The only remaining question in the fiscal cliff debate is not if
the Republicans will capitulate to higher taxes but when. “I, as a
Republican, would take raising the rates on the two top brackets if
in return, we had tax reform laid out over a period of months, if
we had entitlement reform,” said former RNC chairman Haley Barbour,
foreshadowing the coming capitulation of House Republicans.
The GOP is rapidly changing from the party of no to the party of
maybe. Maybe it will accept tax hikes. Maybe it will accept gay
marriage. Maybe it will accept amnesty. Maybe it will change its
position on abortion.
Imagine if prominent Democrats, after losing in 2004, had
proposed significant changes to four or five major stances of the
party. All hell would have broken loose. Instead, Democrats
concluded that the problem was not their message but their
messenger, and they waited for a better candidate. The party didn’t
move to the center. If anything, it moved even farther to the left.
A San Francisco liberal became speaker of the House and a leftist
community organizer became president of the United States.
Unable to show that level of patience or principle, Republicans
appear ready to negotiate away much of their platform. A white flag
peeks out of their pockets. During the presidential campaign, they
said that the federal government “has a spending problem, not a
revenue problem.” But no sooner had they lost than they accepted
politics as a joint search for more government revenue.
A few Republicans still go through the motions of saying that
tax hikes are bad for the economy, but that is not a very
principled objection to high taxation or a sturdy one, as evident
in Barbour’s comment (he acknowledges that a tax hike is “bad for
jobs and bad for the economy,” but would support it anyways). The
principled objection to increasing taxation is that it is unjust.
For decades, the federal government has taken more in taxes from
the people than it needs to perform its legitimate functions. By
accepting the lie that the federal government suffers from
inadequate revenue, the Republicans show that they accept the
Democrats’ conception of an unlimited federal government and its
use of taxation as an instrument of theft.
Republicans are following, not leading, on what they think is a
path to political redemption. But irrelevance is the more likely
destination. Given a choice between two liberal parties of varying
degrees, the people will choose the more authentic one, as they do
in California and Northeastern states. The Scott Brown versus
Elizabeth Warren race could become the paradigm of American
politics, with the more liberal candidate winning each time.
In the meantime, American political discourse will grow more and
more narrow and complacent — a case of the blind leading the
blind. The media already spends most of its energy on trying to
reduce the two “reasonable” positions in any given debate down to
two barely distinguishable liberal ones. This task will only get
easier as the Republicans signal retreat.
On a recent This Week, all the panelists supported gay
marriage, including the designated “conservative” ones. George
Will, who used to quote Edmund Burke about the dangers of mobs, now
prefers to quote pollsters on the “emerging consensus.” To the
delight of his fellow panelists, he pronounced gay marriage an
inevitability: “There is something like an emerging consensus.
Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It’s old
people.”
This is exactly what members of the chattering class want to
hear and they buzzed over Will’s brilliance for a couple of days.
But they didn’t mention that this expert on the future composition
of America had recently predicted a Romney landslide. So he doesn’t
have his pulse on the present, much less the future. “I’m
projecting Minnesota to go for Romney,” Will said. Let’s see if his
“Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying”
prognostication holds up any better. At the very least, it is
premature: he didn’t mention that thirty-three states have banned
gay marriage despite the “emerging consensus.”
There is certainly an emerging consensus in the green room of
ABC and other networks on that and other issues. But so what?
Republicans used to understand that false ideas, even if ostensibly
popular and spread by powerful elites, fade and end up discredited.
The existence of the Soviet Union was thought to be permanent by
the liberal elite; Ronald Reagan said Communism would collapse
under the weight of its own lies. His impolitic honesty about that
was in the end the best policy and politics — a lesson waffling
Republicans forget at their own peril.
