OK, so Republicans will say anything (no matter how improbable) in order to gain and maintain power. The logical inference, therefore, is that Republicans want power for reasons almost entirely other than those they state*. So the question is, why do they want power?"The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape. "
Krugman walks a little way down this path. He notes that the logical and arithmetic implication of the GOP pledge to balance the budget while cutting taxes by 2020 is that we would have to eliminate the entire Federal government aside from Medicare, social security and the military (including Congress) and privatize Medicare and Social Security in the bargain. But then he steps back from the implication of this (that Republicans want to hand over as much dough as possible to the capitalists and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves) by noting that this agenda doesn't stand a chance, even among the Republicans themselves. Instead, what is going to happen is that we'll get the tax cuts and little if any in the way of spending cuts (or more likely, increases in spending in ways that won't do much good), and we will drive the government even deeper into debt and dysfunction.
Krugman's analysis boils down to calling them a bunch of idiots who won't get what they really want and will destroy us all in the process. But there's a contradiction at the heart of this. They're smart enough to understand that their numbers don't add up. They're smart enough to craft propaganda that gets people to join in their wish-fulfillment fantasies. They can't be so so dumb that they've miscalculated the political impossibility of what they're proposing. OK, so I will admit that my motto in life is "don't assume conspiracy when incompetence suffices to explain." I am predisposed to accepting exactly this assessment of the Republicans. However, I don't really buy that they are pushing us toward banana republic status out of sheer ineptitude. There's something else going on.
I have a partial explanation. First, it mostly boils down to the fact the Republican party is controlled by the most nakedly ruthless forces within capitalism. These forces want to grab as much of our society's wealth for themselves as possible. Increasing public debt (especially debt spent in their interest) is a great way to do this, since they wind up holding most of that debt, and can tax the rest of us to pay it off. At the same time, they recognize the limitations of this worldview (default on that debt would be a bad thing for them). They realize that if they manipulate things just right, they can make Democrats take much of the blame, and be forced to do the heavy lifting of trying to clean up public finances (as Carter and Clinton had to do). This is a crude analysis, no doubt full of gaps, but I think it fits the facts better than sheer incompetence.
There's also the deeper question of why people seek power in the service of this kind of agenda. While many politicians are part of the uber-wealthy class pulling the strings, many aren't. What's the payoff for them? Some are actually true believers in the cause and think they are doing society some good. But given that the "cause" makes no objective sense in this instance, it seems unlikely that greed and stupidity alone are sufficient to explain the behavior of all Republican politicians. The missing element would seem to be the desire for itself. This is the part that I will admit I simply do not grasp. I have exercised small amounts of power in my day (in the workplace, at home, over an audience), and have mostly been left cold by it. Though I have certainly witnessed it over and over again, I have never come to any understanding of why some people seek power and use it in ways that harm others without necessarily serving their own material welfare.
To me this should be one of the central questions of the social sciences, yet it seems not to hold such a place. Perhaps Krugman could turn his Nobel-wattage abilities to dissecting this
*In all fairness, Democrats (who may be better but aren't saints) will also of substantial improbability in order to gain and maintain power, also for reasons left unsaid, but I generally find these to be less frequent and less astonishing. But that's a subject for another day
