George Will, I think it was, was once quoted as saying he would be perfectly happy if the US were to return to the social order of 1905. It’s an idea that should strike horror into anyone who’s not an upper-class white male with no conscience; but thanks to what passes for fiscal policy in the GOP these days, we’re now well on our way. Paul Krugman (pause while conservative members of the audience leave the room, assuming there will be nothing of substance to follow) lays it out in the New York Times magazine:

Here’s how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There’s a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don’t pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these “lucky duckies.” (Yes, that’s what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as the Journal said, to get their “blood boiling with tax rage.” . . .

The astonishing political success of the antitax crusade has, more or less deliberately, set the United States up for a fiscal crisis. How we respond to that crisis will determine what kind of country we become.

If Grover Norquist is right — and he has been right about a lot — the coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians — in the name of fiscal necessity — to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.

In Norquist’s vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

It was bad enough when the future looked like Mexico City. I’m not sure it’s an improvement now that it looks more like Yoknapatawpha County.