David Brooks dreams of a new Hamiltonian Party with a "reinvigoration agenda" of entitlement reform, "early childhood education, technical education, community colleges, an infrastructure bank, asset distribution to help people start businesses, a new wave industrial policy," a simplification of the tax code and a "streamlining" of business regulations and "lower corporate rates, a sane visa policy for skilled immigrants, a sane patent and permitting system, more money for research."
Why a new party? Because, contends Brooks, "the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic."
Republican politicians don’t design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices — as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal.... The Republican growth agenda — tax cuts and nothing else — is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible.
As for the Democrats, they offer practically nothing.... They still have these grand spending ideas, but there is no longer any money to pay for them and there won’t be for decades.... [T]hey too are trapped in a bygone era. Mentally, they are living in the era of affluence, but, actually, they are living in the era of austerity.
Brooks' marked implication is that the two parties shoulder equal culpability for grinding this country to a fiscal pulp and then inflaming us with unrealistic expectations erected on impossible foundations. "[T]he two parties have grown more rigid," writes Brooks, so "Voters are in the market for new movements and new combinations."
I resist the cliche of "false equivalency." Nevertheless I'll use it this morning, because Brooks has discovered its Platonic Ideal.
For decades, Republicans have practiced the political skulduggery of Machiavellian fiscal murder most foul, and they finally have the Dems where they want them, which is in a chasmic hole from which the country may never crawl out. For decades they borrowed and spent and borrowed some more and spent some more and then they borrowed yet more and spent yet more with pornographic abandon, knowing all along they weren't trying to merely starve the beast of government, but essentially kill it -- to confine it in debtors prison and straitjacket our future.
This the traditionally conservative GOP accomplished by bamboozling a moderately conservative electorate into thinking that its fiscal policies were -- what else? -- traditional conservative policies, when in reality they were pseudoconservative humbug strategically designed to eviscerate the federal government, to gut New Deal and Great Society entitlements, to slash huge holes in our social safety nets, to maroon us forever on an inhospitable isle of grim austerity.
Did Democrats fail to sound the alarms? Did they cravenly duck under the GOP's demagogic fire? Did they cede philosophical territory, inch by inevitably destructive inch? Rhetorical questions all, but to now equate Democratic transgressions of cowardice with Republicans' sins of aggression, as David Brooks seems to do, is both harsh and unjustifiably harsh. And blind.
Democrats aided and to some extent abetted, but there is only one indictable villain here -- and it is ethically incumbent on authentic conservatives of public intellectualism to unseal that indictment and reveal the culprit's identity to the rank-and-file, conservative electorate.
Democratic ideas for a better future can go nowhere because of ... Republican crimes; as well, and somewhat ironically, Brooks' own ideas for a "reinvigoration agenda" under a fanciful Hamiltonian Party can go nowhere because of ... Republican crimes. At the hands of a narrow minority of grotesquely reactionary ideologues we have, collectively, been hogtied, cheated, lied to, fettered, hobbled, and now stampeded into a quite possibly inescapable pit of national decline.
There is a path out, but it must begin with honest conservatives being honest about who, principally, got us here, and why, and how.