What to expect from the Trump-Ryan relationship

Ryanism resembles Bushism in proposing that a mix of tax cuts, deregulation, freer trade, entitlement reform, and high immigration will raise economic growth and lift all boats. That promise, though, is increasingly hard to believe. The Bush administration advanced a similar agenda (the steel tariffs were imposed to make bigger trade-liberalizing deals politically possible). It achieved much of that agenda, but the economic results, particularly for people in the middle of the income spectrum and below, were unimpressive.

Even if the promise is true, however, the agenda has a fatal political weakness: It gives a lot of working-class voters something to fear without giving them any concrete and immediate benefits. And it lends itself to a rhetoric of hope that is a poor fit for this moment and, maybe, this era. The idea of democracy promotion abroad has similar drawbacks.

Optimism about immigration seems to be going over particularly poorly. For one thing, it is especially hard to make the case that a substantial increase in low-skilled immigration — something for which, lest we forget, a large bipartisan majority in the Senate voted in 2013 — will boost the fortunes of people in hard economic conditions. Immigration boosterism on the left and right also tends either to ignore or to disdain the cultural concerns immigration raises: the sense that too much immigration can threaten a way of life.

Trumpism both corrects and exploits some of Ryanism’s blind spots. Trump won big among white voters without college degrees. In part that must be because Trump’s agenda offered these voters more, and threatened them less, than Ryan’s. Rather than supplementing entitlement reform with free-market policies that would be more attractive to these voters, Trump ditched entitlement reform and offered them protectionism. And having made that trade, Trump built up enough political support that he may now be able to deliver on some of the policies on which Ryan and he agree, such as large tax cuts for the highest earners in the land.