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Deeply Reactionary

No one who pays attention to politics is unaware of what the Republicans are trying to do with the budget. James Surowiecki's conclusion gets to the serious point:

It’s true, of course, that this budget will never become reality; after all, the electorate likes most of the programs that House Republicans want to kill. The budget is, as many have said, an act of political theatre, a way for Republicans to demonstrate what they stand for. But that’s precisely what makes it so revealing: what Ryan is proffering here is something like the platonic ideal of a budget. And what his plans tell us is that there’s very little the federal government has done over the past hundred and fifty years, apart from fighting wars, that the House Republicans approve of. In that sense, the Ryan plan is not about fiscal responsibility. It’s about pushing a very particular, and very ideological, view of the proper relationship between government and society. The U.S. does need to get its finances in order. It just doesn’t need to repeal the twentieth century to do so.

In order to return our society to the time of (their) ideal domination — of whites over people of color, of men over women, of bosses over workers, of the wealthy over the rest of us — Republicans must repeal all of the accomplishments of progressives in the last century. Most people don't want that to happen. So the Republicans lie about it.

They should at least have the courage of their horrific, feudal convictions.