After all, we are not communists
By 
Hillary Clinton has an op-ed in the New York Times today, attacking the GOP’s proposed Obamacare replacement:
The central debate in the old era was big government versus small government, the market versus the state. But now you’ve got millions of people growing up in social and cultural chaos and not getting the skills they need to thrive in a technological society. This is not a problem you can solve with tax cuts.
And if you don’t solve this problem, voters around the world have demonstrated that they’re quite willing to destroy market mechanisms to get the security they crave. They will trash free trade, cut legal skilled immigration, attack modern finance and choose state-run corporatism over dynamic free market capitalism.
The core of the new era is this: If you want to preserve the market, you have to have a strong state that enables people to thrive in it. If you are pro-market, you have to be pro-state. You can come up with innovative ways to deliver state services, like affordable health care, but you can’t just leave people on their own. The social fabric, the safety net and the human capital sources just aren’t strong enough.
Oh wait that’s actually David Brooks.
Of course Brooks has to preface his implicit conclusion that Democrats rather than Republicans should be running America with a bunch of both sides do it nonsense about how if only Obama had concentrated on real problems, like the decline of Western Civilization, instead of wasting time on trivialities such as coming up with innovative ways to deliver state services like affordable health care the ACA, then we wouldn’t be in the present mess.
Over at Slate Reihan Salam comes to essentially the same conclusion:
This is the right way for Republicans to talk about the cost of the safety net: If there’s a conflict between rich people’s money and the lives of ordinary Americans, we’re going to choose the latter every time. But Ryan couldn’t pitch his plan in these terms, because he needed to demonstrate that he could shrink the size of government. If he wasn’t going to cut Medicare and was going to cut taxes, he had to slash safety-net spending somewhere else. That’s why he proposed wildly unrealistic reductions in the growth of federal Medicaid spending. His message wound up being completely muddled. We need to cut spending because we’re facing a debt crisis … but we’re also going to cut taxes. It is vitally important that we protect the safety net for old people … but we’re going to slash it for poor people. . . .
How can Paul Ryan and his allies send a more coherent message around the American Health Care Act? A good starting point would be to forget about cutting Obamacare’s taxes on households earning more than $200,000. It’s not that Republicans are opposed to cutting those taxes. It’s just that their priorities should lie elsewhere, namely in ensuring that vulnerable people don’t get screwed. If Ryan can’t get behind that message, his health care bill deserves to fail.
But of course Ryan can’t get behind that message, because upper class tax cuts make up Paul Ryan’s — and indeed the contemporary GOP’s — only actual agenda. All the culture war stuff is just so much dry ice smoke at a bad rock concert.
Brooks and Salam are basically Eisenhower Republicans, aka the contemporary Democratic Party. They just can’t quite come out of that particular closet yet, even to themselves.