Conservatives don’t have a monopoly on gloom and doom. For confirmation of this, one need only look at the Malthusian Left’s repeated, and repeatedly mistaken, predictions that global warming, now known as climate change, is about to extinguish life on Earth.
And, to set political philosophy aside, one must recognize the contribution to our lamentations made by simple cranks, whether they be cultists expecting to hitch a ride off the doomed planet on a passing comet or those forlorn Jeremiahs, whose sandwich boards declare that the end is nigh. None of these types can be placed on the right half of the ideological spectrum, or at any point on it, for that matter.
But it must be acknowledged that we conservatives, who, by definition, want to conserve things in a world that stubbornly persists in changing, are inclined toward the view that everything is going to hell in a handcart. This being so, and wishing always to avoid playing to stereotype, I endeavor to mix some leavening into our chronicling of political folly.
And yet, it is difficult to conclude from current affairs that events are running smoothly in America. Board members of the Federal Reserve, and their former boss, Janet Yellen, who now runs the Treasury, are spookily agreed that we’re not entering a period of serious and sustained cyclical inflation, even though Joe Biden is spending borrowed money more profligately than any president before.
Historically, this kind of unanimity has repeatedly proved to be the precursor of a crash. I remember the phenomenon of “panic buying” before Black Monday 1987, when investors were, as one, so frightened of being left behind by a surging stock market that they piled in, adding mightily to the scale of the disaster that was about to befall them. More recently, in the run-up to the Great Recession, everyone and his grandmother borrowed to buy real estate, stoking prices and ensuring no dollar was left idle if it could be used to make the crash more spectacular.
Now, I am reading headlines such as “America’s Welfare State Is on Borrowed Time,” which adorned a Wall Street Journal op-ed by my wise friend Chris DeMuth, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, who noted that spending on social benefits was heading briskly toward 80% of the federal budget even before Biden stamped his game foot down on the accelerator. Whereas for 200 years, we borrowed only for emergencies and then paid down debt in fat times, we now borrow to finance our day-to-day running costs, and, despite what advocates of Modern Monetary Theory want us to believe, it can’t go on forever — or even, I suspect, for very much longer.
The flip side of this fiscal unraveling is Biden and the Democrats picking apart the structure of our republic. That is the subject of Charles Cooke’s cover story this week, “Assault On The Constitution.” Biden is, writes Cooke, threatening to subject the United States “to the most dramatic structural transformation in 90 years.”
The news isn’t always good. But we promise to tell it like it is.
