Says Frum:
Why are American politicians playing so rough? We have moved into an era of scarcity. Once it seemed possible to have the spending Democrats wanted, financed at the tax rates the Republicans wanted, while paying for sufficient national security and running bearable deficits. That sense of expansiveness is gone. The trade-offs between Obamacare and Medicare, between spending and taxes, suddenly seem acute, imminent, and zero sum. These disputes are not merely economic. As the United States becomes more ethnically diverse, debates over fiscal priorities inescapably become conflicts between ethnicities and cultures.
Economic growth is a wondrous potion. It encourages lending because borrowers can repay debts from rising incomes. It supports bigger government because a growing economy expands the tax base and makes modest deficits bearable. Despite recessions, it buoys public optimism because people are getting ahead. The presumption of strong economic growth supported the spirit and organizational structures of postwar America.
…
Slow economic growth now imperils this postwar order. Credit standards have tightened, and more Americans are leery of borrowing. Government spending — boosted by an aging population eligible for Social Security and Medicare — has outrun our willingness to be taxed. The mismatch is the basic cause of “structural” budget deficits and, by extension, today’s strife over the debt ceiling and the government “shutdown.”
The real pleasure of the Right these days is the politicization of governmental procedures to achieve arbitrary, extra-constitutional power. Despite their endless lauding of the constitution, they detest the existing system of checks and balances that creates a variety of independent centers of power. Under Gingrich, under Bush, and under Cruz, they are seeking some form of dictatorship, to somehow turn the clock back, to some time past, though exactly when is not yet known.
*OK, this epithet owes more to rhetorical balance than accuracy. Although Samuelson, to my mind, spends far too much time picking at Democratic nits while Republican locusts run wild, he will on rare occasion write a laudable column, for example, this one, which begins with the following unBoblike sentence: “In the struggle between capital and labor, capital is winning — and that’s hurting the feeble economic recovery.”
†The frequent and shameful extra-legal interventions in the supposedly legal investigation of Clinton by the Special Prosecutor (initially, the “Whitewater Investigation”) are well described in An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton by U.S. Appellate Court Judge Richard Posner. Posner, who loathed Clinton, was nonetheless repeatedly stunned by the gross violations in legal ethics and procedure undertaken by the right-wing establishment to push things along. Ronald Dworkin, in an excellent review of Posner’s book points out that that Posner, with his repeated assertions of Clinton’s guilt, was probably worthy of both impeachment and removal from his judicial office himself, for “commenting” on an “impending case”—since Clinton was still liable to indictment in federal court when Posner published his book.
