Good comment at Brad DeLong's

Otto, the power struggle is, I think, bigger than you've described it; it (used to) be bounded by a decent respect for the opinions of others and for the appearance of decency, for example. Social norms are part of the context in which these struggles happen.

Since 1994, though, the current crop of Republicans has jettisoned its fealty to that context and simply taken up outright lying. I think what Krugman's discussing is the pattern of the lies, not necessarily the true basis for this night-of-the-living-dead tax-cut attack.

True, Norquist apparently believes his crap about starving the beast, and it's possible that somebody, somewhere, might actually have believed supply-side (the more transparent lie of the two). I will agree that most of these theories' proponents probably did have a good laugh on the way to banking their shiny new tax cuts.

A bigger point is that the tax-cut reflex (something like an amoeba's reaction to light, perhaps) works completely, obviously, and insanely against the glue that holds the contemporary Republican party together and in power. I mean pork, in the specific form of earmarks.

Earmarks are what allows the White House to maintain its iron grip on the party, working through its captive congressional leadership-- earmarks are the goodies each representative can take home to convince the voters that everybody in Congress sucks, except my guy (which is what the public says now, so it's worked pretty well).

Earmarks and other goodies (Medicare B being the biggest earmark of them all) are how the party has managed to counteract the centripetal tendencies forced on parties and politicians by the horrendous expense of campaigns. Parties could no longer play the major part in financing campaigns and were becoming next door to useless very recently (remember the early 90s), before the current Republican leadership figured out how to use earmarks to restore party discipline.

It was brilliant. It was also, unfortunately, ruinous to our fisc. But we know where the true loyalties lie of the people who invented this system.

And thus we have the paradox of a party held together by giving away federal goodies, but reflexly devoted to destroying the means of providing the goodies.

This is the true triumph of white southern culture, or the revenge of the Confederacy; take your pick.