1) Republicans still have a very serious agenda; and

2) Paul Ryan is a very serious fellow, worthy of all the encomiums Washington reporters have showered on him in recent years.

But can Ryan singlehandedly save the GOP brand from the party’s standard-bearer? Probably not.

Even as Trump is having one of the worst periods of his campaign, getting criticized across the political spectrum for his racist attacks on the judge in the Trump University fraud case and raising new worries that he’s completely unprepared to mount a general election, Ryan has been rolling out a series of new policy agenda papers.

AD

AD

Today, he’s delivering a “blueprint” on national security. Are you ready? Ryan and congressional Republicans want to Protect the Homeland, Defeat the Terrorists, Tackle New Threats, and Defend Freedom. Doing all this requires being more willing to use the military, plus a lot of “standing up” and showing “strength.” In other words, pretty much what Republicans have been saying forever. Try to contain your wonder at the powerful wonkery on display.

This comes after Ryan held a press conference earlier this week to announce his new plan to reduce poverty. Substantively, that document is mostly a rehashing of Republican rhetoric on the subject — safety net programs are terrible, we need to send authority down to the states (i.e. allow states to provide less help to poor people), and so on — along with a few new ideas like reversing the Obama administration’s “fiduciary rule,” which means Ryan thinks part of the answer to poverty is to allow financial advisers to deceive their clients into buying products that aren’t in their best interests (and no, I’m not kidding — Steve Benen explains here).

But all this is to be expected, because periodically Ryan delivers a “new” policy paper that is almost always just a retelling of the same things he and other Republicans have been advocating for years, except maybe this time with a new font. He gets all the requisite headlines (“Ryan Unveils Policy Blueprint”), reinforcing the idea that he’s the GOP’s brain, the last serious man in a party gone bonkers.

AD

AD

There are more of these blueprints coming on other subjects, and it’s hard to imagine they’re going to be any more specific or innovative. But the point isn’t so much to provide an agenda Americans will understand and be persuaded by as it is to persuade them of the existence of an agenda, whether they know what it contains or not.

However, if this is a project to save the GOP brand from Donald Trump — which I’m sure Ryan would love to do, even as he carefully implements a plan to emerge from this election unscathed — it faces a rough road ahead. You can’t secure the party’s identity in a sterile lockbox while that party’s presidential nominee is tossing sewage everywhere, then take that identity out again five months from now and believe it’ll be unsullied. For better or worse, mostly for worse, Donald Trump is now the leader of the Republican Party, and what he does will have an enormous part in defining it in voters’ minds. The GOP is the party of Trump.

And let’s not forget that Trump’s vulgar brand of white identity politics isn’t something alien that’s been foisted on the GOP; it’s just a less subtle version of what they’ve been offering for decades. He may retweet neo-Nazis, say that he can’t be judged fairly by Hispanics, and want to keep out Muslims, but the “Southern strategy” implemented by Richard Nixon — in which whites were encouraged to resent and fear black people and the Democrats who tried to assist them — was the GOP’s path to presidential victory for a few decades. Changing demographics have now made the strategy an electoral loser, but the party is still caught in the racial edifice it constructed, now with resentment of immigrants added to the mortar.

AD

AD

It’s not as though the GOP came to get almost the entirety of its support from white people by accident (which they did well before Donald Trump hijacked the party). In 2012, for instance, Mitt Romney got about nine out of 10 of his votes from whites, while Barack Obama got just over half of his from whites.

Race is just one part of the identity politics equation, and it’s a game Republicans have long been adept at playing. They would always define themselves as strong, manly, and patriotic, while defining Democrats as weak, feminine, and America-hating. It’s only recently that Democrats have been able to fashion their own winning identity, by convincing voters they’re young, diverse, forward-looking and innovative, while Republicans are old, tired, and fearful of the future.

The point is that while policy is important, it forms only part of each party’s image in the public mind. And for Republicans, it has always been the less important part, because their positions tend to be less popular than Democratic ones. The easiest way to sell a candidate devoted to tax cuts for the wealthy, privatizing Medicare, and opposition to minimum wage increases is to convince voters to think about something else, like which candidate sports the bigger flag pin.