In the wake of the Democrats’ upset victory in a NY special election yesterday, Jonathan Chait lays out the unpopularity of the Republicans’ goals, and their methods of concealing them:

One favored tactic has been to keep the issues of taxes and spending separate. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush passed large tax cuts that mathematically implied the need for cuts in popular spending programs. But they fiercely denied the implication, and left the work of spending cuts for the future, so that the tax cutting could proceed without any acknowledgement of the priorities it required. Indeed, Republicans understood very clearly that obscuring the trade-off was the entire key to gaining public acceptance …

… this political method naturally leads to very large deficits. The Republicans have now fashioned themselves as the party of fiscal discipline, an imperative that drove them to do something they haven’t tried since 1995 — actually lay out a budget that reconciled their priorities on spending and taxing. This was a huge mistake. As happened in 1995, this laid bare the wild unpopularity if their choices.

He also quotes Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute with some thoughts that I believe are relevant to Bruce Anderson’s point:

… blue-collar voters react differently to issues than the GOP base does. They are more supportive of safety-net programs at the same time as they are strongly opposed to large government programs in general. These voters crave stability and are uncertain of their ability to compete in a globalized economy that values higher education more each year.

My point here is not to inform you about US politics. It’s that fundamentally there is a very similar dynamic going on here in Canada. Forget the jibes about “American-style politics”: this is just a matter of math. You cannot keep cutting taxes without running deficits unless you also cut services, and most people won’t like that.

Regardless of what some columnists like to think, Stephen Harper’s party did not win power as the party of fiscal discipline and then get forced by their minority status into maintaining high spending levels. As Stephen Gordon has shown, the GST cut that Harper promised in his first winning platform put us on track to a deficit right off the bat. I’d assume that Harper didn’t make that pledge expecting to win a minority.

Their most recent budget continued this habit of promising lower tax rates without honestly identifying commensurate spending cuts.

Sooner or later, something will have to give. Either the government will drown in its own deficits, or services will start to be cut and the divergence between Harper’s aims and Canadians’ desires will become apparent.

I’d actually wager that both will happen: spending cuts that are insufficient to bring down the deficit will nevertheless create sufficient pain to trigger an electoral backlash. That is, after all, what happened to the Tories in Ontario — many of whom are now making federal fiscal policy.

As a result of this logic, I think it’s extremely premature to proclaim a lasting realignment of Canadian values or politics.