Paul Ryan has arrested intellectual development, from his youth encountering Ayn Rand, who he used to force all his staffers to read until it got exposed.
He’s wrong. He has simplistic ideas.
He thinks he’s some missionary to improve America through misguided social Darwinist ideas that will somehow improve things by weeding out the chafe.
He has learned he has to sell his policies through lies — kill the poor becomes help the poor, but he thinks that’s just because so many don’t understand his views the right way.
Once he can implement them and Make America Great Again, they’ll see.
But he’s a child in his thinking. The thing is, his distorted ideology happens to overlap with the agenda of the most powerful in our society, the plutocrats. And so, he has support.
This is the problem: imagine a two-hour debate where Ryan had to put his ideas up for challenge against Joseph Stiglitz. Or Paul Krugman. Or Nomi Prins. Or Naomi Klein. Or many others.
He would be slapped down like Donald Trump taking a polygraph.
His empty, shallow, radical ideas and the hard they cause would be exposed for all to see.
But in our democratic society based on rational, informed voters, he never has to do that.
All he has to do is have the think tanks and Frank Luntz make his talking points, the right-wing media supported by the plutocrats spread them, and parrot them, while continuing his ‘great war’.
And this right-wing system has made this misguided ideology the most powerful in our land — just as some version of communism once was in the USSR, in China — but even they evolved.
Why shouldn’t the most powerful man in Congress actually debate the hidden, radical agenda he has for America? If he’s right, shouldn’t he able to win the debate?
It’ be great to see him challenged and pressured ongoing forever to this. At the least it would make it clear to everyone he was refusing.