Donald Trumps Art of the New Deal?
'The demolition job is finished, and now a new Republican Party is arising from the rubble, its ultimate shape unclear. President-elect Donald J. Trump, the most conspicuous builder on the scene, is the undisputed leader of his party. But he also remains an outsider, as Republicans who opposed him said all the way to election night. The mounting tensions of the transition have done little to change this.
In fact, they have highlighted the curiously dual identity Mr. Trump has created for himself. There is the candidate who vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, deport all undocumented immigrants, rollback financial regulations, undo the Iran nuclear deal and repudiate the Paris agreement on climate change. But there is also the Trump who seldom espouses conservative ideology, especially its call to shrink the scope and scale of government. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Mr. Trump told The Daily Signal, a pledge he has since backed away from, but only haltingly. Since his victory he has spoken of bringing jobs to the heartland by spending $1 trillion on infrastructure.
This raises a question that has tantalized some observers during Mr. Trump’s improbable campaign. As swiftly as he might try to dismantle President Obama’s legacy, might he also emerge as a defender of F.D.R.’s?
It may sound far-fetched, but not necessarily to voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan, who, after voting Democratic in 2012, chose Mr. Trump this time. The conflict is brewing with another enclave of the party: its entrenched governing elite. Their leader is House Speaker Paul Ryan, who clashed repeatedly with Mr. Trump during the campaign and has since emerged as a rival architect of the new Republican Party. Mr. Ryan’s free-market, anti-New Deal principles are spelled out in “A Better Way,” a sheaf of ambitious proposals on issues ranging from jobs and education to health care and taxes. It has become the conservative blueprint, and a postelection survey showed that as many as two-thirds of Republicans think Mr. Ryan “should have more influence over policy” than Mr. Trump, Politico reported.
Who, then, will decide the party’s direction, Mr. Trump or Mr. Ryan? A useful precedent is the Republicans’ intraparty conflicts after the 1952 election, when another novice politician Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was opposed by conservatives. The differences between the two men are manifold: Eisenhower was the nation’s greatest war hero, a dignified man of preternatural calm, who was also the president of Columbia University. Mr. Trump avoided the Vietnam-era draft and is better known for his inflammatory tweets and stream-of-consciousness stump speeches. Yet like Mr. Trump, Eisenhower, the first Republican president elected in 20 years, was not especially ideological. And like Mr. Trump, he was suspected of being a closet Democrat. . .
This is why the most important contest in the days ahead could be one within the Republican Party, as Mr. Trump’s potential “new” New Deal comes up against the free-market vision of Mr. Ryan. Little more than a year ago, Mr. Ryan supported an infrastructure plan floated by Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, who argued that hundreds of billions of dollars could come through a one-time “repatriation” of profits from giant companies’ overseas earnings in exchange for lower tax rates. It might seem surprising that Mr. Ryan — who has also been saying that he wants to privatize Medicare — was agreeable. But he represents a flyover state, Wisconsin, that has a troubled economy. The same was true of a second Republican, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who also backed the bill. The bill went nowhere, in part because of election tensions.
Now all three legislators will be returning to Washington, bigger players than before. Each would gain stature from a put-America-back-to work bill. The top House Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, instantly picked up on Mr. Trump’s words, saying, “We can work together to quickly pass a robust infrastructure jobs bill.” She has been joined by other congressional Democrats, who are looking for areas of agreement with Mr. Trump on this and other measures that could ease the struggles of middle- and working-class America.
Populists of the past, most strikingly George Wallace, embraced the New Deal while also practicing a politics of racial division. Mr. Trump may follow a similar path, as his selection of Stephen K. Bannon, the former head of Bretibart News, as his chief strategist suggests. Mr. Trump’s choice of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama to be attorney general raises similar concerns.
But it is a long way to January 20. A Rust Belt Republicanism that returns to an older idea of pragmatic consensus politics could be a revolution for the better.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/donald-trumps-art-of-the-new-deal.html?
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