Jacob S Hacker: The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (2006; revised and expanded edition, paperback, 2008, Oxford University Press)

(pp. 7-8):

The United States does spend less on government benefits as a share of its economy, but it also relies more -- far more -- on private workplace benefits, such as health care and retirement pensions. Indeed, when these private benefits are factored into the mix, the U.S. framework of economic security is not smaller than the average system in other rich democracies; it is actually slightly larger. With the help of hundreds of billions in tax breaks, American employers serve as the United States' unique mini-welfare states -- the first line of defense for millions of workers buffeted by the winds of economic change.

The problem is that these mini-welfare states are coming undone, and in the process, risk is shifting back onto workers and their families. Employers want out of the social contract forged in the more stable economy of the past. And because they do no not need to answer to the broader public that depends on the jerry-rigged systems of security they provide, employers are getting what they want. Meanwhile, America's framework of government support is also strained. Patently inadequate to deal with families' growing risks, it is nonetheless attacked for costing and doing too much -- by critics who claim that the ideal of insurance is both outmoded and harmful to economic growth and advancement.

As private and public support erodes, workers and their families must bear a greater burden. This is the essence of the Great Risk Shift. Through the cutback and restructuring of workplace benefits, employers are seeking to offload more and more of the risk once pooled under their auspices. Facing fiscal constraints and political opposition, public social programs have eroded even as the demands on them have risen. And if critics have their way, these programs will erode even further. The next frontier in the Great Risk Shift is the transformation of existing programs -- Medicare and Social Security chief among them -- from guaranteed benefits defined by law to individual private accounts that leave workers and families shouldering more and more of the risks that these programs once covered.

(pp. 13-14):

Consider some of the alarming facts. Personal bankruptcy has gone from a rare occurrence to a relatively common one, with the number of households filing for bankruptcy rising from fewer than 290,000 in 1980 to more than two million in 2005. The bankrupt are pretty much like other Americans before they file: slightly better educated, more likely to be married and have children, roughly as likely to have had a good job, and modestly less likely to own a home. They are not the persistently poor, the downtrodden looking for relief. They are refugees of the middle class, frequently wondering how they fell so far so fast.

Americans are also losing their homes at record rates. Sine the early 1970s, the mortgage foreclosure rate has increased fivefold. From 2001 to 2005, even before the housing bubble burst, an average of one in every sixty households with a mortgage fell into foreclosure a year -- a legal process that begins when homeowners default on their mortgages and can end with homes being auctioned to the highest bidder in local courthouses. [ . . . ]

Meanwhile, the number of Americans who lack health insurance has increased with little interruption over the last twenty-five years as employers have cut back on workplace coverage for employees and their dependents. Over a two-year period, more than 80 million adults and children -- one out of three nonelderly Americans, 85 percent of them working or the kids of working parents -- spend some time without the protection against ruinous health costs that insurance offers.

(p. 24):

These up-and-down swings are what get missed when we use annual snapshots to look at the income distribution. There are not just the well off and the poor. There are Americans who are doing well one year and poorly the next -- and vice versa. In fact, a surprisingly big chunk of the inequality that we see across families at any point in time is due to transitory shifts of family income, rather than to permanent differences across families.

(p. 24):

The evidence shows, moreover, that income mobility across generations is actually lower in the United States than in other affluent nations. According to recent studies, there is more social mobility in European nations such as Sweden than in the United States, and in fact only South Africa and Britain have as little mobility across generations.

(p. 25):

The difference between these two scenarios is profound, because both research and common sense suggest that downward mobility is far more painful than upward mobility is pleasurable. In fact, in the 1970s, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman gave a name to this bias: "loss aversion." Most people, it turns out, aren't just highly risk-averse -- they prefer a bird in the hand to even a very good chance of two in the bush. They are also far more cautious when it comes to bad outcomes than when it comes to good outcomes of exactly the same magnitude. The search for economic security is, in large part, a reflection of a basic human desire for protection against losing what one already has.

(p. 32):

The flipside of this picture, however, is that poverty afflicts many more Americans at some point in their lives than is commonly believed. Take the U.S. child poverty rate of 20 percent -- a rate three times higher than the norm in northern Europe. Most people look at this number and think that "only" one in five kids experience poverty in the United States. That's true in any given year, but the kids who are poor change from year to year. If we want to know how many kids experience poverty at some point in their childhood, we need to count up the total number who spend at least a year beneath the poverty line by the age of eighteen. The answer, it turns out, is shocking: More than half of American kids spend at least a year in poverty by the time they're eighteen -- compared with less than a quarter of German children.

The picture is similar for adults. Using the PSID, the sociologist Mark Rank has calculated that a stunning 58.5 percent of Americans will spend at least a year in poverty between the ages of twenty and seventy-five.

(p. 43):

Today, critics of Social Security often describe it as "outmoded" -- a program built for a very different set of circumstances. But the ideal of insurance wasn't meant to deal with the calamity of the Depression; it was meant to provide a secure foundation for economic activity and advancement for decades to come. The architects of the Social Security Act contrasted insurance for working Americans with relief for those who were already destitute. Relief was reactive, demeaning, inevitably stingy. Insurance was proactive, uplifting, generous. Relief was backward looking; insurance was forward looking. By creating a basic floor of protection, it allowed Americans to seize on economic opportunities they might otherwise view with anxiety and fear.

On Harvard economist Martin Feldstein (pp. 50-51):

A Feldstein article had two parts, now familiar after years of repetition by disciples and emulators. First, find a well-meaning law, regulation, or program that was designed to protect workers and their families from harm by indemnifying them against certain risks. Second, show that by reducing the costs of these risks, the law, regulation, or program created perverse incentives, making the problem it was meant to solve worse, or at least not much better. For example, Feldstein attacked both unemployment insurance and Social Security on the grounds that they encouraged the very thing they were supposed to prevent -- namely, time out of the workforce and inadequate retirement income. The Feldstein one-two punch was always backed up with impressive economic techniques and delivered with an air of regret rather than anger. "You may not like the truth," was Punch 1. "But you cannot deny it," was Punch 2.

Over the course of the 1970s, Feldstein churned out a series of highly technical but hugely influential studies showing that Americans, because of tax breaks and public programs, were excessively insured against health costs and other financial risks. Not only were all existing policies inefficient, Feldstein argued, the taxes used to support them were a huge drain on the economy, drastically reducing the incentives of higher-income Americans to work and invest. (In his classes, Feldstein liked to describe the three U.S. tax rates as "high," "higher," and "highest.") When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he tapped the forty-one-year-old economist to head the White House's Council of Economic Advisers.

(p. 52):

This was -- and is -- the central message of the Personal Responsibility Crusade: Government should get out of the way and let people succeed or fail on their own. Government insurance upsets the natural working of a free society. It takes from the most energetic individuals and enterprises in society to subsidize those who are a costly drag on a vibrant economy. "Government insurance," in the words of one critic, "taxes the most productive activities to redistribute to the most risky" -- one reason why "the government that governs least, governs best." In the early 1980s, conservative scholar Charles Murray coined a simple syllogism to explain why good-intentioned programs inevitably went bad: "Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer." In other words, helping people just creates more people who need help -- moral hazard with a vengeance.

Who's Afraid of Personal Responsibility? (pp. 59-60):

Picture our liberated worker. A hardworking professional, he takes time each morning to check the level of his IRA, rebalance the portfolio in his 401(k), see if his medical spending is depleting his Health Savings Account, and make sure the Education Savings Account he set up for his kids is accumulating enough for sixteen or more years of private schooling for his twin daughters. If he were to lose his job, he would draw on his Temporary Unemployment Savings Account -- which, of course, he's diligently contributed to, knowing full well the risks that all professionals face in today's hyperdynamic, free-agent economy. If he were somehow disabled, he could draw on his Disability Savings Account, as well as the tax-advantaged private disability coverage that he purchased on his own and religiously renews each year.

His wife is staying home to care for their two new children, courtesy of a Caregivers' Account in which the couple socked away money from their first day out of college. Soon, they will draw on the Caregivers' Account to pay for a full-time nanny so his wife can go back to her own professional job. Ever resourceful, he has not only bought a standard life insurance policy but also set up a Long-Term Health Savings Account, which will cover his and his wife's expenses if they ever need nursing home care -- and, like all the other accounts, can be passed on to the kids if they don't use the money by their deaths. He often finds himself shaking his head when he hears about young workers who have passed up all these extravagantly subsidized options. To each his own, he shrugs. He is certainly not going to bail them out when they find themselves out of a job or in need of round-the-clock care. And when his kids are older, he will tell them what he has learned from a life of hard work and prudent saving: The entitlement age is over.

Jimmy Richter was making nearly $100,000 per year at Nortel Networks before his job was cut in 2002. No one in the field was hiring, so he wound up taking a supervisory job at a cable company paying half of what he was making (p. 72):

The only truly unusual aspect of Richter's experience is how common it is at a time when the unemployment rate is so low. Why aren't employers scrambling for workers, and workers bidding up wages, when only one in twenty workers if out of a job? The answer is that many who find themselves, like Jimmy Richter, without a good job eventually give up looking for one. These are the shadow unemployed -- people who want to work , who would work, but who aren't counted as unemployed because, in the parlance of unemployment statistics, they're not "actively seeking work" when they're surveyed. And however you count them, the shadow unemployed have grown.

(p. 80):

The shift is etched on our economic landscape: In the late 1960s, the nation's largest employer was General Motors, which paid its workers solidly middle-class incomes ($29,000 on average, in current dollars) and provided generous benefits. Today, the largest employer is Wal-Mart, which pays roughly $17,000 on average, offers no guaranteed pension, and covers less than half its workers through its health plan.

Wal-Mart and GM, of course, represent extremes. But they give a sense of the scale and scope of the change. For decades U.S. manufacturing has been in steep decline, as an increasing share of employment has moved into the service sector -- industries like medical care and teaching that do not turn out physical products. In 1960 almost 40 percent of nonagricultural employment was in manufacturing. By 2002 only 14 percent was, and more than 80 percent of nonfarm work was in services. Manufacturing has not just fallen in relative terms but in absolute terms, too, with 5.2 million manufacturing jobs lost between 1979 and early 2004 -- over half that total since 2000 alone.

(pp. 88-89):

A generation ago, families' dependence on financial contributions from women like Julie and Vicki was relatively rare. Most married women with kids stayed at home while their husbands worked for pay. Today, almost all husbands still work, but married women -- even married women with very young children -- are much more likely to work than not. Roughly six in ten married mothers of infant children work. In 1975, only three in ten did. At the same time, the contribution of women's earnings to household income has grown dramatically. In 1970, less than a third of married couples worked roughly equal numbers of hours a week, and in about half of families, men earned essentially all of the family's income. By 2000 more than 60 percent of married couples worked approximately equal hours, and only about a fifth of families featured the Leave It to Beaver male-breadwinner model. In the course of a single generation,t he norm for married women with children has shifted form staying home to care for children to working (often full time) in the paid labor force to bolster family finances.

And bolster family finances women have. Although the median family income has grown only modestly in the last generation after adjusting for inflation, married-couple families have seen stronger growth, with their median income rising around one-third between 1973 and 2003. As this comparison suggests, much of the rise in what American families take home is due not to higher wages or salaries, but to the fact that women are working many more hours outside the home than they once did. Indeed, without the increased work hours of women, the rise of real middle-class incomes between 1979 and 2000 would have been less than a fourth as large as it was, while low-income families would actually have experienced a substantial real income drop. In short, middle-class families have gotten richer mainly because women have started working for pay or stepped up their work hours -- and this is one reason why these families' standard of living is now at greater risk.

(pp. 98-99):

We can see this in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has asked questions about wealth on a regular basis since 1984. Young families whose heads grew up in the 1940s and early 1950s entered middle-age (age thirty-five to forty-four) in 1983 with a median household wealth of $57,393. For young families whose heads grew up in the 1960s and early 1970s, by contrast, the middle-aged situation reached in 2002 was not nearly as bright: The median family held only $31,800, or more than $25,000 less (all these numbers are in 2002 dollars). At the same time, according to a recent study by the think tank Demos, the youngest of adult Americans are piling up vastly more debt than their parents did at the same stage of life, particularly credit-card debt. In 1992, 7.9 percent of young adults (aged twenty-five to thirty-four) faced "debt hardship" -- spending more than 40 percent of their income on debt payments, including mortgages, student loans, and minimum credit-card payments. By 2001 the percentage facing debt hardship was 13.3 percent.

Not surprisingly, the gap in wealth between young and old families has grown: In 1984, median household wealth of older families (whose heads were age fifty-five to sixty-four) was four and a half times the median for young families (age twenty-five to thirty-four). By 2003 it was nearly thirteen and a half times as great. And rising debt and falling wealth for younger Americans haven't been accompanied by higher consumer spending. To the contrary, young Americans in the 1990s (so-called Generation X) spent less than their baby-boomer parents did in the 1970s. "With the possible exception of having a larger array of entertainment and other goods to purchase, " write two economists, "members of Generation X appear to be worse off by every measure."

(pp. 100-101):

At the root of the dilemma is the simple reality that raising children is long, hard (and, yes, terrifically rewarding) work -- costly in terms of both time and money. Over the last generation, the expectations on parents have grown dramatically, even as the costs of parenthood have risen and the tangible rewards have evaporated. Parents are expected to devote eighteen years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars to provide continuous guidance, love, education, and care to each of their offspring. Indeed, our society depends on these massive investments to flourish and grow. But most of the costs of raising children are not borne by the societies that reap the benefit; they are borne by parents. The result is a wholesale transformation of the economic effects of kids. In the not-so-distant past, children were an insurance policy for parents -- an additional worker on the farm, a helping hand when parents grew older. Today, for all the joy and love children bring into a family, they are, in simple economic terms, a risk -- and a risk that parents bear almost wholly on their own.

(p. 122):

To be sure, defined-contribution accounts grew handsomely during this period, especially in the 1990s. Yet, at the same time, median defined-benefit holdings declined as employers stopped offering defined-benefit plans. So too did expected Social Security benefits, thanks to the cutbacks in Social Security passed in 1983. When all the gains and losses are added up, the median family approaching retirement -- that is, the family exactly in the middle of the retirement wealth distribution -- ended the 1990s with 11 percent less in retirement wealth than the median family had in 1983. And the story gets worse. The proportion of near-retirement families that are likely to live on less than halfof their prior income in retirement increased substantially between 1989 and 1998 -- from less than 30 percent to more than 40 percent. In other words, more than two out of five families nearing retirement in 1998 were likely to be living on less than half of their present income -- a sharp increase in less than a decade.

(pp. 130-131):

Guerilla warfare was a team sport. In what would become a standard cycle, trumped-up complaints against Social Security moved from conservative intellectual circles to policy experts in antigovernment think tanks into the mouths of Republican politicians -- becoming, as in a childhood game of "telephone," more grandiose and inaccurate at each step of the journey. Thus the respected Harvard economist Martin Feldstein wrote a series of highly influential -- and, it soon became clear, highly flawed -- analyses arguing that Social Security was not only inherently unsound but a massive drag on the economy. His complaints were picked up by anti-Social Security policy experts who dumbed them down for a broader audience and trumped them up for the press-release world of Washington. Within a matter of years, these talking points became the standard mantra of Republican leaders: Social Security was going broke; it was drastically reducing national savings; it was bad for widows and blacks; it was a form of fiscal child abuse that allowed greedy seniors to rob from the younger generation.

The claims were often as preposterous as they were powerful. (How, for example, could Social Security so grievously disadvantage women when they received so much more back from the program relative to what they had paid in than did men? How could the program be running on empty when Republicans were calling for using the surplus in the program's trust fund to pay for new tax cuts?) But the plausibility of the Chicken Little chorus was less important than its overall impact. What Social Security had going for it, besides the fact that people liked its basic goal, was that millions of Americans had paid into it and expected to get back what they had been promised when they retired. Convincing Americans that the chance of getting full Social Security benefits was lower than the chance of aliens landing on Earth -- as one humorous but completely bungled anti-Social Security survey suggested most younger workers felt -- made the task of blowing up the present system that much easier.

(pp. 138-139):

Consider the grim statistics. Among insured Americans, 51 million spend more than 10 percent of their income on medical care. One out of six working-age adults are carrying medical debt, and 70 percent had insurance when they incurred it. Of those with private insurance and medical debt, fully half have incomes greater than $40,000, and of this group a third are college graduates or have had postgraduate education. In the twelve months prior to May 2007, around three in ten nonelderly adults who had health insurance lacked adequate coverage. These "underinsured" Americans are the hidden blot on American health care, missed by the binary categorization of the population into the insured and uninsured. Nearly six in ten of the underinsured postponed needed medical care because of the cost, nearly four in ten had to put off medical care because of the cost, nearly four in ten had to put off home or car maintenance or repairs due to medical expenses, a third had to dig deep into their savings to pay for medical care, and more than one in five made job-related decisions based mainly on their health care needs. Strikingly, the median family income of the underinsured was $58,000 -- almost exactly the same as the median income of those with adequate coverage. The underinsured were just as likely to be white as the well insured, nearly as well educated, and just as likely to work full-time and in large or medium-sized companies. The only consistent way in which the underinsured appear to differ from those who are better protected is that they are at grave economic risk.

Meanwhile, millions upon millions of otherwise fortunate Americans find themselves uninsured at some point, and often at several points, during their lives. Everyone has heard the numbers: 47 million Americans without health insurance, the vast majority of them in working families. But the uninsured are a constantly shifting group that includes many more people than that. In the two years beginning in 2002, a stunning 82 million people -- one out of three nonelderly Americans -- went without health insurance at some point. Most were uninsured for at least half a year; more than half were uninsured for at least nine months. And yet these ordinary Americans at extraordinary risk have for years remained largely unnoticed, an inconvenient blot on the heralded success story of the American economy.

(p. 142):

To start with the most fundamental issue, health care is not like other goods. Most of us think it's fine that some people can't buy fancy clothing or fast cars, or have to eat at home instead of going out to splendid restaurants. But most of us draw the line at basic health care. Someone who is gravely ill or injured needs treatment -- period. This "rule of rescue" builds on a broader conviction: that everyone in an affluent society needs to have at least some protection against conditions and events that cripple their ability to participate as citizens and workers.

And since health care isn't an optional luxury, it's also an expense that almost everyone wants to have insurance against. Health insurance was once called "sickness insurance" -- for a simple reason: the main cost of health care used to be the time spent out of the workforce due to sickness. Today, however, the costs of medical treatment vastly dwarf the forgone earnings due to sickness, mostly because medicine can do so much more than it once did. In 2003, according to my own analysis of data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, nearly 40 percent of Americans had medical expenses (covered by insurance or not) that exceeded 10 percent of family income, a third had expenses that were larger than 20 percent, and more than a tenth had expenses that exceeded their entire income. There is simply no way that families can finance expenses like this on their own. Insurance, like basic health care, is not optional.

(p. 143):

All this would be less of a problem if the insurance market in health care worked smoothly, but it does not. When insurance is for discrete, discernable risks that are easily assessed and not easily faked, private insurance markets perform splendidly. Unfortunately, the health insurance market isn't at all like this. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the likelihood of needing insurance and the magnitude of future health costs are very difficult for insurers to estimate. As a result, insurers frequently know less -- much less -- about applicants' need for insurance than applicants themselves, and this gives rise to the great bugbear of private insurance markets: "adverse selection."

Adverse selection is a fancy phrase for a simple fact -- people who most need insurance are most likely to buy it. The problems begin when insurers try to protect themselves against adverse selection. Once obvious response is to try to weed out or charge exorbitant rates to the highest-risk groups. Yet the ability of insurers to do this is limited by knowledge, by technology, and sometimes by law. And, of course, these practices undercut the ability of those who truly need insurance to obtain it. The other response is to raise premiums, but this simply reduces the number of people who have coverage. It cannot eliminate adverse selection, because at any premium, those most likely to need coverage are most likely to see it as in their interest to pay the premium.

(p. 178):

The starting point for a new vision is a simple but forgotten truth: economic security is a cornerstone of economic opportunity. Like businesses, people invest in the future when they have basic protection against the greatest downside risks of their choices. The worker who fears being laid off at any moment may be more productive in the short run. But in the long run, insecure workers tend to underinvest in specialized training; they are more reluctant to change jobs; they try to minimize their sense of job commitment to protect themselves against psychological loss. Similarly, the family barely scraping by may work more hours; but in the long run insecure families are not going to be able to make the investments in education and other keys to their future that they should. And, of course, none of these costs include the huge emotional, psychological, and economic losses absorbed by workers and their families when they lose their incomes, their homes, and their dreams.

(pp. 179-180):

These strains reported by middle-class Americans are staggering. Among adults with family incomes between $36,000 and $58,000, one in eight say they were involuntarily unemployed in the previous year, one in five didn't go [to] the doctor because of the cost, more than one in five said they went without health insurance at least once, nearly two in five said they didn't have access to an employment-based retirement plan, more than half said they didn't have enough savings to handle a personal economic crisis, and roughly two in three said they weren't saving enough for retirement. Among Americans as a whole, the biggest worries -- reported as "very stressful" by more than 40 percent of adults -- are "having enough for retirement," "having enough savings," and the "cost of health care," the number-one worry.

(p. 189):

Few Americans, I am certain, are ready to accept this dismal conclusion -- not at least in the world's richest nation. And rightly so: Almost every other advanced industrial country provides insurance not just to the aged but to all citizens, while spending much less on a per-person basis than the United States' incomplete system does. Many of these nations, furthermore, have much older populations than we do, have citizenries that go to the doctor more often, and have better basic health outcomes. Yet their overall health spending remains far below ours and, in many, has also been growing more slowly.

Jacob S Hacker/Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy (2005, Yale University Press)

I actually read this book after I read Hacker's more recent book, The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, which focuses more on the effects of the Republican ascendency than on the political techniques surveyed here.

(pp. 2-3):

Today's governing Republican majority can justly claim that it has defied these normal laws of political gravity. It has ruled with the slimmest of majorities and yet overseen a major transformation of America's governing priorities. It has been locked in tight competition with its political rivals and yet shown little inclination to tack to the political center. It has strayed dramatically from the moderate middle of public opinion and yet faced little public backlash. Again and again, it has sided with the extremes. And much more often than not, it has come out on top.

This book explains why. It shows that those who run our nation are committed to ideas and laws that are at odds with the moderate center of American opinion. It explains why our nation's political leaders have veered so far right and why the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability have not been able to bring them back. And it explores how the interwoven forces that have created this troubling state of affairs can be overcome. America's great democratic experiment is under assault. Restoring its health requires understanding how those that hold the reins of political power in the United States have succeeded in pushing American government so far off center.

(p. 13):

Students of politics, even professional ones, frequently take for granted the agenda of political debate -- as if everyone agrees what issues should be debated and what alternatives should be considered to address them. This is a profound error. The great political scientist E. E. Schattschneider once observed: "There are billions of potential conflicts in any modern society, but only a few become significant. . . . [T]he definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power. He who determines what politics is about runs the country." One does not have to believe in a cohesive power elite pushing all conflict to the side to recognize that the power to set the terms of debate is a hugely important mechanism of influence. As we shall see, it is a mechanism that the increasingly coordinated GOP establishment has skillfully used to shift American governance to the right.

(p. 45):

Republicans like tax cuts. The party that emphasized fiscal discipline int he face of the Great Depression now touts tax cuts no matter the budgetary consequence. Tax cuts are Republicans' all-purpose policy tonic, a solution perpetually in search of a problem. If the economy is doing poorly, taxes must be cut to promote growth. If the economy is roaring like a late-night party, the government needs to "open the doors and windows and invite everybody in." As the United States prepared to invade Iraq, Tom DeLay felt moved to declare that it was Congress's patriotic "duty" to cut taxes. "Nothing is more important in the face of a war," DeLay insisted, "than cutting taxes."

(pp. 48-49):

And yet, this conventional portrait of American politics completely fails to explain the tax-cut party. The tax cuts did not pass because ordinary voters wanted them. They passed because Republican political elites were eager to please their base -- the partisans, activists, and moneyed interests that are their first line of support. And they passed because GOP leaders were able to manipulate the public face of the tax cuts through their language, their control over the governing agenda, and their crafting of the tax cuts themselves. What the tax cuts reveal is that Republicans now have the motive and the means to get into law major policies that few Americans support -- and to shield themselves from the risk that the millions on the losing end of the bargain will realize they've been had.

(pp. 52-53):

Thanks to disillusioned former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and journalist Ron Suskind, a number of important internal memos from the early Bush administration are now in the public domain. One that is particularly revealing dates from the unveiling of the Bush administration's first round of tax cuts in 2004 (fig. 3). It was written by Michele Davis, a top Treasury official and participant in daily meetings on the administration's communications strategy. Her prescriptions regarding "message" undoubtedly reflect strategies developed at the highest level. The memo begins innocently enough, asking O'Neill to plug tax cuts at a press event unveiling the president's budget. then, however, Davis warns: "The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes." This is a stunning admission. If the Bush administration had cared about responding to public opinion, it presumably would have counseled a much more modest plan. But to Davis, the views of the public on this profound question of governance offer only a motivation to spin. O'Neill is reminded to avoid talking about any possible tradeoffs that tax cuts might entail. "It's crucial that you make clear that there is no tradeoff here," Davis writes. "Roll-out events like this are the clearest examples of when staying on message is absolutely crucial. Any deviation . . . will change the way coverage plays out from tomorrow forward."

(pp. 71-72):

Republicans have developed what we will call, with apologies to left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky, the "new rules for radicals." Alinsky's original rules for radicals were designed to mobilize public opposition to corporate and elite power. The Republicans' new rules are designed to minimize popular concern about policies and actions that frequently cater to these same corporations and elites. If we are to understand how Republicans have successfully pursued policies inconsistent with the popular wishes, we need to understand each of the six strategies they live by.

• Rule 1: Control the Agenda. Political elites know well that they are advantage don certain issues, and they try to stay on the terrain that serves them best. Even when elites don't control which exact issues come up, they may be able to dictate which proposals receive attention -- a formidable political weapon.
• Rule 2: Don't Focus on the Label; Worry about What You Can Put in the Box. Political analysts too often judge victories by looking only at the label slapped onto whatever has passed. But politicians know well that an enormous range of government activities can fall under the heading of any broad label. To see off-center policymaking in all its dark glory requires looking past labels and examining what legislation actually does.
• Rule 3: Run from Daylight. Passing laws is generally a high-profile venture and therefore potentially risky. But there are powerful ways to change policy without changing laws. And these alternative routes typically throw up fewer roadblocks and attract less attention, which makes them especially attractive for moving public policy off center.
• Rule 4: Don't Just Do Something; Stand There. In American politics, power often means the ability to block things you don't like. And sometimes, to block new policies is to change existing policies. When policies have to be updated to achieve their goals or deal with pressing social problems, successful obstruction means government does less.
• Rule 5: Starve the Beast -- Later. Most of what our government does requires money. As a result, conservatives have long argued that the way to downsize government is to "starve the beast" by slashing taxes. But much of what government does is also very popular. So conservatives have learned to delay the starvation diet for later. Chip away at the financial foundations of government today, so that, down the road, it finds itself -- like Wile E. Coyote in the old Road Runner cartoons -- running in thin air, with nowhere to go but down.
• Rule 6: Tilt the Playing Field. The powers of a coordinated, aggressive political majority can be used to change policy. They can also be used to change the rules of the game, so that the room to pursue off-center initiatives will be greater in the future.

(pp. 79-80):

In 2005, for instance, the Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America's Social Security (known as "Compass") launched a $20-million campaign on behalf of the president's still-undefined privatization proposal. Although Compass is a collection of major business and trade associations, the effort had all the trappings of a grassroots campaign. Similar efforts were launched by the anti-tax Club for Growth and by Progress for America, an ultraconservative activist network -- both of which targeted the Republican base in key GOP districts. All told, at least $100 million was on tap for the lobbying blitz, most of it coordinated by the White House. "With the president's leadership and the White House leadership, they have really put together a campaign-style effort to enact Social Security reform," said a leader in the Compass coalition. "They've got all their assets involved in this thing."

Even with outside support, however, Bush's overhaul of Social Security will require fiscal chicanery and manipulative policy design at least rivaling that of the tax cuts. There is simply no way to divert so much of younger workers' payroll taxes out of the traditional Social Security system otherwise. In light of strategies chosen in the tax-cut debate, we can expect highly creative attempts to borrow the trillions needed to fund private accounts and even more creative measures to obscure the benefit cuts that privatization will require. The new accounts will be offered up front as manna from heaven that, once granted, can never be taken away. The benefit cuts will be delayed, hidden in the obscure language of cost-of-living increases, or ultimately left to future Congresses to deal with. But the basic strategy will be clear. Get private accounts into law in any way possible. Assure their recipients that these accounts are theirs, never to be altered or touched. Hide the huge costs and risks. And hope that, when the day of reckoning comes, voters won't recognize how and when America's most popular program was hijacked.

(pp. 114-115):

Political inequality of this sort is a cause for concern whichever party it favors. But make no mistake: A system biased in favor of well-off voters is also a system biased in favor of the Republican Party. New York Times columnist David Brooks and others have had much fun casting the battle between Republicans and Democrats as a clash of civilizations between decadent, highbrow coastal regions and the patriotic, lowbrow heartland. Yet traditional economic divisions have not been supplanted by a culture war between tolerant, latte-sipping progressives and patriotic, NASCAR-loving traditionalists. To the contrary: Class is actually an increasingly important dividing line between the parties. Sine the 1950s, the relation between income and party allegiance -- with poor and working-class voters favoring the Democrats -- has become stronger, not weaker.

(p. 115):

Consider trade unions, which once represented more than one in three workers in the United States (and, indirectly, those workers' families). Since the 1970s, the proportion of workers that is unionized has plummeted, and today less than a tenth of private-sector workers belong to a union. Amid the ongoing debate over whether unions are good for the economy, we often forget that they have always been crucial political actors, helping workers identify common issues, informing them about political and policy considerations, and shaping political debates. No organization representing working families today has anything remotely like the same reach, influence, or cohesion as American unions did during their halcyon years.

(p. 116):

Rising economic inequality, in short, has abetted political inequality, hardened the class divisions between the parties, and bolstered the GOP in particular. For well-off Americans, the political world is increasingly their oyster: They vote in high numbers, contribute with abandon, and happily watch as politicians compete for their favor. For less well-off Americans, the political world looks ever more forbidding. Largely neglected by the parties, reliant on the media and candidates for basic information, they have to work ever harder just to have their voices heard. And as the political influence of business and the well off has grown, the political influence of the Republican Party has grown, too.

(p. 141):

Indeed, while expensive lobbying has long been prevalent in Washington, it has recently exploded. The cost of direct lobbying -- personal contact with lawmakers -- has nearly doubled since 1997, to almost $2 billion per year. Indirect lobbying (such as telemarketing and issue advertising) raises the total to roughly triple that amount. Lobbying is a big and rapidly growing business. And it grows, presumably, because people with money think it's worth investing in. They wouldn't be writing bigger and bigger checks unless they expected that the added investment would more than pay for itself.

(p. 142):

As House Republicans worked on these deregulatory initiatives, reporters commented on the remarkable prominence of business lobbyists. Interest group representatives took up positions in committee staff offices, where they drafted legislative text on office computers, conducted briefings for congressional staff, and generally acted as expert consultants on the details of legislation. The picture was one of powerful interests, with huge financial stakes in proposed policies, dictating to elected officials. Yet DeLay's own comments at the time offer a revealing glimpse at a more complicated relationship. "You've got to understand, we are ideologues," DeLay told the reporter Elizabeth Drew. "We have an agenda. We have a philosophy. I want to repeal the Clean Air Act. No one came to me and said, 'Please repeal the Clean Air Act.' We say to the lobbyists, 'Help us.' We know what we want to do and we find the people to help us do that."

Indeed, there is much to suggest that the New Power Brokers have worked diligently to turn the stereotyped relationship between the lobbyists and the lobbied on its head. The most publicized example has been the "K Street Project," begun shortly after the sweeping victory of congressional Republicans in 1994. Unsurprisingly, DeLay and Norquist were at the center of this initiative, too. The K Street Project was designed to pressure lobbyists to adopt a more pronounced Republican slant in both their campaign contributions and their hiring practices. Using figures compiled by Norquist, DeLay called lobbyists into his office to discuss whether their contribution and hiring practices qualified them as "friendly" to the GOP. "If you want to play in our revolution," he announced, "you have to live by our rules."

(p. 159):

As [John] DiIulio noted in his confessional memo, "In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis. . . . Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking." But perhaps DiIulio's most revealing revelation was who was in charge of policy design in the Bush White House -- not the Office of Management and Budget, not the White House policy staff, and certainly not the executive departments. Rather, all policy ran through one man, Karl Rove. "Little happens on any issue without Karl's okay, and, often, he supplies such policy substance as the administration puts out," wrote DiIluio. The reason? "The Republican base constituencies, including beltway libertarian policy elites and religious right leaders, trust him to keep Bush '43' from behavior like Bush '41' and moving too far to the center or inching at all center-left."

(pp. 176-177):

This economic and technological upheaval has dictated a sharp turn from "hard news" toward entertainment. Every story has to grab the viewer immediately, because a single dull moment risks the dreaded click of a remote control. As a result, stories have become shorter, and the emphasis has shifted to those that can best exploit the visual power of television: scandal, crime, celebrities, natural disasters, and "soft" news items like personal health and personal finance. What has been squeezed out is hard news, especially concerning relatively complex issues of policy or politics that require many words to explain and typically yield poor visuals. During the presidential campaign of 1968, candidates could expect to speak on camera for an average of forty seconds without interruption; two decades later, the average is just nine seconds. Not surprisingly, detailed discussions of policy that would allow voters to get a better sense of the stakes in ongoing political conflict fare especially poorly in this environment.

(pp. 177-178):

Certainly most newspapers provide very limited information related to the content of policy -- information that we have demonstrated is crucial for accountability. Consider how USA Today, the nation's largest circulation daily, covered the Bush tax cuts in 2001. We and a team of researchers examined every story written in the newspaper on the 2001 tax cuts. Recall again that this was the president's top domestic priority and the most important piece of domestic legislation in two decades. The stakes for Americans were huge. Appropriately, USA Today ran 78 stories about the tax cuts, many of them on the front page. But of those 78 stories, only 6 were primarily about the content of the legislation. Only one was about the remarkable distributional effects of the proposed changes in policy. Instead, the focus of reporting was the political saga: the president's efforts to rally support, the tactics of opponents, and the slow but steady march of the Republicans' agenda through Congress. The bastion of detailed reportage, the New York Times, performed noticeably better, but the same bias was evident. The Times ran 126 stories, almost a third on the front page. But almost 60 percent were principally on the politics of the plan, whereas only 7 stories focused on distributional issues. And, of course, most Americans are not getting their news from the New York Times.

(p. 197):

Whether sympathetic or hostile to organized labor's decline, Americans are conditioned to think of it as natural, even inevitable. As globalization spreads and the American workforce shifts from blue-collar manufacturing into new service industries, according to this common view, unions are gradually rendered obsolete. This conventional wisdom is simply false. All affluent democracies are undergoing these large social transitions. Most are actually more exposed to the forces of globalization than is the United States. But in many of these countries, rates of unionization have declined little if at all. And none has experienced the precipitous decline in unions experienced in the United States.

The scale of union decline in the United States cannot be explained by anything distinctive about the composition of the American workforce or patterns of American economic activity -- the United States is not, for instance, more "postindustrial" or "globalized" than other countries. Instead, the dramatic fall of unions most clearly reflects two distinctively American realities. The first is the acute difficulties that American unions have confronted in adapting to a new economic environment given their high levels of fragmentation and their very uneven geographic reach. These features have made it easier for employers to pit one group of workers against another and to move their activities -- or threaten to move their activities -- to areas where unions are weak or absent, whether inside or outside the United States.

The second reality is more overtly political,a nd it gets to the heart of the problem. The capacity of unions to organize depends on the rules governing collective bargaining, and these rules have grown steadily less favorable to their cause. Unions organize far more workers in other countries not just because workers there are more sympathetic to unions but also because the law makes it much easier for unions to organize. Over the past twenty or so years, in a wide range of settings, American employers have worked steadily and effectively to tilt the rules of collective bargaining in their favor, and they have received a very sympathetic ear from the Right.

Geoffrey Nunberg: Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Holywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (2006; paperback, 2007, Public Affairs)

One of several books to pick apart the right's remarkable success at framing public discourse on political issues. (George Lakoff has pushed this argument further, but he has his own idiosyncratic way of framing things, which makes him less useful as a critic.)

(pp. 7-8):

You can see why Democrats would look to language to explain their electoral failures. Ever sine the Republicans first began to woo Southern and working-class voters during the Nixon years, the decisive factor in American politics has been voters' apparent willingness to subordinate substantive interests to symbolic ones. In poll after poll, a majority of middle-class voters acknowledge that the Democrats would d oa better job on most of the issues that affect their daily lives, from Social Security and taxes to the environment and education. But when it comes to the crunch, a significant number of voters seem to ignore their own best interests and make their choices on the basis of patriotic appeals and cultural issues, only to be rewarded with policies that favor the rich and powerful at their expense. How could the right get away with that, Democrats ask, unless the Republicans have been turning voters' heads with a snappy line of patter? If voters can't see where their interests lie, it must be because the Democrats aren't telling their story well enough.

(pp. 14-16):

But people have different ideas about what it means for the Democrats to have a "narrative." For Robert Reich, it implies the need to evoke basic American myths and archetypes, according to a kind of political Golden Bough. Reich argues that the Democrats have to anchor their appeal in what he identifies as four "essential American stories": The Triumphant Individual, The Benevolent Community (neighbors rolling up their sleeves for the common good), The Mob at the Gates (the United States as "a beacon light of virtue" in a world threatened by barbarian forces), and The Rot at the Top ("the malevolence of powerful elites"). For the American Prospect's Robert Kuttner, it's a question of rediscovering the Democrats' populist roots: as Robert Kuttner says, "It's still a tale of two Americas, and Democrats need to tell it more convincingly."

For centrists, on the other hand, "having a narrative" tends to be a matter of making an accommodation, real or rhetorical, to some of the concerns of middle-American voters. According to Brad Carson, the Democratic representative who ran a surprisingly strong Senate race in Oklahoma in 2004, Democrats can win votes in red states only if they position themselves as a party of reform and "move away from any hope of bringing peace to irreconcilable moral disputes. Instead, Democrats should create a meta-message, one based on hope, values, and strength, that can be offered to voters everywhere." And Will Marshall, of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, insists that Democrats must be "comfortable using the language of faith" with heartland voters, so as to dispel the idea that "bicoastal elites look down on them as Bible-thumping primitives."

As varied as they are, those proposals all have the virtue of acknowledging that the Democrats' communication problems go deeper than anything that can be implemented simply by doing a global search-and-replace to substitute new phraseology for old. But while a lot of people recognize that the party needs more than a mere shift in vocabulary, few have understood how deep and pervasive the problem is. The fact is that "having a narrative" involves something more than fashioning new campaign themes, even broadly coordinated ones -- it means making that story part of the fabric of American political discourse. And while this isn't chiefly a matter of words, words matter to it. A large part of the Republicans' successes over the past thirty years or so is attributable to their ability to change the political subject -- diverting resentments that have their roots in economic inequalities to debates over "values," making programs that chiefly benefit the wealthy sound like they're aimed at benefitting the middle class, turning government into a term of abuse, and making reservations about the direction of American foreign policy sound like signs of weakness of purpose or questionable loyalty. The right couldn't have achieved all of that except by bending the meanings of words to their purposes and by getting Americans to accept those new meanings.

(pp. 28-29):

The words of our final vocabularies don't mean; they evoke. Like proverbs, they draw their power from their ability to call up scenarios, images, or moral tales. How do you teach someone the meaning of appeasement? You could read her the dictionary definition: "The policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace," as the American Heritage puts it. That would be a reasonable thing to do if the word in question were palliate or placate, say. But if that definition were all there is to the meaning of appeasement, you could use it as a fair description of the Bush administration's policies toward North Korea or Iran -- literally speaking, after all, appeasement is just a matter of trying to cut a deal to avoid a destructive confrontation. That's how people used to use the word, often in an approving way -- Churchill himself advocated a policy of "prudence and appeasement" toward the Turks when they went to war with the Greeks in 1919.

But after Munich in 1938, appeasement could only stand in for pusillanimous capitulation to the insatiable demands of a tyrant. The word comes with a series of stills attached to it: Neville Chamberlain with his silly high collar, striped pants, and drooping mustache; Hitler's face superimposed over goose-stepping German troops; Churchill glaring defiantly over his cigar. When Condoleezza Rice used the word on Meet the Press to describe the French and German reluctance to go to war over Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, it wasn't a charge anyone could answer by arguing that the historical analogy wasn't really very apt (Churchill didn't actually advocate going to war with Hitler in 1938, for one thing). It was simply part of a semantic blitzkrieg aimed at seizing the moral high ground for the administration, and there was no way to counter it except with an equally potent symbol that connoted rash bellicosity.

(p. 31):

But precisely because they're so vague and general, those basic symbol-words are particularly subject to manipulation. As Lippman noted in his satirical remark on the politics of subway fares, it's in the nature of political discourse to draw those words as expansively as possible, so as to reduce the details of an issue to the purely emotional response that items like freedom or values can evoke. As the writers of a recent book on political language put it: "Words like patriotism and terrorism do not let us breathe. They exhaust the air around us. We reason less well in their presence. . . ." And when words become purely connotative or evocative, it can be easy to extend their auras by manipulating their meanings or applying them to things they didn't originally refer to.

(p. 49):

Like much of the new language of the right, the redefinition of liberal goes back to the Nixon years, as liberalism was coming under attack, and Vietnam and the fallout of the civil rights movement were opening new fissures in American society. Or I should really say the Agnew years, since it was Nixon's vice president Spiro Agnew who pioneered the new populist tone of Republican rhetoric. Agnew's phraseology was impishly sui generis -- it's hard to imagine Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes describing his press critics as the "nattering nabobs of negativism" or "pusillanimous pussyfooters." But with his coded appeals to "law and order" and his attacks on the "liberal intellectuals" who were destroying the country's strength, the student radicals and hippies, and the "effete corps of impudent snobs" of the media, he became the Mrs. O'Leary's cow of the culture wars.

(p. 50):

The Republicans realized, though, that they could harness the same resentments that Wallace had spoken for, turning themselves into what the historian Michael Kazin has described as "a counter-elite, a welcome home for white refugees from the liberal crackup." To accomplish this, however, they had to blur and broaden Wallace's target audience, transforming it into the "silent majority" of whites who were frustrated by what they took to be liberal indifference to their anger about crime, race, and the counterculture. In Kazin's words: "As liberalism crumbled, astute minds in the party recognized that the defense of middle-class values -- diligent toil, moral piety, self-governing communities -- could now bridge gaps of income and occupation that the GOP had been unable to cross sine the Great Depression."

(p. 53):

David Brooks argues that "income resentment is not a strong emotion in much of America," since Americans "have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich. . . ." Brooks went on: "Americans read magazines for people more affluent than they are (W, Cigar Aficionado, The New Yorker, Robb Report, Town and Country) because they think that someday they could be that guy with the tastefully appointed horse farm. Democratic politicians proposing to take from the rich are just bashing the dreams of our imminent selves."

That's a popular argument in the corridors of Washington's right-wing think tanks, but you have to be pretty remote from Main Street to take it seriously. True, there are some working Americans who intend to wind up rich some day and who have already packed the appropriate political attitudes into their hope chests. But for the majority, wealth is a fantasy, not a hope.

(pp. 73-74):

The very superficiality of conservatives' incessant references to brands and lifestyle is crucial to the way they've delineated the adversaries in the "culture war." As it happens, that phrase appeared around the same time that "Volvo liberal" did, exploiting some of the ambiguities that had crept into the word culture over the preceding decades. When people first started to talk about "culture wars" around 1980, they were referring to the controversies over PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, the "Great Books" requirements at universities, and the multicultural curriculum -- that is, battles over "culture" in the sense that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "the intellectual size of civilization." But before long the phrase was being used to refer to a war between cultures in the anthropologists' sense, which was being fought over issues like abortion, gun control, and the teaching of "creation science" in the schools. That was what Pat Buchanan was getting at when he spoke of a "cultural war" in a famously provocative speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention:

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.

There's no question that the kind of "cultural war" that Buchanan was referring to was and remains a very real feature of American public life. But Republicans realized that the armed conflict that Buchanan was talking about wasn't a struggle they could build broad middle-class coalitions around.

(p. 80):

Whether you examine political attitudes, social values, or lifestyle, in short, it's simply hallucinatory to believe that there's a "cultural divide" in America that bears comparison with the economic division between rich and poor in Victorian England or the political divisions of the Civil War -- or for that matter with the cultural division between the North and South of fifty years ago. But it's precisely the vagueness and superficiality of the right's cultural stereotypes that make them so useful: they create an illusion of shared experience among people whose actual commonalities don't extend to much more than the products on their shelves and a general sense of grievance. You get a sense of just how blurry and expansive the boundaries of "red-state culture" are when you hear right-wing writers proclaiming their identification with middle-American voters, even if they actually have no more in common with the longneck-drinking, pickup-driving classes than Paris Hilton does. Take the way radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham begins her book Shut Up and Sing by castigating "elite Americans":

They think we're stupid. They think our patriotism is stupid. They think our chruchgoing is stupid. They think having more than two children is stupid. They think where we live -- anywhere but near or in a few major cities -- is stupid. They think our SUVs are stupid. They think owning a gun is stupid. They think our abiding belief in the goodness of America and its founding principles is stupid.

The most significant word in those passages is we. How abstract must the notion of "red-state culture" be if it entitles Ingraham -- who is the daughter of a Connecticut lawyer, and who went to Dartmouth and the University of Virginia Law School and now lives in Washington, D.C. -- to claim the right to share a first-person plural pronoun with a Pentecostal deer hunter from Oklahoma? And Ann Coulter, another Ivy-educated second-generation lawyer from Connecticut (and with the vowels to prove it), goes on about red-state denizens with the effusiveness of a fifth-grader reporting on a zoo visit. "I loved Kansas City! It's my favorite place in the world . . . It's the opposite of this town. They're Americans, they're so great, they're rooting for America!" "I love Texas Republicans! . . . Americans are so cool!" "Queens, baseball games -- those are my people. American people." It's as if all differences of class and background have been swept aside, leaving Coulter, Ted Nugent, and Johnny Ramone to swill in a communion of Clinton-hating ectomorphy.

(pp. 108-109):

The problem isn't just that the Democrat's value-talk smacks of defensive me-tooism, but that it betrays a certain semantic cluelessness. Values "works" for the right because it evokes the narratives that underlie its populist strategy. When conservatives present themselves as the defenders of values, they don't mean simply that their views are principled, but that they will uphold the views of "ordinary Americans" whose religious views and standards of personal morality have been mocked and traduced by out-of-touch elite liberals. Values is charged with the indignation and displaced class resentments that the right has been battening on for the last forty years.

(pp. 122-123):

Americans have always been ambivalent about government. It may be, as political scientist Samuel Huntington has said, that distrust of government is "as American as apple pie," but people have also looked to government to play a constructive role in their lives. The traditional debate over government took a new form in the early twentieth century, as first the Progressives and then the Democrats introduced new measures to regulate employment and commerce, and conservatives countered with attacks on centralization and growing government power. Addressing proposals to have Washington regulate the railroads in 1906, the Republican Speak of the House "Uncle Joe" Cannon warned, "If the Federal Government continues to centralize, we will soon find that we will have a vast bureaucratic Government, which will prove inefficient if not corrupt." At the time, the word bureaucracy was still a word that Americans tended to associate with the undemocratic regimes of countries like Germany, Austria, and Russia. But over the following decades, it became a staple disparagement in conservative criticisms of domestic programs. "The new despotism is bureaucracy," the Wall Street Journal thundered in 1935, and over the course of the decade the Journal cited the threat of bureaucratic intrusion as its reason for opposing child labor laws, Social Security, the minimum wage, and public works like the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1940, the Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie contributed "big government," which was coined as a turn on "big business." Willkie acknowledged that government intervention had been necessary to correct "abuses on the part of some American businessmen and financiers" in the 1920s. Alas, he added, the New Deal had failed to "replace this corporate tyranny with a truly liberal faith. Today it is not Big Business that we have to fear. It is big government."

(p. 128):

The "big government" charge, in short, is mostly just prejudice tricked out as philosophy -- it can't be answered simply by pointing to the reductions in the deficit you've achieved or the number of jobs or departments you've eliminated. And because the phrase is suffused with the ideology of the right, George Bush can freely invoke it to criticize the Democrats, whatever their actual positions, in the same way he can talk about "faith" and "values" with confidence that his audience will understand the phrases in a sympathetic way. "On issue after issue," Bush said during the 2004 campaign, "from Medicare without choices to schools with less accountability to higher taxes on working Americans, my opponent takes the side of more centralized control and bigger government." And Bush has tried to exploit mistrust of government to argue for moving payroll taxes into private accounts, where "the money in the account is yours, and the government can never take it away."

(p. 131):

But as the historian Eric Foner has written in his History of American Freedom, freedom is a word that is "deeply embedded in the record of our history and the language of everyday life" and is "fundamental to Americans' sense of themselves." Foner documents the way most of the major political debates in American history have been waged over dueling definitions of freedom, even as other nations often framed the very same issues in terms of notions like equality or community. Just over the last half century, redefinitions of freedom have been central in the Cold War, the civil rights struggle, feminism, the New Left, the personal liberation and self-expression movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Reagan revolution, and the war on terror. No group or movement has been able to establish its moral authority in America without being able to claim freedom for its own.

(pp. 133-134):

From the late nineteenth century onward, conservatives have attacked virtually all of the reforms and regulations advocated by Progressives and later the New Deal Democrats as encroachments on individual liberty, a theme you can trace in the Wall Street Journal's editorials over the past eighty years. In the 1920s, the Journal warned against the threats to freedom that were implicit in minimum wage laws, the child labor amendment to the Constitution ("an assault upon the economic independence of the family"), and laws permitting peaceful union picketing ("attacks on the Constitutional rights of the employer," the Journal said, adding that "peaceful picketing is a contradiction in terms"). In the 1930s, it used the same rhetoric to attack Social Security ("a vast system of socialized thrift") and public works projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority (which "threaten to engulf us in totalitarianism"). In 1943, the Journal warned that it would be a mistake for the government to promise full employment when the war was over: "Hitler gave full employment. Mussolini gave full employment. . . . What they took in exchange was men's freedom."

And so on. When national attention turned to women int he workforce in the 1960s, the Journal opined that "[t]he vision of millions o women parking their kids at subsidized [day-care] centers and rushing off to the day's grind looks less like America than Russia, where the State has done so much to disrupt family life." It denounced the fair employment and public accommodations sections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as an "aggrandizement of the police power . . . of doubtful Constitutionality." And in 1970, it argued that pollution was first and foremost a social problem that would be easily manageable through voluntary action and education and warned that government regulation would "force a solution without waiting for the social and psychological change, sacrificing cherished traditions of personal freedom for the sake of survival."

(p. 140):

But free-market ideologues tend to embrace the inequities of the market, as if the body counts that capitalism exacts were proof of its moral superiority. When the Enron meltdown threw thousands of people out of work and devastated their pensions, Bush's economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay called the collapse a "tribute to American capitalism" and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill made the point even more fulsomely: "The genius of capitalism is people get to make good decisions or bad decisions,and they get to pay the consequence or to enjoy the fruits of their decisions. That's the way the system works."

(pp. 143-144):

That sort of talk is what passes for "tough-mindedness" in a lot of right-wing common rooms. Conservative rhetoric has always been susceptible to a strain of macho indifference to the misfortunes of others -- its object, as the conservative writer Peter Viereck wrote disapprovingly in 1962, is to "make people ashamed of generous social impulses." But most Americans, including many conservatives, were apt to find that tone disturbingly unChristian. Once the failed relief effort had become a public relations disaster, even George Bush knew better than to imply that the victims were to blame for their misfortunes. The reason for coining "compassionate conservatism" in the first place was to try to allay the suspicion that conservatives are temperamentally hard-hearted. That may be personally unfair to most conservatives, but it's a natural reaction to their rhetoric. Epithets like "bleeding-heart" have taken their toll on liberals, but they also tend to discredit the people who use them. We may be wary of soft-hearted sentimentality, but we're also apt to be wary of people who get off on deriding it.

(p. 170):

Like a lot of the right's rhetoric, complaints about the liberal bias of the media first became prominent in the Nixon era, when Spiro Agnew led the administration's campaign against the "small unelected elite" who were tilting the news in a liberal direction. In a speech in 1969 that became an instant sensation, Agnew charged that the networks were selective in their news coverage and invariably emphasized bad news over good and gave excessive attention to black extremists and anti-war demonstrators. And living in the "unrepresentative communities" of Washington, D.C., and New York, they were out of touch with the American people: "perhaps it is time that the networks were made more responsive to the views of the nation." Over the following years, the Nixon administration continued its campaign against the media; in 1972, Pat Buchanan, then a Nixon speechwriter, threatened that the administration would consider bringing anti-trust charges against the networks if they continued to "freeze out opposing points of view and opposing information."

The right's campaign against liberal media bias continued unabated for the next twenty years, but it wasn't until Bill Clinton's election in 1992 that it went into high gear, spearheaded by well-funded think tanks and policy groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Media Research Center, and Accuracy in Media. By then, the media themselves were giving the charges wide coverage. Over the first four years of the Clinton presidency, major newspapers mentioned media bias four times as often as they had during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Even more striking, 95 percent of those referred to liberal bias rather than conservative bias.

(pp. 179-180):

As that makes clear, the right's attacks on media bias aren't simply a criticism of the way the mainstream media cover political stories: they're also aimed at undercutting the difference betwen reporting and commentary, and with it the notions of trust, neutrality, and even truth that have stood as the ideals of responsible journalism over the past century. The fact is, the right's disquisitions on the impossibility of true objectivity are a pure distraction here. It may or may not be possible to arrive at "objectivity" in the austere philosophical sense of the term -- "the view from nowhere in particular," as the philosopher Thomas Nagel describes it. But that concept is only incidentally related to what "objectivity" means in journalism, where it stands in for a collection of attitudes, ethical principles, stylistic guidelines, and professional practices that are always bumping awkwardly into one another as the canons of the profession evolve. In his history of the development of the concept of journalistic objectivity, David Mindich identifies its components as "detachment," "nonpartisanship," "balance," attention to facts, and the inverted pyramid form of writing, though no doubt others would carve it up differently. That assortment is varied enough to make it clear that "journalistic objectivity" doesn't really say a lot more than "good journalism" does. It certainly doesn't imply the absence of perspective or what used to be called "coloring." But it does imply a commitment to getting at the truth of the matter -- and top there being a truth of the matter to get at. And when journalists come up short, there are standards you can hold them to.

(pp. 181-182):

The most striking example of that tendency is the way the right has politicized the kind of scientific findings that used to be outside the pale of partisan controversy. Writers like Chris Mooney, John Judis, and Michael Specter have amply documented what Mooney calls "the Republican war on science," as the administration systematically ignores, suppresses, or distorts scientific findings that it finds inconvenient and stacks its scientific agencies and advisory committees with appointees who are willing to toe the Republican line on everything from the effects of excessive sugar intake to the causes of global warming. What's striking is that a lot of conservatives consider themselves bound by principle to accept the administration's views on those questions even when they run counter to the overwhelming scientific consensus. It's one thing to reject the scientific evidence of revolution out of a personal faith in biblical inerrancy. It's another to deny the existence of global warming simply because you're a loyal conservative, or to see bias when the press fails to "balance" its reporting on the issue. Thirty-five years ago, not even Spiro Agnew would have thought to look for evidence of liberal bias on the New York Times's science pages.

Afterword, added to paperback edition after 2006 elections (p. 210):

The meltdown was actually a long time coming. In retrospect, the history of the Bush administration's policies could be written as a string of linguistic miscues and slogan recalls. Six months after the 9/11 attacks, Bush's insistence that his administration was focused on getting Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" had morphed into official indifference: "I don't know where he is. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him." And then, after the initial military success in Iraq, the administration produced its single most ill-advised bit of rodomontade when Bush appeared in May 2003 beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

"Cakewalk," "Freedom is untidy," "Bring 'em on," "When they stand up, we'll stand down": the more pithily memorable the phrases were, the more they came back to haunt the administration when their disconnect from reality grew too obvious to ignore. Take them together with the administration's other failed slogans and catchphrases -- "the ownership society," "Clear Skies," "personal accounts," and the rest -- and you have an object lesson in the limits of "messaging" and framing as instruments for shaping public opinion. Words can cloud reality for a while, but they can't wholly obscure it -- sooner or later, people cotton to what Auden called "the shadow cast by language upon truth."

(pp. 213-214):

Then too, the conservative label is more contested and weakened than at any time in recent years. In the wake of the 2006 election, everyone on the right was quick to blame the Republicans' setbacks on their failure to hew to the core principles of true conservatism, but each constituency offered a different idea of what those core principles are and how they were betrayed. For some, the Republicans' downfall was their failure to do more to preserve moral values; for some it was their refusal to hold the line on spending; for some it was a focus on money and power rather than a concern about character; and for some it was a failed Iraq adventure that's signaled what William F. Buckley described as the absence of an "effective conservative ideology." It's a reminder that labels cut both ways: what can be a useful tool for smoothing over differences in good times can be an embarrassment when it comes to apportioning blame. And however those disputes fall out, it's clear that in the future, people who call themselves conservatives will have to do a lot more explaining and qualifying than they have in recent elections. (John McCain's decision to label himself a "commonsense conservative" says more about the weakening of that label than George Bush's use of "compassionate conservative" eight years ago. As Michael Kinsley has observed, "common sense is considered, by conservatives, to be a specifically conservative virtue. Unlike, say, compassion.")