Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from Wisconsin and most recent first runner-up in the vice-presidential pageant, has releasedhis latest "budget," which is only a budget in the same way that what the guy says to the pigeons in the park is a manifesto. It is constructed from the same magical thinking, the same conjuring words, the same elusive asterisks, and the same obvious obfuscations of its actual intent that Paul Ryan and his running mate put forward in the last campaign, in which they were so thoroughly rejected that Ryan couldn't even carry his home town. In fact, in this fiscal fantasia, the magical thinking, conjuring words, and obvious obfuscations are now run by us at 78 r.p.m. so as to balance the budget in 10 years rather than in 40. It is very doubtful that a country that declined to savage itself on a 30-year layaway plan is likely to agree to do so over a decade so as to get all the savaging done at once. What is it about elections that Paul Ryan doesn't understand?

What is it about America that he just doesn't get?

And that is the central pivot to Ryan's entire career, and certainly to his completely unwarranted stature as some kind of economic savant. Paul Ryan's economics are not economics so much as they are a statement of political philosophy. All political economics are based in political philosophy but, in Ryan's case, political philosophy is not the root of his notion of a political economy. His political philosophy is his notion of political economics. He believes that there are certain things that the government should not do for its citizens, and he would believe that if the balance showed a 20-gozillion surplus. His goal is to stop the government from doing those things. Everything else he does — every "budget" he proposes — is in service to that philosophy. His whole career has been made within the confines of that philosophy. It has blinded him to the very real human effects of what would occur if his "budget" ever was adopted, it also has blinded him to his own staggering hypocrisy — a man seeking to demolish the very safety net that got him through high-school and college, a man talking about the perils of government who's never had a real job outside of it. He is engaged in an extended act of camouflage through which he concocts disguises for policy preferences that the country has told him, over and over again, it does not want, and which the country has told him, over and over again, do not reflect the country's idea of itself. When he laughed at Paul Ryan in that debate, Joe Biden laughed for America.

(We were a little tough on Ezra Klein yesterday and, in the past, he has been dreadfully soft on Ryan. But, good lord, Ezra parks Ryan's latest barrel of bushwah deep into the cheap seats. Well struck, young man.)

There's a clear tell to be found when Ryan starts explaining about "communities." It is a wonderful passage because it is so deeply weird, and so deeply ahistorical, and so deeply divorced from the way actual people live their actual lives that it makes you wonder if, instead of being the coddled golden child of the wingnut welfare state, Ryan was raised by tinkers on Mars.

We are a self-governing people. Yet, if we can't manage our own affairs, we can hardly govern a nation. It's in the assembly hall and the boardroom-in the town meeting and the state legislature- that we learn how to govern. And that's where we forge our common bonds. Yes, government is one of those bonds. But it can't unite 300 million people-not on its own. It needs our communities to tie us together. Today, our communities-our families, in particular-face many dangers: rising health-care costs, a stagnant economy, a massive debt, an uncertain world. These dangers require a lean, dynamic government-one that can protect its people and keep its word. They also require government to respect its limits-to understand it plays a role in our lives, but not the leading one.

Bear in mind when you read this that Ryan doesn't have the faintest fcking idea what he's talking about here. Let's begin with the easy part. What's the deal about "government"? Government encompasses both "the assembly hall" — unless Ryan is talking about the Indiana University basketball team, which I doubt — and the town meeting. Those are government as much as is the federal government, which seems to be what Ryan's really talking about. This puts Ryan on the wrong side, not only of history, but of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which was called because "government," as expressed by the assembly halls and the town meetings, and the state legislatures, were tearing the country apart. You know why Paul Ryan likes local government so much? It's because local government is the easiest to buy. It's the easiest to intimidate. It's the easiest to break.

What does he mean by "communities" if not the self-government within which we create them? And how, exactly, is a city council, which probably spent the last two days arguing about, I don't know, Agenda 21's plan to steal our golfs, supposed to reassure me against "an uncertain world"? These are not the words of a man from planet Earth. But he does have some more word salad to share on the subject.

While we belong to one country, we also belong to thousands of communities — each of them rich in tradition. And these communities don't obstruct our personal growth. They encourage it. So the duty of government is not to displace these communities, but to support them. It isn't to blunt their differences or to flatten their character — to mash them all together into a dull conformity. It's to secure our individual rights and to protect that diversity.

The two greatest achievements of the Civil War period that were not directly connected to the Civil War itself were the intercontinental railroad, and the Morrill Act, which set up the land-grant universities all over the country. Neither of them would have been possible had representatives sharing Paul Ryan's views of "community" not absented themselves from both the national legislature, and the nation itself. Both of them were dedicated in giving the children of those communities a chance to break out of grinding, hopeless conformity mashed into them by a whimsical national economy, disease, flights of locusts, and the occasional murderous blizzard.

There was no more period of this country's history in which "communities" and the people in them were so thorough mashed "into a dull conformity" than in those deregulated, robber-baron, laissez-faire days for which Ryan has been so obviously nostalgic ever since his hometown sugar daddy got him a job in Bob Kasten's office. And, as for "communities" encouraging, and not flattening, our personal growth, well, Loretta Lynn was the coal-miner's daughter so, scoreboard! (And if you can't sing, well, coal mine, moonshine, or move it on down the line.) As for rest of the discussion of how things get mashed into conformity in our "communities," I will yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Hannibal:

Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd 'a' knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't 'a' tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.

We've all been there before, Huck. We can see a grifter coming over the ridge

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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