One costly side effect of spread of mass media is that likable stupid people have the opportunity to spread nutty ideas. Walter Cronkite was a hugely popular because he perfected the avuncular style that people naturally trust. He seemed like a nice, thoughtful older man who was only there to inform the viewers. We now know he was a pathological liar and willfully misinformed his viewers on behalf of the Left
The cable news channels and network news operations are always looking for that person who can gain the trust of the viewer. If they can peddle the old time religion at the same time, that person is getting very rich on TV. A good example on the Right is financial pundit Larry Kudlow. On TV and radio he comes off as a super-nice, old financial hand, whose wealth of experience makes him uniquely qualified to assess the economy. He gets treated as a sage, despite being wrong about most of the things he discusses.
For all his wrongness, he is a good bellwether. He can be counted on to pitch the company line. In his case, the company is the GOP and the go along to get along gang of Conservative Inc. Seeing this today, we can assume that the GOP will be satisfied to say they are right, but otherwise do nothing to claw back some of the last five years. The signals are being sent to the party and its cheerleaders that the cost is clear. No one will expect them to actually do anything once they have some power.
The usual suspects will churn out some books about how to repeal this or reform that liberal policy. The GOP will offer up candidates long on complaints about the welfare state, but short on desire to do anything about it. The GOP will soon offer up a laundry list of things to fix it. The dynamic of the next 15 years as the boomers age off will be one where one party promises to fix it and the other promises to expand it. The logic of it is now off-limits. Instead, we are looking at a long losing fight against mathematics.
The line now from Conservative Inc is, “it will collapse under its own weight.” That’s true, but it will take 15 years. In a business, pushing off bankruptcy for fifteen years is a good thing. Most businesses don’t last that long. For government, the longer reform is delayed, the worse the cost of collapse is when it comes. In fifteen years, there will be a lot of white people expecting their checks and a lot of brown people expecting their free stuff. When the money runs out, things will get ugly in a hurry.
That’s the insidiousness of social democracy. You get the benefits up front, but push the cost way past the point when current office holders are gone. Whatever the structure, democracy ends up as a some type of tragedy of the commons. All of the incentives are for living in the moment and pushing the costs off to the next generation. It’s why every democracy ends in dictatorship. It’s also why the so-called conservatives are just fraudsters. They know this, yet they go along with it because it pays well.
