Gingriched:

(See UPDATE below.)

Quoth Kevin Drum:

everyone who looks seriously at federal spending for more than a few minutes knows perfectly well that the vast majority of spending goes to four things: Social Security, Medicare, national defense, and interest payments. Unless you propose large cuts in those programs, you just aren’t serious about “small government.”

And of course no one will ever propose serious cuts in those programs. Interest payments are untouchable for obvious reasons, and the other three are all highly successful and highly popular programs. Not only won’t they be cut, but demographic and other pressures ensure that all of them will grow considerably over the next couple of decades and everyone knows it.

It’s this that makes modern Republican fiscal policy so deeply cynical and abhorrent. The leadership of the pary knows perfectly well that spending won’t be cut because they’d be kicked out of office instantly if they tried it. At the same time, they also know that their tax cuts will produce extremely damaging long term deficits. But they don’t care because the damage won’t become apparent until they leave office.

Off the top of my head I can’t think of another period in which a political party deliberately enacted policies they knew to be so damaging over the long term. Mistaken policies, sure, but not deliberate ones. But that’s what the Newt Gingrich revolution did to the Republican party.

In a sense the following doesn’t matter, because I basically agree with Kevin’s analysis of the current Republican strategy. But the last quoted sentence seems off to me. We got where we’ve gotten because of Clinton’s defeat of the Gingrich revolution. Remember that Gingrich wasn’t demonized for wanting to cut taxes; he was demonized for wanting to cut spending. The Contract for America guaranteed a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, and Clinton pulled out the stops to argue that balancing the budget would require slashing popular programs. And then the ultimate reversal in Gingrich’s and Clinton’s fortunes came as a result of the budget showdown and government shutdown– when the Gingrich Republicans were trying to exercise the kind of spending restraint that’s so out of fashion in the Bush administration.

Clinton’s willingness and ability to frame every proposed spending cut, or every proposed reduction in a rate of spending growth, as an apocalyptic threat to the existence of Medicare, Social Security, and public schools taught the Republicans that they would always lose if they tried to cut spending. It certainly taught them that they would lose if they even kind of looked in the direction of restraining Medicare growth.

Now in an important sense Clinton was able to pull this off because he had the better sense of popular preferences. That is, as Kevin rightly points out, voters in the aggregate really don’t want to see cuts in Social Security or Medicare. There was certainly deceptiveness on Clinton’s part, but in basic outline he was honestly closer to where voters wanted to be than Gingrich was. (And part of the deception was over how wide the gap between them was. Clinton was a relatively moderate spender, and Gingrich was a pretty moderate cutter. But such is politics; you try to define your opponent.)

But still. The 1994 Republican Party doesn’t somehow logically culminate in the 2004 Republican Party. The latter is in an important way the repudiation of the former. It rests on the commitment to never get Gingriched again.

Update:

Kevin updates (same link as above) to say that he agrees, and just worded the original sentence vaguely.