The climate of the next political era will be shaped by one foundational fact: We are out of money. Every decision we make in the next decade will be colored by this knowledge.
Government will struggle to adjust to this new scarcity. The old formulas of influence and the parceling out of government largesse will be abandoned.
A period of enforced austerity awaits us. If politics looked ugly before, imagine all the nastiness of the same old fight over fewer resources.
Already, the winds are shifting. The ancien régime of earmarks and pork is politically untenable. They won’t name buildings after modern earmarks. There is now no such thing as innocent spending.
It’s also hard to ignore the rising dissatisfaction of the American people. The days of relative calm, of multi-year realignments, of slow rises and falls of parties — these days are over.
Voters will vacillate wildly between parties and personalities, almost incoherently blaming whoever is in power for the sins of the past.
When at some point we get serious, as we must, about entitlement reform, this tendency will only be more exaggerated. Scarcity will lead to budget cuts, budget cuts will create opposition and opposition will shorten tenures in office.
Politicians may as well resign themselves to unpopularity, short windows of power and inglorious austerity.
This may lead to better representation. If leaders expect to make difficult and unpopular decisions, perhaps making them will be viewed as an act of virtue, whether voters reward it or not.
Nowhere is the new paradigm more visible than in Wisconsin, where budget cuts and labor unions have collided in an explosive conflict that has protestors flooding the streets and legislators leaving the state.
Wisconsin may soon become usual in the politics of scarcity. Republican Gov. Scott Walker, like many new governors, is spoiling for a fight. His labor opponents are accustomed to government indulgence.
This clash is unavoidable, and similar fights will soon play out at state capitols and in Washington.
Wisconsin is a first salvo in the coming battle over our spending culture. The echoing strangeness of the scene may soon become more commonplace as the certainty of our government’s lack of resources settles on us.
Our politics has long been an exercise in unreality. Spending is divorced from consequences. Year after year, politicians are elected on unsustainable premises, and the money flows. Budgets are raised almost by rote, and any slowing in growth is called —perversely — a cut.
What will become even clearer in these next years is that every government program has a constituency. Every cut is the death of someone’s dream.
Fights like Wisconsin throw into stark relief the opposition that even small changes will prompt.
Even after the few cuts that can be made in discretionary spending are done —nationally and locally — even after the wailing and gnashing of teeth and the parading of people who need the government, the real work will still lie ahead. Medicare and Social Security are the grand anchors of our politics, slowing us and slowing us until they stop us completely.
The age of government scarcity has just begun.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu
