The Economist: A year out from the election, the GOP looks simultaneously chaotic and enormously

successful

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21677983-year-out-election-gop-looks-simultaneously-chaotic-and-enormously

The primary is not improving matters. One front-runner, Donald Trump, wants to wall off Mexico. Another, Ben Carson, has a tax plan that entails a 30% cut in the size of the government. And if such right-wing posturing makes it hard for more reasonable candidates to remain so, the Republican mainstream, currently led in the primary by Marco Rubio (pictured) and in the House by Mr Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, a representative from Wisconsin, is anyway immoderate. Mr Rubio, a 44-year-old senator from Florida, proposes tax cuts that by one estimate could increase the deficit by $12 trillion over a decade. Both would repeal Mr Obama’s health-care reform without promising a reassuring alternative to the 17.6m Americans it has provided with insurance. “I think it’s funny that people talk of Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan as mainstream Republicans,” smiles Mr Jordan. “They’re the classic class of 2010, like most of the Freedom Caucus.”

To end their damaging purity contest, the Republicans need to understand what is fuelling it. That starts with a relentless drive to differentiate the party from the Democrats, whose erstwhile obsessing over ideology has given way to pragmatism. “At some point, people will say what’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats, and it can’t just be abortion,” says Mr Mulvaney.

Yet the change that has come over their opponents is something Republicans should celebrate, not fight. Whatever Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s socialist challenger in the Democratic race, might say, the victory of Reaganite economic policy in the 1980s was complete. That was plain in the following decade when Bill Clinton declared the era of big government to be over. Yet instead of revelling in Reagan’s economic legacy, many Republicans hardly recognise it. They misremember the Reagan years as a time of inexorable tax, deficit and spending cuts (the Gipper at various times raised all three) and mischaracterise everything that has followed as a retreat from that imagined perfection. This is a path that leads to the vast, unfunded tax cuts almost all the Republican primary candidates are now promising, as they vie to be what their party craves: the second coming of something that never actually existed.

George W. Bush’s early stab at compassionate conservatism was an effort to restore moderation. It didn’t go well. Mired in profligate wars and bank bail-outs, his presidency ended as a recruiting sergeant for the caustic right. “I got into politics because of George W. Bush,” says Mr Mulvaney. “We expected him to be like Reagan, but what did we get? No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, compassionate conservatism—just spending more and more.”