This column by Alexander Burns pondering former British prime minister Liz Truss' pilgrimage to Republican halls of power has been getting some attention, given its twin central questions.
Question number one is whether anti-tax crusader Liz Truss, who resigned after a mere 49 days of conservative idea-implementing that so cratered the British economy as to require emergency repair measures that continue even now, sincerely believes there is utility in getting new talking points from the Republican radicals whose ideas proved so disastrous when put into practice that she is now an international laughingstock whose legacy consists of being outlasted by an actual head of lettuce.
If Truss had reconsidered the soundness of a program that sent the pound plunging, triggered emergency actions by the Bank of England and drew open scorn from the Biden administration, she did not say so. To the contrary, she seemed to believe her defective strategy of borrowing Republican ideas could be improved by borrowing more Republican ideas.
The second question, and the more important one for us, is whether the Republicans she's meeting with are feeling any sense of hesitation in their own plans to break the national economy by defaulting on the national debt, a plan which is an order of magnitude more reckless than the Liz Truss agenda.
The conservatives Truss met in Washington did not seem inclined to see her as a Ghost of Christmas Future — a grim embodiment of what happens when you try to revise the relationship between taxpayers and their government without first persuading voters to go along with you. They welcomed her, instead, like a pal who has fallen on hard times.
The answers to both these questions are, of course, straightforward. Pundits like to muse on these things because that's what punditry is, but in this case we have a literal half century of data available on the subject of will hardline conservatives learn a lesson from the utter and spectacular collapse of their ideas when put into practice and the answer is a hard, hard no.
That’s the whole point of conservatism, after all! It does not adapt well in the face of new information. It does not fret—at all—if its grandly announced plans, when implemented, achieve nothing or result in worse results than doing nothing.
We've seen this over and over again. The Trump-era Republican tax cuts on the wealthy were, if anyone was gullible enough to believe their own rhetoric, going to usher in a new age of growth and prosperity that would something something something. The something turned out to be gargantuan add-ons to the national debt, the very thing that the same Republicans purported to be outraged about both before and since, all of it for the benefit of a narrow slice of wealthy Americans who already own All The Things.
You can tell precisely how all of this is going to go just from listing the names of those Liz Truss met with on her Let's Try This Again tour. She sought advice from coup advocate Republican Rep. Kevin Hern of the hollowly named "Republican Study Committee," a group devoted in theory to tax-slashing and in practice to an indecipherable hodgepodge of hard-right twitches.
The second name on Truss' meet-and-greet was ... Grover Norquist. Yeah, that Grover Norquist, of "Americans for Tax Reform." In addition to still being alive, apparently—no small feat for a man who's single-mindedly pursued the castration of government services since the Paleozoic era—he remains a "self-described Truss fan." It will not surprise you to learn that Tax Cut Cthulhu has exactly one prescription for the current situation.
“You do one issue. You do Jack Kemp. You do, ‘We’re the lower-rate people,’” said Norquist, who displays a 1990s-vintage Tory poster in his office (“New Labour, New Taxes”).
One thousand years from now, a cybernetic Grover Norquist will still be haunting the post-apocalyptic American wastelands, telling scavengers to "do Jack Kemp" as if it is the most obvious advice in the world. For everyone who has tried it in this era, however, the results continue to be absolutely abominable. Liz Truss isn't an outlier here, she's just a victim of a parliamentary system of government in which abject economy-crashing failure can still result, on occasion, in political consequences.
Here in the United States, we have dispensed with such notions. There is absolutely nothing you can do that will keep you from being invited onto the Sunday shows, where you will be graciously given camera time to explain that your nuclear carpet-bombing of Colorado may have indeed caused short-term casualties, but will be tremendously popular with Wall Street firms heavily invested in radiation mitigation technologies. You can quite literally send a known-armed mob towards a joint session of Congress for the purposes of disrupting American democracy and few of your fellow politicians will refuse to associate with you after their lives were so flamboyantly risked—and absolutely none of them will haul off and punch you for it.
Say what you want about American democracy, but there's probably no other country where you can send an armed mob after your political opponents and confidently believe you won't get punched for it. We Are Unique.
So then, the question again: Will Republicans be cowed into second-guessing their plan (again) to shutter government (again) and at least temporarily (again) default on the national debt?
No, of course not. What a ridiculous question. If you can assist a coup, get citizens killed, and still be on handshake terms with fellow politicians who don't necessarily like the idea of rebellion but aren't invested enough in that belief to cause a scene or anything, there is little chance you're going to be worried that causing an international economic crisis will get you more than a mild, temporary, and mostly performative scolding. This isn’t Europe. There aren’t consequences for doing the transparently worst, most predictably catastrophic thing.
Listen to this episode of The Downballot for an in-depth analysis of the 2024 Arizona Senate race and the implications of Kyrsten Sinema's re-election decision. Special guest Victoria McGroary, the Executive Director of BOLD PAC, will also discuss the efforts to prevent losses among Hispanic voters and the fight against disinformation in Spanish language media.