David Frum for Democracy Journal: Can the GOP Evolve?
It’s 2024. The vast majority of baby boomers have arrived at retirement age. The pre-baby boomers are rapidly passing from the scene. (The youngest of them, born in 1945, are about to turn 80.) The long-predicted crisis of the American fiscal system has arrived.
The political scientist Harold Lasswell famously defined politics as a contest over “who gets what, when, and how.” Over the next dozen years, as the gap between the revenue lines and the expenditure lines of the federal and state governments widen, that definition could aptly be amended: Who gets disappointed—and by how much? Will baby boomers receive a less generous deal from Medicare than their parents did? Will the huge promises to public-sector retirees be honored? Or will other programs for younger people be squeezed? Will we sacrifice America’s military presence in the world? Or will we exact more in taxes—and if so, what kind of taxes, and imposed on whom?
These harrowing questions have disconcerting political implications for the country’s two great political parties.
For Democrats, the trends pose a stark distributional question. The younger people of the 2020s, survivors of the Great Recession, will in the aggregate be poorer than their elders. Should these younger workers be taxed or see their own social services squeezed in order to support Medicare and public-service pensions in their full amplitude?
For Republicans, the trends pose a coalition-management question. Throughout the Obama years, Republicans built a powerful coalition of the rich and the old. The coalition was built on two principles: militant rejection of any and all new taxes, and unyielding defense of existing government benefits for those at or near retirement age.