Tackling Public Spending

Andrew:

I know that the Tory leadership has been particularly worried about the influence of small groups of Christianists potentially hijacking local nominations. But their numbers are mercifully minuscule compared to the US – which is why the British Conservatives have been able to tackle public spending directly without the baggage of religious dogmatism [bold mine-DL].

Put another way, centralized national political leadership wants to be able to dictate and control the process by which candidates are selected. I can see why this is useful for Cameron, but I’m at a loss as to why anyone outside the Tory front bench should see this as a good thing. As for the “baggage of religious dogmatism,” I have a hard time believing that it is this baggage (if such baggage exists) that is to blame for an American inability to “tackle public spending.”

It seems to me that better explanations would include the utter cowardice of Republican leaders, a decades-long public embrace of entitlements, and a widely-shared cultural aversion to paying for government services ourselves instead of pushing off the responibility onto our descendants. The Tories also have the advantage of operating in a coalition government in which public backlash against austerity can be spread around, and they are faced with an even larger national debt as percentage of GDP than we are. There are some religious fundamentalists less zealous about their holy places than opportunistic Republicans are when it comes to defending the sanctity of Medicare these days. We would be better off spending more time worrying about the effects of the latter enthusiasts, since they are the ones partly responsible for exacerbating the federal government’s long-term liabilities.