Today in Slate, Jacob Weisberg writes on the topic that has energized and infuriated me for a number of months: the seeming incoherence of the American public about what they want from government. Like I’ve done on this blog, he compares the interaction between the electorate and the federal government to California, where the people demand services and refuse to pay for them. It’s feeling one can’t help but come away with after watching Obama’s first year and reading the James Fallows story I praised a few weeks ago.

I’m a little wary of the “ungovernnable America” narrative advanced in Weisberg’s piece, simply because it feels like a slow-motion shot of liberal consensus congealing. It’s an absurdly easy argument to make if you’re a progressive who more or less supports Obama’s domestic agenda: Americans voted him in to fix these things, and now that they aren’t sure about how things are going, they’re just childish idiots who can’t make up their minds. But while I think there’s more to the current political crisis than just American ignorance and double-mindedness, I’m afraid Weisberg is right: people have so little understanding of political reality that they frequently support incompatible ideas, and opportunistic politicians are only too willing to indulge them.

While the Democrats have their own little lies about the costs and effectiveness of government programs, it’s the right that is currently preying on the ill-informed electorate. The naked pandering of the Republican mainstream is already well established, so I won’t dwell on that. (They simultaneously champion tax cuts and increased Medicare spending, bitch about the deficit and refuse to touch out-of-control military spending.) But even more principled conservatives, who really would make hard economic choices in support of their goal of limited government, have incompatible positions. Health care reform is a fantastic example: they oppose the current reform bill partly because of its impact on the deficit, all while the status quo they idolize has an even more devastating effect on federal spending. Other times, they’re just poliically unserious in assuming we can just let major problems go until the free market decides to do something about them.