The debt deal is the end of the neoconservative dream

The Tea Party, by contrast, is a post-war on terror phenomenon. Many of the newly elected Republicans are indifferent, if not hostile, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re happy to cut the defense budget, especially since it makes it easier to persuade Democrats to swallow larger cuts in domestic spending. It’s the reverse of the Cold War dynamic. During the Cold War—especially in the Nixon and Reagan years—conservatives accepted that overall spending would go up in order to ensure that some of that increase went to defense. Today, conservatives accept defense cuts in order to ensure that overall spending goes down.

The good news is that the Tea Party, more than Barack Obama, has now ended the neoconservative dream of an ever-expanding American empire. The bad news is that it has also ended whatever hopes liberals once entertained that roughly 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, roughly 75 years after the New Deal and roughly 50 years after the Great Society, we were living in another great age of progressive reform.