Ross:

But some of Gingrich’s more enthusiastic critics are failing the test as well, by behaving as if the Ryan budget represents some kind of sacred right-wing writ. Unless American politics changes beyond recognition, Ryan’s plan cannot and will not become the law of the land in its current form. And while it has many virtues, it has many flaws as well. Its example should call Republican presidential candidates to a greater seriousness about Medicare reform than most conservative politicians have manifested to date. But it cannot, and must not, become a rigid litmus test: That way lies intellectual sclerosis, and political disaster [bold mine-DL].

It’s still true that “greater seriousness about Medicare reform” is politically disastrous for either party. One reason is that the other party has every incentive to demagogue the issue for short-term gain. That was why Republicans demagogued health care legislation for its cuts to Medicare, and presented themselves as last-ditch defenders of the Medicare status quo. Politically, it worked. They carried the day with older voters, and maximized their midterm election advantage. The GOP rode the election wave to a majority in the House partly by defending the same “unserious status quo ante” that Gingrich was out there defending over the weekend. Gingrich deserves no sympathy, because he has tried and keeps trying to have it both ways, and he has jumped back and forth on more than one issue in the space of a few weeks or months this year. On the question of whether there must be major changes to entitlements or not, it’s important to emphasize that Gingrich gave the wrong but popular answer.

However, the overwhelmingly hostile conservative reaction to Gingrich is interesting because he is now being denounced for making the explicit political case against Ryan’s proposal that the entire party leadership endorsed less openly in the year before the midterms. This is instructive. This is how policy debates often function inside the GOP and the conservative movement. Once a position has become the party line, what came before it is irrelevant. Previously reliable people suddenly become deviationists because they fail to keep up with the shifting requirements of movement and party loyalty. This is how we end up with defenses of the budget plan of a supporter of Medicare Part D as a new unquestionable standard of fiscal responsibility.

As Austin Bramwell wrote almost five years ago:

Second, conservatism is concerned less with truth than with distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!”) that, like “ignorance is strength,” are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker.

Last year, Ryan’s original plan was an interesting proposal that few of his colleagues openly supported and everyone knew was going nowhere. This year, conservatives are expected to line up behind Ryan’s less satisfactory budget plan, and anyone who speaks too critically of the budget plan will end up on the outside. Last year, Republicans understood that serious entitlement reform was political doom for them, which is why they steered clear of talking about it. Remarkably, they are now opting to embrace that which they knew would destroy them, and they are doing this as they head into an election in which the general electorate will be even less sympathetic to Ryan’s plan.

All of this is rather like the response to the “surge.” Once it had been announced, the “surge” became the defining issue for 2007-08 that determined one’s status as a conservative and Republican in good standing. Support for the “surge” identified the GOP and most conservatives closely with an Iraq war that the public had turned against, and it afforded the other party an easy way to distinguish itself from Bush and the 2008 Republican field. It absolutely became a rigid litmus test, which did have the effect of once again stifling any and all productive debate on Iraq and foreign policy on the right.

In that case, the policy and politics were reversed: sound policy and public opinion happened to be on the same side then, but a majority of the GOP and almost all the ideological enforcers on the right supported the mistaken policy. In both cases, Republicans and conservatives have managed to line up against public opinion. Chuck Hagel had the good policy sense and terrible intra-party political instincts to oppose the “surge,” which briefly made him the focus of media attention and also guaranteed the end of his political career in the GOP. There is evidence that the “surge” did not cause the drop in violence in Iraq, and that just as many critics of the “surge” said then and later other factors accounted for the drop:

Overall violence in Iraq declined steeply in 2008. But Thiel attributes this to other factors besides the arrival of U.S. combat reinforcements. These factors include the Sunni Awakening against al Qaeda in Anbar province, the completion by 2008 of sectarian ethnic cleansing in the Baghdad area, the erection of security barriers between neighborhoods in Baghdad, a unilateral cease-fire by some Shiite militias, the increased dispersion of joint U.S. and Iraqi combat outposts in Iraq’s cities, and perhaps most important, the maturation of Iraq’s security forces. These factors could all have occurred without the arrival of additional U.S. forces.

Even though the “surge” wasn’t one of the main factors responsible for the drop in violence, it became received wisdom that it was, and McCain’s support for the “surge” helped him overcome all other liabilities to revive his political fortunes and win the nomination. The lack of real debate over the “surge” on the right was proof that the intellectual sclerosis Ross warns against now had already taken hold. The content of the prevailing official line may change, but the enforcement of that official line as an ideological commitment that must be accepted remains the same.