Frum zooms out:
Why are American politicians playing so rough? We have moved into an era of scarcity. Once it seemed possible to have the spending Democrats wanted, financed at the tax rates the Republicans wanted, while paying for sufficient national security and running bearable deficits. That sense of expansiveness is gone. The trade-offs between Obamacare and Medicare, between spending and taxes, suddenly seem acute, imminent, and zero sum.
These disputes are not merely economic. As the United States becomes more ethnically diverse, debates over fiscal priorities inescapably become conflicts between ethnicities and cultures.
The Medicare population is more than 80 percent white. On the eve of the 2008 recession, the uninsured were 27 percent foreign born. Similar group dynamics are at work in debates over fiscal and monetary stimulus: inflation is a lot more frightening to a retiree who lost a great part of his or her savings in a stock-market crash than to a young family struggling with student loans and a mortgage. And again, America’s retirees are much more likely to be white and native-born than are America’s struggling young families. They are visible again in debates over taxes, where people who earn relatively more feel suddenly intensely vulnerable to the demands and resentment of those who earn less. Those were the feelings Mitt Romney channeled in his notorious crack about the 47 percent.
You don’t have to endorse any of these fears to recognize how they constrain even the best politicians. And not all politicians are best. There will always be people in political life who regard one man’s fear as another man’s opportunity. Such people have enjoyed a very prosperous half-decade.
The Dish 