In reality, the next election may be no more transformative than 2008 turned out to be. The next Republican president may find himself as hemmed in and frustrated as President Obama has become. Meanwhile, America will still have a credit rating to fix, and a deficit to close.More at that link at top, and Douthat had a great piece a few days ago on the debt deal, "The Liberals’ Dilemma." Note especially:
... American liberalism risks becoming a victim of its own longstanding strategy’s success. Because yesterday’s liberals insisted on making universal programs the costly core of the modern welfare state, on the famous theory that “programs for the poor become poor programs,” today’s liberals find themselves defending those universal (and therefore universally-popular) programs at the expense of every other kind of government spending — including, yes, programs for the poor. It’s a classic example of putting liberal political interests ahead of liberal policy priorities. In the short term, the insistence on ring-fencing Medicare and Social Security has left Democrats defending a system that often just ends up redistributing money from the younger middle class to the older middle class while accepting caps on programs that might do more (both directly and indirectly) to help downscale Americans get ahead. In the long term, by postponing any reckoning with the cost of entitlements, it’s making it more likely that the inevitable crunch will hit the poorest recipients of Medicare and Social Security harder than it should.Read that whole thing. Basically, progressives will never cut entitlements because gargantuan socialist welfare states form the core of socialist existentialism.
Douthat's coming of his own as a New York Times columnist, by the way. He had cold feet or something after leaving The Atlantic, but he's been more consistent in posting some excellent commentary of late.