this year, 53% of Democrats called themselves very or somewhat liberal. Eight years ago that number was 44%—again, a significant jump. In Pennsylvania, 66% of respondents called themselves very or somewhat liberal. That number eight years ago was 50%.

The dynamic is repeated in other states. The Democratic Party is going left.

But look at the Republican side. However they characterize themselves, a majority of GOP voters now are supporting the candidate who has been to the left of the party’s established thinking on a host of issues—entitlement spending, trade, foreign policy. Mr. Trump’s colorfully emphatic stands on immigration have been portrayed as so wackily rightist that the nonrightist nature of his other, equally consequential positions has been obscured.

In my observation it is a mistake to think Mr. Trump’s supporters are so thick they don’t know his stands. They do.

It does not show an understanding of the moment to say Donald Trump by himself has changed the Republican Party. It is closer to the mark to say the base of the party is changing and Mr. Trump’s electric arrival on the scene made obvious what was already happening.

Back in February, she touched upon a key distinction between both parties' elites and the people they purport to speak for:

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.
They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.

Tom Wolfe wrote in Bonfire of the Vanities: "Insulation! That was the ticket. That was the term Rawlie Thorpe used. 'If you want to live in New York,' he once told Sherman, 'you've got to insulate, insulate, insulate,' meaning insulate yourself from those people."

Wolfe wrote of 1980s New York:  the setting of Trump's rise to prominence.

Kempism

Peter Spiliakos writes at First Things:

Kempism started as an opening to the working-class. Kempism argued—somewhat persuasively under the circumstances of the late-1970s—that the needs of entrepreneurs and wage-earners overlapped. Today, Kempism has degenerated into a rationalization for the interests and priorities of the affluent.

Kempism speaks for a Wall Street Journal editorial page that prioritizes tax cuts for businesses and high-earners above everything else. Kempsim speaks for the employers who want to make it easier to find workers (and to pay those workers less) as the labor market finally heats up after the Great Recession. The social basis of Kempism is now the business lobbies, and politicians like Paul Ryan whose experiences with the world of conservative think tanks are utterly alien to those of most American wage-earners.

On taxes, Kempism was a victim of its own success. Reagan-era tax reforms (in which Kemp played a big role) took many people off the income tax rolls entirely:  as of last year, about 45 percent of households (mostly lower income) paid no federal income tax at all.  As a result, income-tax cuts now disproportionately benefit the affluent.  

The other half of Kempism, which the article doesn't mention, consisted of proposals to help the poor, such as tenant management of public housing.

Good stuff by itself, but Kempism offered little to the people in between -- the blue-collar and pink-collar workers now flocking to Trump.

Conservative Intellectuals and the GOP

At Politico, Tevi Troy notes that conservative intellectuals did not play a major role in GOP politics until the 1960s.  Their influence expanded greatly under Reagan, but in this campaign it appears to be on the wane.

In 2016, the old model does not seem to be working. This cycle has revealed a chasm between the expectations of the GOP electorate and the conservative intellectual world. Much of this parting of the ways of course has to do with Trump, who does not appear to engage in outreach to conservative intellectuals and has few if any prominent conservative intellectuals on his team. In addition to dismissing National Review and not engaging with the think tanks, Trump has also made clear he wants to go it alone when it comes to idea generation, saying, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain.”

To be fair, though, the emerging separation with GOP intellectuals is not solely a Trump-focused phenomenon. Neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich are exactly darlings of the intelligentsia, either—or they weren’t in the early stages of the campaign. Conservative intellectuals in this cycle were split by the largest crop of conservative candidates ever, but tended to coalesce at various times around Scott Walker, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, all of whom have exited the race. Having think tankers on their side did little to help those candidates connect with voters. Indeed, it could be argued that Jeb Bush’s frequent references to books he was reading may have made it more difficult for him to appeal to voters on the ground.

Mainstream conservative think tank positions on free trade, U.S.-led internationalism, lower personal income tax rates, Social Security reform and immigration regularization simply do not appear to speak to today’s high-anxiety voters. It is possible that the interests of Reagan-era intellectuals were more aligned with the GOP base than they are today. Lower taxes, small government, free-trade, and more immigration appealed to blue-collar voters in Reagan’s day; they don’t so much today. And so far, the elite has been reluctant to adapt.

Are There Any New Ideas?

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

At Politico, Michael Lind writes:

Yet even the most radical ideas of the right for replacing Social Security, Medicare and public education are far from original. Many of today’s conservative policy ideas, including the replacement of progressive income taxes with a flat tax and the reduction of poverty by use of wage subsidies like the earned income tax credit (EITC), are inspired by Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom. Friedman’s book was published in 1962. I was born in 1962. I am not young.

The extension of civil rights to gay, lesbian, bi and transgendered Americans is a genuinely revolutionary development. So are many of the debates about the environment and climate change, which involve relatively recent data and some new technologies. As are debates over Internet privacy that would have baffled Americans as recently as the early 1990s.

But when it comes to the basic questions of political economy, I can’t think of a single proposal being debated today that is not a variation of an idea proposed or passed into law between the first election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and the passage of Medicare in 1965, a period that includes Milton Friedman’s influential masterpiece. The nearly five decades since have been marked by the same pattern, in which progressives defend and seek to extend the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society, while conservatives, and some neoliberal “New Democrats,” propose variations of the ideas set forth by Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom.
...

Even what appears to be a profound debate among contemporary conservative policy wonks turns out, upon inspection, to be merely a clash among different factions of Miltonism-Friedmanism. Proposals by Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) for a larger child tax credit, reflecting one Friedmanite approach, have been criticized by conservatives who think the focus should be on another one of Uncle Milty’s ideas—flattening federal income tax rates. The debate on the right remains not whether to cut federal taxes, but how.

Constitutionalist Agenda

At NRO, Ramesh Ponnuru and Reihan Salam write of a "constitutionalist agenda" for the GOP. They write that conservative remedies are other either fanciful (constitutional amendments) or inadequate (appoint conservative judges).

A practical constitutionalist agenda for the Congress would attempt both to strengthen constitutional principles such as federalism and the separation of powers and to habituate legislators to the idea that they have a role to play on these questions. The agenda would also illustrate how these principles would make for better government. Here are a few ideas that conservative congressmen, and presidential candidates, should be considering.

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• Medicaid:  "As Michael Greve has argued in The Upside-Down Constitution, the Founders envisioned a sharper division between state and federal responsibilities, a division that enabled competition and accountability. The best way to move back in that direction would be for the federal government to cash out most of its spending on Medicaid and give it to the beneficiaries to help them buy insurance in the private market. The federal government should simultaneously make it easier for states to do the same thing with most of their Medicaid spending. And the federal contributions should no longer reward states for higher spending."
• Regulation: "The REINS Act: Many Republicans have, to their credit, advocated legislation requiring a congressional vote before major regulations can take effect, and it was one of the first bills House Republicans passed when they took Congress in 2011. Republicans have mostly described the legislation as a way of safeguarding economic growth and economic liberty, but it too has a constitutional dimension: It is a means of countering the tendency of modern government to vest legislative power in unelected agencies."
• Spending: "Bring agency spending under congressional control: Another step toward reining in agencies would be to make their funding depend on Congress. Congressional power over spending — a powerful protection for self-government that predates the Constitution — has been eroded as government agencies have been given independent funding streams."
• Taxes: "Eliminate the deduction for state and local taxes: Believers in federalism should loathe the state- and local-tax deduction, which in effect transfers resources from taxpayers living in low-tax states to those living in high-tax states and, worse, raises the average state tax rate...Eliminating the deduction would also make voters in states such as New York, New Jersey, and California more tax-sensitive, as they would no longer be shielded from the full impact of their tax bills."  And it would drive these states even deeper into the Democratic column.
• Marijuana; "Allow states to go their own way on marijuana: Public opinion on marijuana is changing rapidly."

Applied Conservatism and the Conservative Reform Network

At The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes writes of the GOP politics of ideas, focusing on the Conservative Reform Network (formerly the Young Guns Network):

GOP presidential candidates were among the first to notice. Florida senator Marco Rubio, who announced for president last week, met several times with a group of conservative intellectuals last year. Now his agenda, notably on taxes, echoes their ideas. So does his new book, American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone.

When Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, came to Washington in February, he made a point of huddling with five policy experts associated with the Conservative Reform Network. One of them, CRN policy director April Ponnuru, wound up being hired. She will soon join the Bush campaign as an adviser.

CRN, which brings together reform-minded Republicans and think tank scholars, is a leader in the conservative idea business. It has spurred a fresh flow of proposals, policies, talking points, and new ways of thinking, mostly based on a concept called “applied conservatism.”

Democrats have nothing to match this GOP idea machine. Their allegiance to identity politics and obeisance to liberal interest groups has led to a commitment to policies from the New Deal and Great Society. Their newest idea is increasing Social Security benefits, itself an old idea. Liberals are “intellectually defunct,” says John Murray, an adviser to former House majority leader Eric Cantor and now CRN chairman.

Rubio, Reform Conservatism, and Taxes

Marco Rubio, who announced his candidacy this week, is part of the "reformicon" movement. James Pethokoukis writes at The Week about his tax plans:

As I wrote in a previous The Week article, the Rubio plan has some great elements, including middle-class tax relief and sweeping corporate tax reform. There is also merit in lowering the top tax rate somewhat to signal that conservatives will not accept its continual ascent to pre-Reagan levels. And while Rubio's plan loses too much money, and taking investment tax rates all the way to zero would seem a political bridge too far, these are fixable issues, and something like the Rubio plan might pass some future Congress.

Critically, the Rubio proposal recognizes that while the U.S. needs faster economic growth, acceleration alone might not help many middle-class families in an economy buffeted by automation of middle-skill jobs and globalization. In short, it's an attempted response to real-world problems and conditions, not ideological litmus tests. His competitors might want to try the same strategy and reject the economic nostalgia and wishful thinking that's infected much of today's GOP policy debate.

Wehner on Conservative Reform

At Commentary, Peter Wehner writes:

It doesn’t surprise many of us that confidence in government is so low during the presidency of a committed progressive, Mr. Obama, whose faith in government appears boundless and whose tenure has been marked by rank incompetence and seen the size and reach of the federal government reach unprecedented levels. The temptation for conservatives will be to take advantage of and build on this widespread distrust, to dial up their anti-government rhetoric, and to continue to focus solely on what government should not be doing.

But as I have argued before (here and here), such an exclusively negative approach to the question of the role of government is not only electorally insufficient; it is unbecoming of conservatism and of the deep commitment that conservatives claim to the nation’s founding ideals.

The way to both re-limit and improve government lies with structural reforms–to our tax code; our entitlement, health-care, and anti-poverty programs; our immigration and elementary, secondary, and higher-education systems; and the energy and financial sector. The fact that government is held in contempt by so many Americans ought to trouble all of us, including conservatives; and making our government one we can once again be proud of ought to be our object and aim. Government is, after all, “the offspring of our own choice,” in the words of Washington, and should have “a just claim to [our] confidence and [our] support.”

Reform Republicanism

Peter Wehner writes at The New York Times:

Too often, Republicans express a purely negative vision of government. This is both politically perilous and intellectually inadequate. Republicans oppose the liberal vision of the role of the state because they support a different, conservative vision. They need to articulate that vision, since many presidential voters will be reluctant to give their trust to leaders who have nothing but contempt for the government they wish to run.

He gives examples of conservative success: welfare reform, crime control, and the EITC.

What conservatives should be aiming for is not a slightly less costly liberal welfare state or simply slowing government’s one-way ratchet toward progressivism. They should be more ambitious and more creative: transforming government programs to make them more modern, efficient, responsive and accountable — to have them support and encourage individual initiative, not replace it.

Conservatives are rightly proud of our Constitution, yet many of them are disdainful of our government. But the Constitution created our system of government, and our goal in political life should be to reform that government back into one we can be proud of again.

Understanding government in this way, and taking the steps necessary to enable it to work better and therefore regain the trust of the American people, is a worthy calling. And a deeply conservative one, too.

Reform Conservatism, New Ideas, and Neocons

At The Weekly Standard, Michael Warren writes that Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is working to be the GOP's new new-ideas guy:

Lee knows he isn’t the presidential candidate conservatives are looking for, but he’s got his eyes on that “positive, innovative, and unapologetically conservative agenda.” He’s not shy about the role he’d like to play. “I do want to influence that debate,” Lee says. His slate of policy proposals isn’t light fare. Since 2013, Lee has introduced bills to make the tax code more family friendly, take on cronyism in Washington, reform the college accreditation system, and change the way the federal government funds transportation infrastructure. But what Lee really wants is to change the way conservatives think about domestic policy, reorienting the Republican party toward a family-focused, constitutional populism to help the GOP win back the White House. If Lee succeeds, it will make him one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation.

Lee’s touchstone is Ronald Reagan, but not in the rote way you might think. “It’s important for us to remember that by the time 2016 rolls around, we will be about as far away from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 as Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 was from D-Day, and it’s important for us to update our agenda to make sure that it fits the times,” says Lee. “We need to stop simply talking about Reagan and start acting like him.” That doesn’t mean slashing the marginal tax rate or getting rid of the Department of Education. Lee says acting like Reagan means applying principles of limited government, constitutionalism, and a healthy civil society to the issues of the day—namely, the rising cost of living and economic insecurity of the American middle class.

If the Republican party needs another Reagan, Lee wants to fill the role of Jack Kemp, who as a junior congressman took the lead in formulating the tax cuts that were central to Reagan’s agenda once he took office. Like Kemp, Lee has made tax reform his signature issue, despite not having a seat on the tax-writing Finance Committee. The target of Lee’s tax proposal is what he calls the “parent tax penalty.” Parents, like everyone else, pay some combination of income and payroll taxes. The “penalty,” Lee says, is that parents also bear the costs of raising children who will grow up to become taxpayers themselves. The current child tax credit isn’t enough to offset these additional costs. Lee’s plan looks a lot like other Republican tax reform ideas—simplifying the brackets, lowering rates, removing costly deductions—while adding an extra $2,500-per-child tax credit that can apply to any parent’s combined tax liability. It’s money that could pay for child-care costs or cover expensive dental work or even help one parent stay home to raise the kids.

Arit John writes at Bloomberg:

Ahead of his foreign policy speech in Chicago on Wednesday, Jeb Bush released a list of 21 familiar foreign policy advisers joining his staff. Nineteen of the names would have been familiar to foreign policy wonks (they’d served under one of more of the last Republican presidents) but only one brought back memories of the neoconservative movement that led the U.S. into Iraq: Paul Wolfowitz.

As several people, especially liberals, have pointed out, by including Wolfowitz—whose brief, scandal-plagued tenure as president of the World Bank is overshadowed by his key role in America’s unpopular invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush—the former Florida governor did little to distinguish himself from his brother’s foreign policy.

But while Jeb Bush is adding neoconservative Iraq War baggage to his 2016 presidential campaign, expected Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has spent years dealing with her own. One of Clinton’s biggest weaknesses with the Democratic base has been her perceived hawkishness—Barack Obama used her vote for the Iraq War against her in 2008, andDemocrats criticized her critique of President Obama’s foreign policy in the Atlantic last year, when she argued that the U.S. should have armed moderate Syrian rebels to prevent the rise of groups like the Islamic State.

In July of last year, the New York Times ran two pieces tying Clinton to the neoconservative movement. In “The Next Act of the Neocons,” Jacob Heilbrunn argued that neocons like historian Robert Kagan are putting their lot in with Clinton in an effort to stay relevant while the GOP shies away from its past interventionism and embraces politicians like Senator Rand Paul...