Over the weekend, on C-Span, I watched conservative author Dambisa Moyo talk about her book. It was amazing - she talked intelligently about the various political and economic challenges. She then leapt to the conclusion that the problem was unions and pensions. She made her case brilliantly and someone watching casually would have been fooled - her solution did not in any way shape or form, fit the problem as she described it. But in the face of a host of problems, she offered a solution. By hyping the problem (the west is done for unless we make changes), she shut down space in which to analyze it and arrive at a solution. It's a tactic conservatives in the US have mastered.
It's a simple realization - conservative politicians in the US are trying to create a crisis. Whether it's threats to shut down the federal government or picking fights in the states states or scaling back needed government services, almost every action taken by conservatives in recent years has been to push the US toward crisis of some sort of another. The ongoing assault on stability consistently and unnervingly leaves the system constantly shuddering and shaken, stumbling from crisis to crisis, conflict to conflict.
Keeping the system off balance pushes voters and politicians away from equilibrium. The system never gets a chance to balance itself, to simply operate. Cutting taxes without cutting spending is another iteration of this tactic. It allows to conservative politicians to push the national discussion into crisis mode - "Oh my god! We have runaway deficits and we're going to go bankrupt and be destroyed." With our quiescent and largely incompetent press, such tactics work. The result is that DC throws itself into a nigh on unhinged discussion about deficits and budgets and starts casting about for ways to prove their seriousness by proposing ever deeper cuts in programs of social uplift while holding sacrosanct tax cuts and military spending.
Constant pressure from these manufactured crises paralyzes any hope of the emergence of a political center. The teabagger rhetoric about the end of America is one means by which conservatives push the political debate off balance. Moderates become increasingly ineffectual in a setting in which teabaggers constantly amp up the rhetoric. How can forge a moderate position between imaginary death panels trying to kill granny and reality? The same goes for congressional Republicans' threats to shut down the government. There's no sane compromise position between "it's not big deal to shut down the government" and "we have to keep government services up and running because people depend on them."
Keeping the system off balance and in chaos serves multiple goals at once. It prevents progressive solutions from being implemented - "We can't implement health care reform when we have a MASSIVE BUDGET CRISIS" - and it keeps progressives constantly on the defensive. If you're spending all your time trying to face a teabagger crowd at the townhall that is sure destruction and socialism are imminent you can't actually do any work. While conservative may not be able to implement their preferred policies, they are often able to extract concessions that further the problem (see December's unconscionable extension of the Bush tax cuts).
At the end of the day, conservatives will keep manufacturing these disasters as a way to keep us all of balance.