Fiscal Crisis as Failure of Progressivist Democracy

Abstract

The American system of political economy surely faces a fiscal crisis illustrated by but not limited to a trend of growing deficits and debt that cannot continue. What can’t continue won’t continue. In what fashion change occurs will be governed by forthcoming interactions between power and ideology. The present crisis has been building for nearly a century, and it resides in the morphing of a constitutional system of limited democracy into one of progressivist or oligarchic democracy. The clear and present danger is that the present crisis will end up strengthening the conservative forces of progressivist democracy and its program of continually extending the reach of politics into society. The avoidance of that danger requires some bold reconstitution of the American civil order in tune with its foundation in a constitution of liberty. Pursuit of this alternative path requires recognition that the progressivist century has done much to eviscerate the exceptional qualities of the American political heritage. That evisceration, however, can be transcended by a muscular liberalism that overcomes the soft power-based sentimentality that is the hallmark of the oligarchic form of democracy.