William Galston, writing about Republican refusal to join a deficit-reduction commission, catches something I missed: the WSJ editorial page is now against means-testing on entitlements programs, because it

means that middle and upper-middle class (i.e., GOP) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes.

Wow. First of all, aren’t Republicans supposed to pretend that they’re the party of regular guys, and that the affluent vote Democratic? (It’s not true, but that hasn’t stopped them here or anywhere else).

And in the past, opposition to means-testing on benefits has come largely from liberals, who fear — rightly, I think — that poverty programs are poor programs: once you make something mainly a benefit to the poor, political support for that program erodes.

But beyond all that: if Republicans are opposed to any kind of tax increase, and now, apparently, opposed to any kind of targeted cuts in entitlement programs, what are they for?

I guess the answer is that they just want to dismantle social insurance altogether — although how that squares with insisting that people get the benefit of their payroll taxes I don’t understand.

And heres’ the thing: Social Security and Medicare are, you know, very popular. The only way they could be gutted, as opposed to reformed in an incremental way, is in the face of fiscal catastrophe — basically, federal bankruptcy. And that, in effect, is what the WSJ is calling for.

Update: As usual these days, truth is weirder and worse than fiction. Some on the right seem to think that defaulting on the federal debt would, in fact, be a good idea — because it would cut the government off from future borrowing.