William Watson: Paul Ryan is retiring, but his Reaganism isn’t going anywhere
When U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced last month he wouldn’t be running for re-election, the reactions varied. For some, it was incredulity about his stated reason of wanting to spend more time with his family. Some had sympathy for him having slogged it out for two years with a raving tweeter as head of his political party and now president. And there were plenty who said good riddance — especially, it seemed, for his political philosophy, which most commentators characterized as undiluted Reaganism. Yesterday’s man with yesterday’s ideas, maybe even the day before yesterday’s ideas, was how many people — not only on the left — dismissed him.
Ryan was born in 1970. He was 10 when Reagan was elected and 18 when Reagan left office. In his early twenties, Ryan fell under the sway of former Congressman and quarterback Jack Kemp, who was also a free-marketer. John Maynard Keynes wrote that “in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age.” So if Paul Ryan’s worldview is still pretty much what it was a quarter century ago in the early ’90s, well, that may be true of most people.
But is constancy in his political philosophy really a dereliction of intellectual duty on Ryan’s part, as so many of the reviews and assessments of him after he announced his retirement suggested? We’re obsessed with novelty these days, but the best test of an idea has never been its age. The Sermon on the Mount is coming up to 2,000 years old. Does that make it irrelevant to 21st-century people (even though it, and related events at the time, are the reason our centuries have the numbers they do)?
Reaganism, which is simply the modern name for an enduring current in conservative thought, is built on a few key observations about human beings. Namely: That they generally respond to whatever incentives they face. That their dealings with each other are subtle and complex and, when undertaken voluntarily, usually mutually beneficial. That they have very limited ability, if any, to foresee the future, still less to control it. That when they do try to rule over each other’s behaviour, the consequences are often unexpected and involve changes that are not mutually beneficial. That it’s generally good for people — and also helps develop them as people, and as a people — when they have to do important things for themselves.
The policy outlook these observations lead to (and have since Smith, Hume, Mill and even earlier thinkers) is that we need to limit what we ask governments to do for us. In general, “government should only do what only government can do.” Reaganism doesn’t say there should be no government. No serious philosophy would. It says we should be ever skeptical of turning new responsibilities over to a social mechanism that is based on control rather than voluntary exchange and that relies on the wisdom of the relatively few humans in charge of it.
It’s true the world has changed a lot in the three decades since the 1980s, although perhaps not as much as in the three decades before them or the three decades before that. It has also changed since the Crash of 2008, as it changed after the Crash of 1929. But is the essential character of human beings and their interactions with one another different now? More of that interaction does take place electronically, to be sure, but behind the tweets, emails, posts, Xboxes, electronic purchases and so on, are people.
Do those people now not respond to incentives? Are their interactions no longer complex, subtle and, when undertaken voluntarily, mutually beneficial? Have human beings recently developed a greater ability to foretell the future? (We have much more data now, but does all that new data render prescience easier or harder?) Are the consequences of our or our governments’ actions now, because it’s 2018, only the ones we expect and only positive for all concerned?
If the human condition has not fundamentally changed, if, to put it less grandly, people haven’t fundamentally changed — and aren’t likely to soon — should our fundamental view of government change? Should we really grant it control over more and more of our lives with every passing year, as we have been doing since the (in retrospect, rather limited) downsizing and privatizing of the 1980s?
It’s not true that the only good idea is an old idea. But it’s also not true that old ideas, because they are old, are necessarily inferior to whatever the latest notions trending on Twitter are.
The essence of Reaganism is modesty about our ability to effectively organize life collectively. Look around the world today and there’s ample justification for such modesty.