As Ryan searches his soul, his most steadfast allies in the conservative movement, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, find themselves in a nightmarishly difficult position. Ryan is a Journal-style conservative through and through, and he is reportedly close to the Journal’s chief ideologist, Paul Gigot. Throughout his career, Ryan has fought for the causes dearest to the newspaper’s heart—namely tax cuts for the rich, open borders, and a hawkish foreign policy. The fact that Trump has won the GOP nomination by bashing elites and immigrants and calling for an “America First” foreign policy is, for Ryan and the Journal alike, an unmitigated disaster. What exactly is the Journal doing to rescue its greatest champion? Are they urging him to get behind Hillary Clinton on the grounds that she’s pro-immigration and more of an internationalist than Trump? Not quite.
Sensing that a beleaguered Ryan was in need of bucking up, the WSJ editorial page defended the House speaker’s endorsement of Trump. Without naming names, the Journal takes “conservative journalists” and “Beltway grandees” to task for arguing that Ryan has sullied his good name…
Leaving aside the merits of the case for tax cuts, the federal income tax is now far more progressive than it was when Ronald Reagan first came to office. Relatively few voters, including relatively few Republican voters, consider tax cuts a particularly high policy priority, as Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View observed back in January. “There is simply no way to make federal tax cuts add up to a winning strategy in this day and age,” she wrote. “It’s great for the donor base and the think tanks. But it’s going to fall on deaf ears among the voters, who just don’t care that much.”
The political advice the Wall Street Journal is giving Paul Ryan and his Republican allies is transparently absurd. Nevertheless, one can’t help but sympathize with the Journal. In the Journal’s ideal world, the GOP would largely abandon social conservatism and instead offer tax cuts for the rich, open borders, and deep cuts in programs like Social Security and Medicare. There is no longer any doubt that this generation of Republican voters has thoroughly repudiated the newspaper’s worldview. That’s obviously pretty distressing. But the Journal doesn’t support these policies because they are popular among Republicans or the public at large. Anyone with even a casual familiarity with American politics would know that simply isn’t so. Rather, the Journal takes these positions because they believe them to be intellectually and morally compelling. That’s fair enough. What the Journal should do, then, is give up on offering political advice and get on with making the intellectual and moral case for welcoming more poor immigrants to America while denying them food stamps and subsidized medical care.
