Republicans face existential crisis as 30-year conservative agenda approaches its end
Its 30-year agenda is coming to an end, but the party is at its most dangerous as it lashes out in its death throes
We are not having a debt crisis.
It's important to make this point, because I keep seeing articles about the "fiscal cliff" that do, in fact, describe it - often in the headline - as a debt crisis. But it isn't. The US government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its deficit. In fact, its borrowing costs are near historic lows. And even the confrontation over the debt ceiling that looms a few months from now, if we do somehow manage to avoid going over the fiscal cliff, isn't really about debt.
No, what we're having is a political crisis, born of the fact that one of our two great political parties has reached the end of a 30-year road. The modern Republican Party's grand, radical agenda lies in ruins - but the party doesn't know how to deal with that failure, and it retains enough power to do immense damage as it strikes out in frustration.
Before I talk about that, a word about the budget "negotiations".
Republicans are saying to President Barack Obama, "Come up with something that will make us happy." He is understandably, not willing to play that game, and so the talks are stuck. Why won't the Republicans get specific? Because they don't know how. The truth is that, when it comes to spending, they've been faking it - not just in this election, but for decades. Which brings me to the nature of the current Republican crisis.
Since the 1970s, the Republican Party has fallen increasingly under the influence of radical ideologues, whose goal is nothing less than the elimination of the welfare state - that is, the whole legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. However, these ideologues have had a big problem: the programmes they want to kill are very popular. Americans may nod when you attack big government in the abstract, but they support Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So what's a radical to do?
The answer has involved two strategies. One is "starve the beast" - using tax cuts to reduce government revenue, then using the resulting lack of funds to force cuts in popular social programmes. Whenever you see some Republican politician piously denouncing federal red ink, always remember the party has for decades seen budget deficits as a feature, not a bug.