How the age of austerity will remake American politics.

In this election, you can glimpse the brutish future of American politics. This new age of brutishness may or may not include the Tea Party. But, even if the Tea Party dissipates, the anger undergirding it will not. The Tea Party has expertly articulated a widespread grievance: that the government is redistributing money from hardworking Americans to the idle and undeserving. Of course, this is hardly a new charge. But it takes place in a new context—an age of growing austerity, where this complaint will acquire an ever-sharper edge and battles over the scarce resources of the state will erupt in spectacular skirmishes.

Politics has, in some sense, always been a resource war—and in American politics it has usually taken the form of one political party promoting a social safety net and the other party decrying how hard-earned tax dollars unjustly finance those benefits. But, while that debate was intense, it was in some sense resolvable. For decades, our political system has been able to fund an array of social programs while keeping taxes relatively low. The American economy grew at a sufficient pace that it could rather effortlessly bankroll a state that satisfied divergent interests.

But that broad, unintentional compromise is no longer sustainable. We’re entering a period of austerity, far different from anything we’ve ever seen before. The predictions, especially the ones formulated by sober, nonpartisan analysts, are eye-popping. Earlier this year, a Congressional Budget Office report estimated that the debt as a percentage of GDP would approximately triple by 2035. Put another way, debt will come to exceed 185 percent of GDP. That’s far worse than Greece’s current perilous condition, a crisis that has been portrayed as the reductio ad absurdum of fiscal indiscipline.

Like the David Cameron government in Britain, or any number of other states across Europe, we’ll soon be forced to reckon with the fact that our economic viability depends on some combination of shrinking the state and raising revenue. If we were careful planners—and, of course, we’re not—we would begin by saving about 5 percent of GDP each year. Next year, for example, we’d have to make tax increases and spending cuts add up to about $700 billion. Over time, the total costs would prove immense: raising everyone’s tax bill by at least 25 percent (and probably a lot more than that) or eliminating about 20 percent of the federal budget (the approximate current size of Social Security, for example).

Even if you assume that a crisis is distant—or assume that we’ll avert it by letting the Bush tax cuts expire and further containing health care costs—the anxieties about deficits are already acute. Both parties are posturing to assume the mantle of fiscal conservatism, a trend that the success of the Tea Party will only exacerbate. And by December, Obama’s deficit commission will release its findings, further propelling this debate to the fore.