Explain something to me, cousins. This federal deficit of yours — why have you all suddenly gone so quiet about it?
For the better part of the past decade, the fact that the Washington was spending a lot more than it raised was, quite rightly, the top issue in American politics. Defense chiefs spoke of the national debt as the single biggest threat to U.S. security, and they had a point. The interest payments to China were funding the bulk of that country’s military budget. Concerned citizens took to the streets in an extraordinary manifestation of America’s individualist tradition, the Tea Party. They demanded tax and spending cuts, a lowering of entitlements, a return to fiscal sanity.
How have things developed since then? On any measure, the fiscal situation has deteriorated badly. President Trump inherited an annual deficit that stood at $587 billion deficit. Next year, it will touch $1.2 trillion, and, within a decade, it will have reached an eye-watering $2 trillion. The national debt has now topped $20 trillion, more than the yearly output of the entire U.S. economy — a figure that previous generations of Americans would have regarded as utterly impossible.
So, where are the demonstrations? Where are the hard-faced Republican Congressmen who would rather cut off funding than allow the debt to rise further? Where, in short, is the Tea Party?
The answer is that it has disappeared at the very moment when it is most needed. I don’t just mean that the network of local initiatives and campaigns has largely shut down, nor that the number of people identifying themselves as Tea Party sympathizers has plummeted — though both these things are true. I mean that the cause which animated Tea Partiers — the belief that governments, like individuals, should live within their means — has faded.
What makes this development especially bizarre is that this fiscal incontinence is taking place at a time of strong growth and low unemployment. Supporters of Obama’s splurge could at least argue that he was engaged in pump-priming during a downturn. I never found that a convincing argument, but plenty of Keynesians sincerely believe in it.
Today, though, even that flimsy justification has been ripped away. There is no argument, whatever school of economics you follow, for emptying your nation’s coffers and exhausting its credit during a boom. Sure, the cuts in corporation tax will, over time, yield higher revenues. But in the meantime, where are the spending reductions? Why are conservatives going along with — no, scratch that, why are conservatives enthusiastically cheering — measures that they would recently have condemned as a betrayal of the national interest?
The only answer I can come up with is that, in a tribal and polarized country, people applaud measures from their guy that they would have howled down had they been proposed by the other guy. Never mind that Trump came late and indifferently to the GOP. Many Republicans are now taking what we might call the FDR line: “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.”
And, to some extent, I get their reasoning. As long as the president is cutting taxes, deregulating, and appointing judges who believe in the Constitution, I can just about see why conservatives might be prepared to give him a pass on other issues.
To be honest, I find it slightly surprising that evangelical conservatives seem not to mind about his fibs, his philandering, or his profanity. I find it odd that all those Straussians who used to define conservatism as being about character, decency, courtesy, restraint, civility, and the defense of high culture have suddenly gone quiet — with a few exceptions, such as Jay Nordlinger in the National Review.
But, as I say, I get the reasoning. The president is, in the final analysis, an employee of the American people. If they hired him to do a specific job — in this case, to tame the unelected agencies that run the country and return power to the electorate — I can see why they might overlook his ill-mannered tweets and other personal eccentricities.
But the ballooning deficit is surely in a different category. Sensible economic stewardship is not an incidental extra for Republicans, an optional add-on. It is their core mission. If they can’t deliver it, they won’t be reelected. And if they are no longer even seriously attempting to deliver it, they won’t deserve to be reelected.
Daniel Hannan, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a British member of the European Parliament.
