Democrats (sans Grover Cleveland) have always spent like drunken sailors. Republicans used to at least complain (before folding like lawn chairs and passing egregious budgets to avoid being called mean names by corporate journalists).

But even those days are gone now. Fiscal hawks no longer serve as the uncomfortable conscience of the Right. That conscience has been evicted and fiscal conservatism is now an orphan ideology in Washington.

President Donald Trump has now added more to the national debt in under six years than former President Barack Obama did in eight. Even more troubling than the debt number is the trajectory. Under current projections, federal borrowing is on pace to hit $48 trillion by the end of Trump’s term.

A $40 trillion national debt is not just an abstract accounting issue for future generations to deal with. It is an active, compounding tax on the present. With interest rates no longer pinned to zero, net interest payments on the debt have become the fastest-growing item in the federal budget, now consuming more taxpayer dollars than national defense and rapidly closing in on Medicare.

This debt service trap creates a vicious economic cycle. Federal borrowing crowds out private capital that would otherwise drive domestic innovation, investment, and wage growth. Simultaneously, it puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to artificially lower interest rates or monetize the debt, leaving people with a choice between permanent, structural inflation or fiscal insolvency.

Progressives, predictable as ever, view the Treasury as an infinite piggy bank for welfare expansion and industrial policy, but the real shift has occurred on the Right. The ascendance of “national conservatism,” a coalition of populist, protectionist intellectuals, has effectively and systematically purged fiscal restraint from the conservative movement. To the NatCon crowd, the state is no longer a dangerous power to be constrained by constitutional checks and balances, it is a weapon to be captured and deployed in the name of cultural and economic engineering. Because their political vision relies heavily on federal subsidies, industrial intervention, and tariffs, the New Right has embraced a brand of economic illiteracy that rivals the Left’s Modern Monetary Theory.

Trump routinely insists that broad import tariffs will raise enough revenue to pay off the national debt. Obviously, this claim fails basic high school math. Total U.S. imports range between $3 trillion to $4 trillion annually. Even a sweeping, destructive tax on every foreign good wouldn’t come close to covering our $2 trillion-plus budget deficit, to say nothing of the $40 trillion principle. The embrace of this foolhardy thinking by the economics-is-fake wing of the GOP explains why the New Right reacts with such hostility toward classical liberals and free-market economists who point out their flawed math.

A telling example occurred on X over the weekend when Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham engaged in a feud with Independent Institute senior economic historian Phil Magness. Rather than engaging with Magness’s arguments, Basham resorted to a tired populist smear, accusing libertarians of only caring about “weed and porn,” and ludicrously accusing them of sitting out the fight against COVID-19 tyranny.

YIELD ON BENCHMARK 10-YEAR TREASURY HITS 5% FOR FIRST TIME SINCE 2007, RAISING DEBT FEARS

This accusation was as revealing as it was childish. Magness, after all, is one of the key figures who organized and amplified the Great Barrington Declaration. In the eyes of the NatCon movement, apparently, anyone who insists on constitutional limits, free markets, and fiscal sanity must be delegitimized. To admit that government spending has real-world limits and ramifications is to admit that the NatCon agenda of state-managed populist economics is built on a foundation of sand.

The country is speeding toward a fiscal cliff with two drivers fighting tooth and nail over who gets to floor it over the edge. Both parties have their reasons to avoid talking about entitlement reform and mandatory spending, but the debt is stubbornly indifferent to political ideology. When the reckoning arrives, the uniparty will have to contend with the wreckage and the public backlash.

Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a writer, musician, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.