Republican party has lost the prudence of yesteryear
Gather round, gentle reader, and I will tell you a tale of yesteryear. It involves the Republican Party, and you will not recognize the institution I am about to describe, full of men in homburgs and little old ladies in tennis shoes, unduly worried about communists at home, but also preoccupied with thrift, good manners, and social and cultural stability.
These Republicans of the old school seldom hectored their opponents the way Harry Truman did when he said, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a Republican. But I repeat myself.” They were, to be sure, conservatives, sometimes deeply and primitively so, but for the most part the most devout racists were in the Democratic Party, often as powerful, obstructionist committee chairmen on Capitol Hill. The great civil rights bills of the 1960s owe their success in large measure to Republicans. (Only one Republican voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the Senate, as opposed to 17 Democrats who opposed it.)
This column is about the eclipse of the old GOP, for whom attention to the deficit was not a disorder, and the rise of a Republican Party led by a president who tweets more in a morning than Calvin Coolidge spoke in a month. What concerns us here is the way the Republicans have drifted from their sense of economy and — to borrow a word from George H.W. Bush — prudence.
The Republicans of the old school were wary of spending, a character flaw when the economy was in swift retreat and when basic human needs were not being satisfied by the hidden hand they admired so much in business and commerce. But their pennypinching was an effective and often useful check on government extravagance, sometimes to the annoyance of Democrats, a breed of humanity they liked as individuals but did not much admire as a group.
Well, that was yesterday. This strain of Republican is all but extinct, but not thoroughly so. The other day Steve Bell, who was staff director for the Senate Budget Committee for five years in the Ronald Reagan era, was complaining to me about how the Republicans no longer worry about a balanced budget, a phrase that was conspicuous in its omission from Donald J. Trump’s budget proposal released this past week.
“He’s for massive tax cuts, a large military, but will not touch Social Security or Medicare,” said Bell. “Most Republican incumbents now believe nobody cares about the deficit.”
Now a caveat. More than a quarter-century ago, Rep. Jack F. Kemp, the Buffalo Republican, campaigned for tax cuts and argued that deficits were less important than Republicans once believed. One of his proteges and colleagues was former Rep. Vin Weber, who was co-chair of Kemp’s 1988 presidential campaign. Weber, of Minnesota, carries an ideological torch for Kemp, but not as an instrument of scorched-earth economics.
“Within the group around Jack there were varying views about the deficit,” he said. “But he would have been concerned about this size of a deficit in relation to GDP. I worry it may be out of control now, largely because of entitlement spending. No one shows much interest in tackling that.”
So here is the conundrum. If you’re worried about long-term deficit spending, the main antidotes are cutting entitlements and raising taxes. The Democrats won’t do the first; the Republicans won’t do the second. That was a problem when there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. But it is a calamity now.
It once was common to write about a Democratic Party loose from its moorings and suffering from an identity crisis. That was yesterday. The Republicans have the White House and the Congress — and an identity crisis of their own.