David T. Courtwright is Presidential Professor of History at the University of North Florida and author of No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America, in which he argues against the prevailing narrative of a conservative revolution in American politics since the mid-1960s. You can read an interview with Courtwright about the book at Rorotoko. Below, a day after President Obama released his budget for the 2012 fiscal year, Courtwright reflects on the continuing reluctance of the Republican Party to fight for fiscally meaningful cuts in entitlement and defense spending.
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The history of modern conservatism is the history of revolution deferred. Voters pummeled liberals in 1938, 1946, 1952, 1966, 1968, 1980, and 1994, just as they did in 2010. Yet no Republican beneficiary, not even Ronald Reagan, achieved conservatism’s central domestic aims. They never overturned the New Deal, or people’s growing reliance on government, or the liberalization of sexual mores and gender roles. They did achieve some victories on taxes and regulation, but they failed to do much for their most long-suffering constituency, the fiscal conservatives.
Consider national debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product. That figure declined under every Democratic president from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon managed the same feat. But every Republican president from Gerald Ford on left office with the debt percentage higher. Ford had to cope with recession for much of his brief presidency. Reagan and George W. Bush had no such excuse. They also enjoyed partial or complete GOP congressional control for six of their eight years. The spending problem went beyond entrenched Democrats.
In 1986 David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director, published The Triumph of Politics, still the best memoir of conservative frustration. Politics triumphed because individuals wanted entitlement checks, corporations contracts, and congressmen pork. Reagan’s decision to cut taxes, spare entitlements, and take rearmament off the books simply made the situation worse. Instead of building a modest welfare state on the foundation of a regulated capitalist economy, as Franklin Roosevelt had done, Reagan wound up restoring a partially deregulated capitalism on the foundation of an enlarged defense and welfare state. Without sufficient revenue, Stockman knew, the arrangement could not last.
Tea-Party activists, burned by George W. Bush’s hypertrophied Reaganism, have pledged to hold Republicans accountable for deficit spending. But because they live in a two-party system, they cannot wring concessions by threatening to withdraw from coalitions, as their counterparts do in closely divided parliaments. So they have resorted to targeting big-government collaborators and backing primary challengers.
This approach seems to have worked. Republican congressmen are plainly terrified of their base. Just as plainly, meaningful deficit reduction will require cuts in entitlement and defense spending, even if accompanied by net tax increases. That was the stark—and, so far, ignored—message of the 2010 Bowles-Simpson commission. Having ruled out tax hikes, conservative activists are left with only spending cuts. But the most fiscally consequential ones, such as implementing advanced retirement ages and closing military bases, would not sit well with voters. Seniors would revolt if most doctors no longer accept Medicare or nursing homes Medicaid. At bottom, conservative revolutions are no different from any other. Self-interest acts as a brake on their momentum, and popular sentiment shifts when it becomes clear that the losers include more than the official villains.
The grand “compromise” at the end of the last Congress—extend the Bush tax cuts, add more tax cuts, and extend expiring unemployment benefits—offers the clearest possible evidence that neither national party is yet serious about the debt. The current wrangling over non-military discretionary spending simply adds an exclamation point. As for repealing Obama’s health-care plan, even that unlikely victory would leave unsolved the real problem, the fiscal burden of covering an aging population with the world’s most expensive and least cost-effective health-care system.
Credit worries and constitutional limits on deficit spending have prompted some state and local governments to make significant spending cuts and tax hikes. But anyone who thinks the current crisis will provoke comparable federal reforms should remember what Stockman confronted in 1981: a prime interest rate of 21.5 percent and a plague of lingering stagflation. Yet even in those dire straits Edwin Meese, James Baker, and Michael Deaver, the leaders of the Reagan administration’s right-conservative, pragmatic-centrist, and public-relations factions, all rejected Stockman’s pleas to erect a fiscal guillotine. They preferred red ink to real blood, and regarded cuts in programs like Social Security as suicidal. They, and the president they served, got through the crisis by kicking the entitlement can down the road. So far their successors have done the same.
