I think this Yuval Levin piece is pretty insightful. I don’t agree with him about the unaffordability of the Democrats’ social welfare state and I am fully cognizant that ObamaCare actually improves our balance sheet rather than contributing to our deficit, but other than those two quibbles I see Levin’s landscape as accurate. The Democrats (as opposed to their progressive wing) are pretty much done building the social welfare state. What they want to do is shore it up financially and implement the health care reforms. They know that they need more revenue to accomplish this on a sound basis. And they know that they will never get the needed revenue if they can’t get it now. The Republicans want to deny the Democrats new revenue for precisely these reasons and, as a result, neither side sees compromise as remotely acceptable.
Where I think Mr. Levin is wrong is in thinking that the battle is still ongoing. You can’t keep everything locked in trench warfare when your side only controls one half of Congress and the other side has the presidency. We can’t have four more years of battles over the debt ceiling. We can’t have four more years of total obstruction in the Senate. The Democrats have to be allowed to implement their policies. There is just no way to maintain the status quo. In the end, the Democrats will get their revenues and implement ObamaCare.
I think Mr. Levin has described the current conflict quite accurately and his analysis helps explain why the Republicans seem incapable of accepting reality and cutting their losses. But it doesn’t ultimately matter whether the Republicans get rolled in December or January. They lost the argument when they lost the elections. And they now know that they have no route back to the White House. There is really no possibility that they can win a national election with their current constituencies. If Hillary runs, she wins. She wins two terms. But almost any Democrat will beat almost any Republican as long as the GOP is beholden to a base that is this intolerant of and alienating to the majority of Americans.
They have suffered their own Waterloo, and they don’t even seem to know it.