Still, the sour complaints and dire prognoses of 1992–oh, my God, the budget deficit will do us in!–were quickly overtaken by events. ~Bill Kristol
Yes, including such “events” as the 1994 election of a Congress that began to impose some of the fiscal restraint that ideally comes from divided government. Deficit doomsayers may have been overwrought in 1992, but it was the Perot campaign pushing the deficit to the middle of the debate and the public’s support for balanced budgets that began to head off any potential woes of running deficits year after year. Relative fiscal restraint combined with the post-’91 recession recovery led to the fat years of the last decade. It didn’t just come out of nowhere, but was the result of a number of people drawing attention to a problem and attempting, however fitfully and half-heartedly at times, to address it. Optimists are great ones for minimising the problems that can actually be solved while undertaking impossible projects to reorder entire societies, which is why they are doubly useless when it comes to running a polity.
Kristol continues:
What’s more, the fear of many conservatives that we might be at the mercy of unstoppable forces of social disintegration turned out to be wrong.
Well, according to the Iraq standard of social disintegration, I suppose they turned out to be wrong. In other respects, most of the things that troubled social conservatives in 1992 are still around and have become in some cases worse than they were. Where there was greater concern about cultural rot and crime in the early ’90s–because these seemed to be and actually were the more salient problems of the time–fears of eroding national identity and security, both physical and economic, contribute to very real anxieties. Some social problems have become less severe in the last fifteen years, but they nonetheless remain great. Of course, Kristol is an unusually bad one to assess whether or not these claims were vindicated, since he did not accept many of them back then, either, and he is instinctively inclined to find pessimistic views unpersuasive.
8 comments
July 6th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Koz
It’s worth noting that relative to deficit reduction of the 1990s, Bill Kristol has ten times the credibility of paleoconservatives. Ie, he organized the resistance to the Hillary health care plan which looked for a while to be a shoo-in. And if it had passed, there would have been no deficit reduction.
I don’t mean to suggest that the paleos were supporting Hillary in that fight of course, they were irrelevant as usual. If it’s not a matter of anklebiting the mainstream Right, don’t count on help from the paleos.
July 6th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Daniel Larison
Okay, so you’re saying that a handful of people actively excluded from any influence on Republican politics lacked influence on Republican politics in 1990s. That’s *really* interesting. In other words, you’re admitting that Kristol has no real point in the article in question.
July 7th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Koz
Truth be told, I didn’t read the article before your last response, I was responding to your post. Now that I have, there isn’t anything particularly objectionable in it to me.
The main point of the article is that even when our problems seemed overwhelming, they really weren’t. Not to say that crime or illegitimacy or abortion aren’t big issues still, but we don’t have to be fatalistic about it. We _can_ address them.
_My_ point is that the paleos are politically useless except for playing backseat driver to the mainstream Right.
Frankly, I don’t think you have much of a response for either one.
July 7th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Grumpy Old Man
Sometimes it’s better to curse the darkness than to light that candle.
Say, when you’re sitting on a leaky propane tank.
July 7th, 2007 at 10:01 am
tedschan
We _can_ address them.
Who is the we here? The Federal Government? The American people? Or the members of local communities?
July 7th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Daniel Larison
No, the main point of the article is that problems, especially as described over a decade later by someone who had no real sympathy with the original complaints, will get fixed, as if the earlier pessimism and complaining had nothing to do with raising the problem in the first place. His other point is apparently that people should always be optimistic. That strikes me as utterly foolish.
I would rather be “useless,” as you put it, than “useful,” given what the mainstream Right has managed to accomplish in the last few years by being useful idiots for this administration. That’s really a powerful observation–a handful of people whose ideas are routinely pushed to the margins are not very politically “useful.” Who knew? Once again you have managed to deliver what you think is some sort of insult that I consider to be a compliment.
July 7th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Koz
Whatever Daniel. This last response is just you venting your spleen at the cost of coherence.
July 7th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
Daniel Larison
Whatever is exactly right. Every time I see a comment from you, I know that it is going to be a waste of my time. I am rarely proven wrong on that point.