The Conservative Onion

[phantom power]

The other thing that I think needs clarification is that it’s wrong to think of conservatives as having a single argument for their preferred policies. What they offer instead is more like an onion, with layers inside layers; every time you strip away one excuse there’s another one inside.

Thus someone like Paul Ryan starts by claiming to be a deficit hawk. Push him really hard, however, on why in that case he advocates big tax cuts, and he’ll shift to arguing that big government (as opposed to not-paid-for government) is the real problem. (That’s also what happened in my UK debate on Newsnight.) But if you push hard on that, it turns out that there’s yet another layer: the claim that things like taxing the rich to help pay for social insurance are immoral, because people have a right to keep the wealth they created — which is why suggesting that no plutocrat is an island is heresy.

This onion structure is why you should never believe reasonable-sounding conservatives who say that you’re attacking a straw man, that “nobody believes” that wealth creators owe nothing to society. Oh yes they do — it’s usually hidden inside a couple of more socially acceptable excuses, but at their core Ryan and people like him believe that they’re characters in Atlas Shrugged.

By the way, who built the roads in Galt’s Gulch?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/the-conservative-onion/

[Duer 157099]

1. I thought you meant there was a conservative version of The Onion

and I couldn't imagine it even being funny at all.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

3. I thought the same thing.

And I was thinking "How the heck can they pull that off and be funny? Conservatives are rarely funny."

[HughBeaumont]

4. How would they do it?

Conservatives have been putting satirists, comedians and joke writers out of business for 10 years now. You can't get much more apeshit-heaving, off-the-charts LOL than the modern Republican and their policies.

[Marie Marie]

5. You read my mind.

(or I read yours..??). We all know that conservatives are only funny when they are not trying to be.

[ThoughtCriminal]

6. All Onion, all the time

after so many years, they still have the ability to produce astonishingly stupid ideas and commentary.

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. More like an Escher onion or mobius strip - when you think you are at the center, you

are back at the top. It is a bizarro argument with no rational conclusion - just leads you in circles.

[phantom power]

7. well said