ActRight

Going into the 2016 election cycle, Republicans had a golden opportunity. The House and Senate are already under GOP control; a win in the presidential race would open up the possibility of passing the most ambitious pro-growth agenda since the Reagan landslide in 1980. All that was needed was general consensus within the party on the important features of a governing agenda for the future, and a strong, reform-minded presidential nominee who could ride that agenda to victory in November. In early 2015, this didn’t seem so far-fetched. Now, we know better. #ad#The two leading candidates for the GOP nomination for president — Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz — are unlikely to unite the party and set the stage for a successful legislative program next year. Trump has built his campaign around simplistic and populist appeals that resonate with a portion of the electorate but are so disconnected from reality, generally wrong in orientation, and counterproductive as to be useless as guideposts for policy. Cruz has, to some extent, followed suit. A year of this kind of messaging from the top candidates has left the Republican party utterly confused about what it stands for and where it is going. Enter Paul Ryan. When he became speaker of the House late last year, he pledged to push forward a proactive agenda that would give the GOP something to run on in 2016. He is now in the process of making good on that pledge, setting in motion a number of internal task forces charged with developing policy positions in key areas, including health care, taxes, safety-net programs, and national-security policy. All of this has left the New York Times wondering if Ryan is positioning himself as a potential candidate for president should the party convene in Cleveland this summer without a clear nominee. Ryan has made plain in every way possible that he isn’t running for president. Instead, he’s doing something just as important: attempting to fill the policy void left behind by a presidential nominating process that has been long on vacuous and impractical statements and short on actual plans for governing the country. Ryan is absolutely right that the House GOP should not defer to the party’s eventual nominee when it comes time to set an agenda for 2017 and beyond, because the likely nominees have shown almost no capacity for advancing an agenda that has any hope of being enacted, much less of working to promote strong economic growth. Wresting away control of the agenda wouldn’t be easy in the best of circumstances, given the wide latitude traditionally afforded the party’s nominee in shaping its platform. But this year it will be particularly tough, because much of what has been said on the campaign trail by the leading candidates needs to be refuted and abandoned rather than adopted by the party. This is especially true if Trump prevails and becomes the party’s nominee. Ryan is absolutely right that the House GOP should not defer to the party’s eventual nominee when it comes time to set an agenda for 2017 and beyond Among other things, Trump wants the United States to become protectionist. This is a terrible idea that will backfire. Since World War II, the United States has been the leading advocate for liberalizing global trade, to the great benefit of economic growth. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was ratified in 1947, and ushered in a period of profound and rapid economic growth among liberal democracies worldwide. Countless studies have documented that free trade speeds innovation and growth in productivity for the U.S. and other countries alike, thus boosting incomes and standards of living. It would be a catastrophic mistake for the U.S. to reverse course and begin unilaterally imposing tariffs on imported goods. Trump seems to think he can rip up 70 years of international treaties and renegotiate their terms from scratch, all without consequence. He is dead wrong. Those treaties have been carefully and painstakingly constructed with the cooperation of scores of countries. By unilaterally imposing tariffs, Trump would violate the terms agreed upon by past presidents of both parties, thus inviting sanctions and tariffs on U.S. exports. The result would be a massive contraction in trade flows and a likely recession. The long-term damage to U.S. prestige and leadership would be devastating. Both Trump and Cruz want the GOP to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiated by the Obama administration. They are wrong about this free-trade agreement, too. Estimates show the agreement will boost U.S. GDP by more than 1 percent in the years ahead. The main effect of the agreement is to substantially lower trade barriers in many Asian countries, to the benefit of American companies. There is no good reason to oppose it, other than fear of a populist backlash. The GOP would do great damage to its integrity if it were to give in to the threat of such a backlash, against all evidence and contrary to its own long history of promoting sensible trade policy. The dislocation that can sometimes occur with trade agreements is real. But it can be best addressed by helping those workers it affects, not by reversing course and imposing costs on all Americans. Workers should be supported during the transition periods of a new trade agreement, with wage support, training, and relocation assistance. But it would be shameful for the GOP to give in to protectionist impulses stoked by self-serving political opportunists. On fiscal and tax policy, Trump is just as delusional. He claims he will cut taxes by $10 trillion over a decade, fully protect entitlement spending, and still eliminate the federal government’s entire debt. This is absurd. Trump has no plan to actually cut spending, and never will. The nation is heading toward a fiscal crisis driven by rapidly escalating entitlement spending. Trump would accelerate that crisis, and it would be disastrous for Republicans, after years of warning that a crisis was coming, to change positions and join him in making it worse. It is true that Cruz’s fiscal- and tax-policy positions are less worrisome than Trump’s, but that isn’t saying much. To date, Cruz has offered very little by way of a practical policy agenda, and what he has said has been either completely farfetched or entirely irrelevant to what actually needs to be done. He touts a flat tax and a VAT to replace the income tax, and proposes eliminating the IRS. There is no prospect of replacing the entire progressive income tax with a single income-tax rate — 10 percent in Cruz’s plan — because of the large tax cut it would represent for the wealthiest Americans. And there’s even less prospect of eliminating the IRS without creating a replacement agency to assume its responsibilities. Moreover, despite suggesting he is an ardent fiscal conservative, Cruz has proposed almost no real spending cuts. He backs a “Five for Freedom” plan: He says he wants to eliminate the Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development, in addition to the IRS. But what he actually means to do is move most of their main functions to other departments, eliminating only a very small and inconsequential number of their programs. This plan would not come close to covering the revenue lost by his tax plan, much less to narrowing the large deficits that he has denounced so fervently since arriving in the Senate. On health care, Trump and Cruz both say they want to repeal Obamacare, but neither man has offered anything close to a credible replacement plan. Among other things, their positions would leave the GOP vulnerable to the accusation that it cares nothing for people with expensive pre-existing conditions (despite Trump’s claims to the contrary). One of the most important aspects of Ryan’s effort is to articulate a practical and credible market-based plan to provide all Americans secure health insurance without Obamacare’s immense expense and bureaucracy. The United States desperately needs an ambitious but practical pro-growth agenda. An agenda focused on tax and entitlement reforms that can pass in Congress, replacing Obamacare with a market-based alternative, rolling back costly regulations on businesses, scaling back long-term fiscal liabilities, and improving worker productivity through better education and training. Unfortunately, the leading GOP candidates for president have given no indication that they are up to the task of articulating such an agenda. So it will be left to Paul Ryan and his House colleagues to fill the inevitable void. Better that than no realistic agenda at all. — James C. Capretta is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism.

Options.

CNN used some very noticeable video editing to transfigure Hillary Clinton on Wednesday's New Day. Correspondent Jeff Zeleny ran footage from the Democratic presidential candidate's victory speech on Tuesday night that transformed Mrs. Clinton into a glowing figure. He hyped how Mrs. Clinton was "savoring a triumph in her long Democratic primary fight — exactly eight years after extinguishing her first trailblazing campaign."

When Dylan West discovered the Pink Pistols Atlanta chapter on Facebook in early 2015, he knew it was a perfect fit.

At the end of last week, the November jobs report was released, with news the economy regained 245,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate dropped from 6.9% to 6.7%. This would seem like good news except economists had widely anticipated a much higher gain, and worry that the tick-down in unemployment can be attributed to people simply dropping out of the labor market.

The offences relate to five women when they were children and allegedly took place between 2005 and 2012.

The Massachusetts Democrat's 2017 federal returns show that she and her husband Bruce Mann, a professor at Harvard Law School, reported an adjusted gross income of $913,000.

A well-qualified high school graduate was allegedly rejected by a prestigious college for merely following Infowars founder Alex Jones on Twitter, says attorney Bradley Shear. Shear says his 17-year-old client was fiercely questioned by the college’s admissions director, not about his stellar grades and extracurriculars, but about his “transgression” of following the controversial host on …

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Sen. Cory Booker claimed Thursday that a journalist with The Wall Street Journal was violating the Constitution by asking him a question regarding his failed “Spartacus” moment before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

MSNBC’s Hardball was in rare form on Tuesday, featuring host Chris Matthews and his various guests perpetually stepping in it. It started with Matthews comparing anti-Trump books to the synoptic Gospels and it snowballed from there, ranging from Matthews touting John Kerry’s new book as being so monumental, panelists the President lacking empathy for hurricane 9/11 victims, and ending with Matthews dubbing the First Family “un-American.”

And the delusion continues once they leave school

A few years ago, I was at a reception inaugurating the school year when an art historian I know tapped me on the shoulder. Was I still writing a book about birds, he wondered, because he had drafte…

Republicans fought among themselves instead of uniting behind our two U.S. Senate candidates in Georgia and the result was the disastrous loss of two runoff elections that will give Democrats majority control of the Senate.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both faced side battles on the campaign trail Tuesday, with one having to denounce an unwanted quasi-endorsement and the other having to spar with a heckler at her rally.

CNN Highlights FL, NC Early Vote Trending GOP (November 4, 2016)

‘Latina for Trump’ spokesperson and recent Congressional candidate in district 44 in California, Jazmina Saavedra, posted a video to her social media pages Friday showing she was kicked out of the River Run Bar in Ehrenberg, Arizona Thursday night because she was wearing a red “MAGA” hat. The owner of River Run Bar told Jazmina …

  Republicans have always un­derstood that their party’s tent is home to different factions. But they have long tended to perceive these factions—the grassroots base, the business Right, the conservative movement, and the governing-party establishment—as deeply united by a way of thinking, and not just by transactional relationships. For two decades and more after the end of the Reagan era, Republicans implicitly thought of this coalition in terms we might roughly describe as “The Four Modes of Phil Gramm.” Gramm, the former senator from Texas, was an ideal full-spectrum-conservative Republican. He was a homespun populist pouring his common sense like ice-cold water over liberal eggheads. He was a libertarian economics professor who believed in markets because he could do math. He was a wonk-intellectual deeply conversant in the vocabulary of modern conservatism. And he was a prudent politician who could cut a deal. So Gramm could be fully at home among the grassroots activists, the businesspeople, the conservative thinkers, and the politicians, but in every case he was a purist conservative of a particular sort. In their rhetoric, but also in their genuine self-understanding, many Repub­lican activists and elected officials as­sumed that most people in these different factions roughly fit that description, too. This has never been quite true; it has grown less true over time, and it simply is no longer true in the wake of this momentous election. The most significant implication of the party’s self-misunderstanding was a misimpression of the nature of its grassroots voters. Republican politicians thought of the base of the party as a steadfastly conservative voting bloc that would rebel against any departures from the GOP’s longstanding agenda and would be dissatisfied with party leaders to the extent they were not sufficiently aggressive in its pursuit. The war be­tween the Tea Party and the establishment in the Obama years was fought on this premise. But Donald Trump’s campaign, even before he won the election, demonstrated that this understanding of the Right’s grassroots—the understanding on which the work of various tea-party activist groups, the House Freedom Caucus, and Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, as well as the responses to these from establishment Republicans, were based—was in error in some important ways, and in any case is no longer operative. Trump showed that much of the base of the party was driven far more by resentment of elitist arrogance, by a rejection of globalism, and by economic and cultural insecurity than by a commitment to conservative economic or political principles. And he thereby also made the base of the party even more traditionally populist. This is surely part of the reason why most members of the House Freedom Caucus and many prominent conservative talk-radio hosts didn’t stand athwart Trump’s candidacy in the primaries, even though he showed contempt for much of what they have always championed. Trump demonstrated that the people they claimed to represent were not quite who they had imagined they were. He made this explicit soon after clinch­ing the nomination. “This is called the Republican party, it’s not called the Conservative party,” Trump said in an interview in May. It was an extraordinary thing for a Republican presidential contender to say. And it was also true and important, and recognizing it would be a very good thing for both Republicans and conservatives. For conservatives, in particular, ceasing to imagine that we own the Re­publican coalition, and therefore ceasing to expect it to simply follow our lead, would be a spur to sharpen, strengthen, and modernize our ideas so that they are more attractive and a better fit to contemporary problems. Understanding the need to persuade our fellow Republicans (and not just business leaders but populist middle- and working-class voters) that our ideas would address their concerns and priorities would strengthen our ability to persuade others, too. And it would help Republicans reinforce gains built up in a protest election that would be hard to sustain without substantive policy accomplishments. But coalitions shape their members, and so just as conservatives might hope to channel the energies of the populist Right and restrain its excesses, sharing the party with a populist voter base might in turn reshape conservatism. In­deed, in some important ways it has already done that over the past decade and more. And just as Republicans have failed to take note of the actual character of their coalition, conservatives too have not sufficiently acknowledged how our movement has changed.  Just as Republicans have failed to take note of the actual character of their coalition, conservatives too have not sufficiently acknowledged how our movement has changed. American conservatism has always been a collection of varied groups and schools of thought united, in broad terms, by a general view of the world. That view usually involves a low opinion of man’s character and rationality, combined with a high opinion of his dignity and rights; a resulting skepticism about power that tends to point toward greater confidence in mediating institutions and decentralized decision-making than in consolidated expertise and social engineering; and an overarching belief that the world is a dangerous place and maintaining order takes real work. These general views explain the attachment con­servatives have to the American Constitution—which is rooted in some similar premises—and to the Western tradition beyond. But as foundations for a coalition, these general views can add up in different ways under different circumstances. Since the 1970s, conservatives have tended to think of them as adding up to a coalition modeled on a three-legged stool. The legs have been muscular (originally anti-Communist) internationalism, social conservatism, and supply-side economics. Different conservatives emphasized these differently, with some really belonging to just one faction and only tolerating the others for practical ends. But the three routinely worked together. And as happens in coalitions, the three elements all tended to shape one another over time. The internationalists made social conservatives tougher and less naïve about the world, and made the supply-siders more committed to freedom along with wealth. The social conservatives made the hawks more idealistic and made many of the supply-siders pro-life and otherwise traditionalist. The supply-siders made the internationalists smarter critics of Communism and made the social conservatives friendlier to growth and wealth. The result, for a time, was a better-rounded and more effective coalition—one with a particular kind of argument for freedom at its core. And that coalition also helped shape the Republican party in recent decades in its battles with the Democrats, who have been shaped by their own different, if no less powerful, understanding of freedom. That conservative coalition was well formed to offer attractive solutions to the problems of the late 1970s and the 1980s, but with time it has grown in­creasingly detached from American circumstances and priorities. One of the things we see more clearly in light of this year is that the familiar conservative coalition has for some time already been gradually transforming into a related but different coalition. The precise shape of that emerging coalition remains unclear, but it is a little easier after this momentous election to speculate about its gen­eral outlines. Rather than muscular internationalism, social conservatism, and supply-side economics, the three legs of the stool of the conservative coalition in the coming years seem more likely to be, broadly speaking, American nationalism, religious communitarianism, and market economics. That’s a closely re­lated coalition. The change has been evolutionary, not revolutionary, and conservatism has not changed as much as the broader Republican coalition has under the forces of populism. The internationalists who were more defense hawks than democracy promoters can find a lot to like in a constructive nationalism. The supply-siders are be­lievers in free markets, they just tend to emphasize growth at the margins more than using markets as tools of problem-solving. The social conservatives share the worldview of religious communitarians, if not always the same political instincts. There are many similarities, but this also stands to be a different conservatism in some important ways. It is, for one thing, an ideological coalition that evinces a yearning for solidarity as much as a hunger for freedom. The ideological coalition that is progressivism will likely change in similar ways in the coming years, as an emphasis on conformity overtakes an ethic of lib­eration. This gradual evolution of the ideological Right and Left reveals an underlying shift in American life that we are only beginning to understand. In a sense, Donald Trump has written a check to his voters that only conservatives can help him cash. The interaction of the elements of this new coalition will also, unavoidably, be different. As before, the three elements would need to restrain one another’s excesses to make the whole more functional and appealing. Religious communitarians might help to make nationalists less livid and more tolerant, and to make the “marketists” less libertarian and in­dividualistic. Nationalists could make religious conservatives less universalist and make marketists less cosmopolitan. Marketists could help make nationalists less isolationist and religious communitarians less collectivist. In effect, all three will need to focus one another on the middle layers of society: a constructive nationalism as a unifying force against both hyper-individualism and globalism; a community-minded religious conservatism as a counterforce to the potential of markets to fall into moral chaos and of nationalism to de­volve into hateful insularity; market economics as a way of solving problems near at hand rather than of unleashing faceless global forces or just liberating individuals. This would still be a thoroughly conservative coalition in a familiar sense. It would be the natural home for pro-growth, small-government capitalism, along with social traditionalism and unabashed American patriotism and constitutionalism. But it would tend to emphasize the links between these views (which, after all, are also naturally in tension) by emphasizing their common roots in humility more than their common aspirations to boundless liberation. It would be more sober than cheerful, more careful than confident, more Tocque­ville than Kemp. And it would be a conservatism heavily influenced by the increasingly populist flavor of the broader Republican coalition in the age of Trump, even as it frequently needs to act as a check on the party’s populism. #related#This outline is speculative and heavy on broad categories and vague “isms.” But it might suggest some guidelines for conservatives as we consider our role in the new Republican governing coalition. In a sense, Donald Trump has written a check to his voters that only conservatives can help him cash. That will require conservatives within the party to de­termine how far toward populism we should be willing to go, what we should ask in return, and how conservative principles can be applied to our contemporary challenges to address the desires and needs of middle- and working-class Americans. None of these will be quite new questions. Some on the right have been asking them for years. But the Republican coalition is only now beginning to understand how important they will be to its future. — Yuval Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a contributing editor of National Review. * National Review magazine content is typically available only to paid subscribers. Due to the immediacy of this article, it has been made available to you for free. To enjoy the full complement of exceptional National Review magazine content, sign up for a subscription today. A special discounted rate is available for you here.

Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy is not a fan of social media. In fact, he thinks it's "ruining this country."

Hidden Ipsos Poll: Public Strongly Backs Donald Trump's Plan To 'Pause' Legal Immigration

11 votes and 0 comments so far on Reddit

Racism and division in the UK are officially things of the past! The Brits are standing up for their values by getting migrants to repeat words like "toleran...

A Snopes.com article attempting to discredit a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group news story revealing that millions of Department of State tax dollars were sent to a charity created by

President-elect Donald Trump announced Exxon-Mobil Corp's Rex Tillerson as his choice for secretary of state on Tuesday, praising the business leader as a successful international dealmaker who has led a global operation.