An Empire Needs a Bottomless Budget

Since Reagan, intellectual-political life has gone topsy-turvy. Conservatives and allegedly “free-market” economists have twisted themselves inside out trying to find new reasons why deficits don’t matter. Today, if you were to pose the question to the small-town Republican, you might still find a faint residue of the Old Religion. But the poor man has been betrayed by his party, by his representatives, by politics itself, by the lure of empire, and by his own vain and fatal urges. He has come to believe what he must — never more true than under Donald Trump…