Paul Krugman: Doubling Down on W

 "There are no moderates in the Republican primary":

Doubling Down on W, by Paul Krugman, commentary, NY Times: 2015 was, of course, the year of Donald Trump, whose rise has inspired horror among establishment Republicans and, let’s face it, glee — call it Trumpenfreude — among many Democrats. But Trumpism has in one way worked to the G.O.P. establishment’s advantage: it has distracted pundits and the press from the hard right turn even conventional Republican candidates have taken, a turn whose radicalism would have seemed implausible not long ago.

After all, you might have expected the debacle of George W. Bush’s presidency ... to inspire some reconsideration of W-type policies. What we’ve seen instead is a doubling down, a determination to take whatever didn’t work from 2001 to 2008 and do it again, in a more extreme form.

Start with the example that’s easiest to quantify, tax cuts..., it’s harder than ever to claim that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. ... In fact, however, establishment candidates like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are proposing much bigger tax cuts than W ever did. ...

What about other economic policies? The Bush administration’s determination to dismantle any restraints on banks ... looks remarkably bad in retrospect. But conservatives ... have declared their determination to repeal Dodd-Frank...

The only real move away from W-era economic ideology has been on monetary policy, and it has been a move toward right-wing fantasyland. ...

Last but not least, there’s foreign policy. You might have imagined that the story of the Iraq war ... would inspire some caution about military force as the policy of first resort. Yet swagger-and-bomb posturing is more or less universal among the leading candidates. ...

The point is that ... the mainstream contenders ... are frighteningly radical, and that none of them seem to have learned anything from past disasters.

Why does this matter? Right now conventional wisdom ... suggests even or better-than-even odds that Mr. Trump or Mr. Cruz will be the nominee, in which case everyone will be aware of the candidate’s extremism. But there’s still a substantial chance that the outsiders will falter and someone less obviously out there — probably Mr. Rubio — will end up on top.

And if this happens, it will be important to realize that not being Donald Trump doesn’t make someone a moderate, or even halfway reasonable. The truth is that there are no moderates in the Republican primary, and being reasonable appears to be a disqualifying characteristic for anyone seeking the party’s nod.