Collective Conscious

Veronique de Rugy makes the case:

After two years of absolute Demo­c­ra­tic power, many vot­ers hope that the Repub­li­cans will restore fis­cal san­ity to Wash­ing­ton. But a look at the GOP’s track record and cam­paign promises should give us pause.

Will things be dif­fer­ent today? Not if we take Repub­li­cans at their word. The Pledge to Amer­ica, released by Repub­li­can lead­ers before the elec­tion, sup­pos­edly rep­re­sents their party’s plan to cre­ate jobs and cut gov­ern­ment spend­ing. But the pledge takes mil­i­tary spend­ing off the table, barely pro­poses any other sav­ings, and makes no attempt to fun­da­men­tally reform enti­tle­ment spend­ing, the pri­mary dri­ver of spend­ing growth.

[And] in his 2005 book Impos­tor: How George W. Bush Bank­rupted Amer­ica and Betrayed the Rea­gan Legacy (Dou­ble­day), the for­mer Trea­sury econ­o­mist Bruce Bartlett makes a con­vinc­ing case that Bush and the Bush-​​era Repub­li­can Con­gress were ter­ri­ble on trade, point­ing to their sup­port for farm sub­si­dies and import bar­ri­ers that ben­e­fit polit­i­cally influ­en­tial groups such as sugar, rice, cot­ton, and corn producers.

First of all, note that that chart rep­re­sents spend­ing only, not the gov­ern­ment sur­plus or deficit. When we look at that pic­ture, the GOP gets an even worse indictment:

So what is a real eco­nomic con­ser­v­a­tive — that is, some­one who is inter­ested in using the gov­ern­ment to pro­tect the free mar­ket but not to pro­mote security-​​statism - to do? I really couldn’t tell you. The present Repub­li­can Party is a security-​​statist, social-​​repressive orga­ni­za­tion; the Demo­c­ra­tic Party pro­motes mod­er­ately col­lec­tivist eco­nomic pol­icy (pro-​​labor, pro-​​immigration, pro-​​education, etc.).

Just like true lib­er­als — who believe that the econ­omy needs a major reshap­ing to fairly dis­trib­ute income and out­put — true con­ser­v­a­tives — who believe the same thing, but in the oppo­site direc­tion — are agents of change in a democ­racy where the party sys­tem sup­ports the sta­tus quo.