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The Republican party is generally claimed to be the party of fiscal responsibility. Note the term "claimed" here; I do not think the record of Republican governance proves this claim at all well, but nonetheless the default expectation seems persistent. When I was younger, this was certainly a selling-point of the party to me, and I voted for Bush II in the hope that he'd get government spending under control. Then 9/11 happened, and he wasted trillions wandering our military through the middle east.
Now the debt is very bad, and people are once more raising the banner of Fiscal Responsibility. Is it in Republicans' interest to enforce "fiscal responsibility", and if so, how? If we were to seriously cut spending and raise taxes, as people claim the fiscal situation demands, this would almost certainly cost us the next election. In the best possible case that I can see, we would be expending our political power to create stable economic conditions for our opponents to then rule. The more likely case would be us expending our political power to ameliorate spending that our opponents increase to gain power for themselves, resulting in a much shakier economy and our complete political irrelevance.
Why not offer the Fiscal Responsibility mantel to the Democrats? The economy is very complicated after all, and they are at this point clearly the party of Expert Opinion: who better to determine and implement the hard-nosed measures necessary to right our economic vessel? When I was younger, the obvious rejoinder would have been that they would do a bad job of it and disaster would result, but it seems to me that we have not done all that much better, and disaster seems likely in any case. If disaster cannot be meaningfully avoided, then why expend limited resources demanded by a serious political conflict on an unfixable resource-sink of a problem? What's the actual plan, here?
You're only looking federally (and even then I'd say the GOP still has a slight edge because they're less willing to waste money on patently obviously useless spending like trans operas in Latin America etc.). But at the state and local levels, the GOP is clearly the party of fiscal responsibility, as can be seen by comparing debt levels (absolute and per capita) between various strongly blue vs strongly red states and cities.
The case that trans operas in Latin America are useless to American interests has not been made. Whatever you think of trans operas in the abstract, it seems quite likely that transing a neutral country will bring it culturally closer to the American universal culture fold. This makes it less likely that it will randomly kick out or tax American businesses, thumb its nose at American products, back Russia or China in some international affairs matter or even host a Chinese military base. The trans operas might well be the by far most cost-effective way to reap those benefits, and it's not even clear if they benefit the trans agenda at home all that much.
If South Korea had a nationalist faction that opposed k-drama on aesthetic grounds, would it make sense for it to prioritise going after its foreign distribution?
Transing Afghans didn't exactly work out. Seems like bringing in lgbt and feminism just made them hate us more.
Uniquely, the Afghans saw the American Empire's cultural exports as the net-negative that they are (the bombs themselves didn't help either), were in a very unique position to reject them, so they did.
Transing other countries very observably makes them weaker, and as such doing so is generally in the US' interests. That this also applies to the US itself is not as much a concern.
If the US makes receptive countries weaker with cultural exports, it weakens its own allies. Meanwhile, China has been shutting down LGBT centres.
Better to have strong allies than weak allies.
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