Blog Archive

Two different pieces from John Derbyshire currently posted at NRO sparked a reaction from me. The first one is the Derb’s reaction to the Clinton’s. In it he encapsulates my feeling about the nineties exactly. Pardon the long quote but it is an excellent passage:

The principal political fact about the Clinton presidency is that during it, politics in the U.S.A. came to an end. That’s a bit of an exaggeration; but from the long view, 20th-century American politics was a struggle between those who wished to expand the scope of government ? most especially the federal government ? and those who wished to resist that expansion . . . That struggle ended in the spring of 1996, with the Clinton-Gingrich-Dole compromise on the federal budget. That marked the defeat of the main conservative enterprise, the end of any real hope of reducing the size of our federal government . . . Less obvious at the time, liberalism was also dead. It had died in November 1994, when the Republicans took Congress. This was a clear popular defeat for big government liberalism. The people had spoken: They did not want any extravagant new government programs. It was not that the era of big government was over; only the era of expanding government was over. The 1996 debacle demonstrated that the people did not want a smaller government, either. All polls showed that Americans at large were unhappy about the government shutdowns of 1995, and blamed congressional Republicans for them. The lesson our political classes read from the events of 1994-6 was: The people don’t want any more government, but they don’t want any less, either.

I think this is just about right. In fact this is what I was trying to get in my arguments with Josh. Politicians have a rather serious radar system that tells them how to get elected. The GOP is picking up on the signals that voters want them to avoid massive spending programs but also avoid cutting services. Hence Republicans rather ambivalent job of holding the line on spending. This is a difficult situation because it is hard to move the public out of this equilibrium. Some conservative and libertarian activist think it might be good for the GOP to lose power; that such a downturn would force them to pay attention to their base. Other cynically hope that a looming budget deficit might return some sanity. I am not so sure either idea is a good one. I would hate to have the Democrats in control of congress right now given what is at stake in terms of foreign policy, the judiciary, tax cuts, etc. I am also not quite sold on the idea of forcing deficits in an attempt to get government back on a diet. Unfortunately this leaves me with a potential wishy-washy wait and see attitude but hey that is where I am at right now. Politics to me is risk reward and right now I see the Democrats as a greater risk with very little if any reward.