Greg Anrig: The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing (2007, Wiley)

Anrig works for Twentieth Century Fund, a left-ish think tank. I don't think he gets very deep into why conservative ideas so bad in practice, but he provides a lot of examples. I believe that conservatives have a significantly wrong view of human nature -- they don't much like it, and believe it has to be controlled with threats of coercion managed by an elite who, quel surprise, are the conservatives. They also misunderstand the economy, thinking it's about money when it's really about labor. They also take a very cynical view of politics, mostly because deep down the understand that they deserve to be in the minority, so can only seize power through chicanery and confusion. That cynicism breeds all sorts of bad faith: lying, cheating, schemes to divide their opponents into warring camps, etc. These are deeper level problems with most of the things that Anrig lists.

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(pp. 8-9):

The sponsors of the right-wing ideas industry simply wanted to roll back government, through any means necessary. In contrast to the intellectuals who reveled in the conservative canon, the central financiers of the modern conservative movement were successful men of action with enormous wealth, in most cases built on inherited assets. Most of them harbored a barely contained sense of fury over their own personal encounters with the government -- especially despising taxes and regulation. Not coincidentally, the Coors, Bradley, and Koch families all had roots extending to the John Birch Society, the secretive organization founded in the late 1950s that suspected that communists were taking over the U.S. government, among other conspiracies. Scaife believed that Clinton aide Vince Foster's death was "the Rosetta stone" that would explain what he believed to be untold conspiracies related to the president he abhorred. The leading funders of movement conservatism didn't think twice about what the consequences for the public -- intended or unintended -- might be of getting rid of this or that program or regulation or tax or policy. Just do whatever it takes to get on the offensive, attack, and beat back the government. Those were the kinds of results they wanted.

(p. 12-13):

Because the ultimate goal of movement conservatives is to roll back the government, the answer to domestic problems as they have defined them almost invariably entails the simple panacea of substituting the private sector for the public sector. Just turn everything over to markets, and let the collective wisdom of consumers, free enterprise, competitive pressures, and Adam Smith's "invisible hand" fix everything. Yet most existing government domestic programs came about in the first place because of what economists call "market failures." Experience over more than a century, consistent with economic theory, demonstrated that competitive firms acting to maximize profits in the absence of rules will impose harms on the broader public -- harms that voters through the democratic process insisted be curtailed. So the government created laws, regulations, and enforcement systems to help ensure that the food supply would be untainted, that drugs and medical devices would be safe and effective, that price-gouging monopolies be broken up, that securities markets be fair, that transportation systems be safe, that the environment be protected, that racial discrimination be outlawed, that fraudulent sales practices be criminalized, that workplaces be safe, and so on. It also created economic protections such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and food stamps to cushion economic blows for citizens who fared poorly in the rough and tumble of the marketplace, and for older and disabled Americans out of the workforce.

(pp. 34-35):

The politicization of FEMA did, however, generate a certain sort of productivity when four successive hurricanes slammed the pivotal election state of Florida during the 2004 presidential campaign season. An investigation of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel found that concerns about the damage the storms could do to the president at the ballot box prompted FEMA to dole out disaster relief checks with unprecedented generosity. The paper reported that two weeks after a FEMA consultant raised alarms that the second of the hurricanes was creating a "huge mess" that could reflect poorly on Bush, a Florida official wrote that FEMA was handing out housing assistance "to everyone who needs it without asking for much information of any kind." Subsequent investigations by the DHS's inspector general and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs confirmed the Sun-Sentinel reports, finding that FEMA paid more than $31 million to thousands of Florida residents who were unaffected by the hurricanes. As Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) descried it at a contentious May 2005 hearing at which Brown parried heated questions, "FEMA approved massive payouts to replace thousands of televisions, air conditioners, beds and other furniture, as well as a number of cars, without receipts, or proof of ownership or damage, and based solely on verbal statements from the residents, sometimes made in fleeting encounters at fast-food restaurants."

(p. 35):

The conservative movement produces leaders who are committed to Ronald Reagan's core belief that government is the problem, not the solution. The right also insists that after political victories, as many like-minded leaders as possible should be planted throughout the government to "exert control" over civil servants, who typically have much more experience and knowledge about public activities such as responding to emergencies. Allbaugh and Brown were exactly the kinds of leaders the conservative movement promised the public that it would bring to the executive branch: advocates of "limited" government; suspicious of career bureaucrats; believers in outsourcing, downsizing, and devolution; recruiters tot he government hierarchy of more ideologues just like them. People who describe Allbaugh and Brown as simply incompetent or unqualified misunderstand why conservative government is failing. They did precisely what the right said its leaders would do.

(p. 47):

Established in 1982 by a group of conservative lawyers and law students at the University of Chicago, Yale, and Harvard, the Federalist Society was initially conceptualized as a networking organization on campuses opposed to what was perceived to be liberal orthodoxy taught at law schools. The idea was to identify and feed promising young conservative attorneys into clerkships and positions in the Reagan administration, while winning over and indoctrinating law students who would be exposed to the insights of leading conservative legal figures. Early founders and supporters of the society included such icons of the right as Edwin Meese, Irving Kristol, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Robert Bork. Over the years, money supporting the Federalist Society has flowed from the always generous Scaife, Olin, Bradley, and Earhart foundations. It has grown to include lawyers' chapters in about sixty cities and student chapters on almost all of the nation's accredited law school campuses.

(pp. 92-93):

As it turned out, the 1993 budget bill was the catalyst setting in motion a virtuous sequence of economic changes that produced an extended period of strong, broadly shared prosperity for the first time in more than two decades. Because Americans across the income spectrum earned higher incomes than anyone had predicted, more tax revenue flowed to the government -- substantially reducing budget deficits. But the end of the 1990s, the federal budget was running large and growing surpluses that enabled the government to pay down some of the national debt that had built up over the preceding decades.

The unemployment rate, which reached a decade high of 7.8 percent in June 1992, fell steadily to 4.1 percent by the end of the 1990s -- the lowest level since the late 1960s. The inflation rate defied economic theory and declined in tandem with unemployment, dropping from a peak of 6.3 percent in October and November 1990 to 2.7 percent by December 1999. Over the second half of the decade, the annual productivity growth rate -- which had languished near 1.4 percent for more than twenty years -- averaged about 2.5 percent. In the five booming years from 1995 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew faster (more than 4 percent annually), maintained a lower unemployment rate, and generated less inflation than in the whole of the 1970s or the 1980s. Even workers at the low end of the income ladder received wage increases above the inflation rate for the first time in decades, though rising inequality continued because the highest earners (the ones who bore the brunt of the Clinton tax increase) did even better. A federal budget deficit of 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1992, projected at the time to rise to 5.5 percent of GDP by 2000, transformed into an actual surplus of 2.4 percent of GDP by the end of the decade -- un unprecedented swing of 7.9 percentage points.

I suspect that if you look closer several of those number will lose some of their lustre. In the mid-1990s the government changed the way it calculates inflation, reducing the results in numerous ways -- the main purpose was to reduce cost-of-living increases to Social Security beneficiaries. Depressing the inflation rate has the side effect of making real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) look better. Unemployment figures are also affected by reductions in unemployment compensation. Welfare reform also worked to improve the numbers, although that was largely the good fortune to do the reform during a period of strong economic growth. The growth itself was largely driven by a huge one-time expansion of the computer and telecommunications sectors, primarily due to the World Wide Web. Fiscal policies, as well as Clinton's decision to shelter internet sales from state and local sales taxes, helped. But a fair chunk of that growth turned out to be a bubble which burst following the fizzle of the Y2K pseudo-crisis. The bubble was duly embraced as real by Clinton and others looking for good news. My view is that it was mostly driven by the longer term (at least since 1970) trend concentrating of wealth, which has generally worked to inflate the value of assets. The surplus proved chimerical, not least because it was achieved by sleight-of-hand in the first place: the last piece was achieved by cutting capital gains taxes, which on top of the stock market bubble led to a one-time asset sell-off. This got Clinton his momentary surplus, but by lowering taxes made it harder to sustain surpluses. Bush's tax cuts were all the worse because they claimed to redistribute a surplus that didn't really exist in the first place.

Still, one thing that Clinton's fiscal policies do clearly prove is that it is possible to raise marginal income taxes without doing any significant damage to the economy. That in itself undermines a huge chunk of Republican ideology.

(p. 99):

Countercyclical Keynesian tax cuts, which first took hold as a strategy to jump-start the economy during the Kennedy administration, are supposed to work by giving people more money to spend. But to the extent the Keynesian approach retains any theoretical credibility based on its checkered history -- more often than not ending up in the hands of taxpayers well after the downturn as already ended -- it needs to be implemented during a period of prolonged stagnation after it has become clear that lower interest rates and subdued inflation haven't self-corrected the economy. Still, Bush left his tax-cut proposal essentially intact while insisting that it would lead to a quick economic turnaround. The Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby, a moderate, wrote in February, "This weird revival of Keynesianism says a lot about the rickety intellectual basis for a large tax cut."

(p. 100):

Even as the rebate checks were flowing through the mail in August 2001, President bush interpreted the near-complete evaporation of the $4 trillion to $5 trillion in previously projected surpluses during his eight short months in office as "incredibly positive news." Why? Because it would put Congress in a "fiscal straitjacket." With that remark, the president endorsed what has become the dominant conservative rationale for tax cuts in the wake of the failures of supply-side economics to live up to its theoretical promise during the Reagan administration. The argument is known as "starving the beast," a phrase widely attributed to the former Reagan budget director David Stockman. As Grover Norquist, a modern-day kingpin of the conservative movement, explained it to U.S. News and World Report: "The goal is reducing the size and scope of government by draining its lifeblood."

(p. 111):

To convey how the modern conservative movement is responsible for corrupting the concept of "fiscal conservatism" to the point that it has become an oxymoron, a little history is useful. In the three decades preceding the Reagan administration, revenues as a share of national income were roughly stationary while expenditures rose only modestly. Each president, from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon to Ford to Carter, handed a lighter or comparable debt as a share of the economy to his successor. But during every single year of the presidencies of Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, the national debt rose relative to the size of the economy. Combined, the debt-to-GDP ratio climbed by nearly 40 percentage points on their watch, while it fell by 6 points during the Clinton administration. It's a record of irresponsibility and failure that speaks for itself.

TABOR stands for TAxpayer Bill Of Rights, a law that was originally passed in Colorado and touted as a model for other states -- there's a crowd that's been pushing it in Kansas for years, but it always gets beat back by pointing to how much damage it has caused in Colorado (pp. 131-132):

One of the remarkable aspects of the conservative movement's success has been its effectiveness at imposing a blur of confusion when it identifies a threat to its agenda created by readily discernible objective reality. Studies with misleading if not outright bogus claims are cranked out whenever facts emerge that contradict their belief system. Journalists compelled by the mores of their profession to present both sides of issues usually quite with equal weight the "experts" of the right situated in their well-financed "policy institutes" alongside others who actually understand public policy and believe in effective government. It took thirteen years for a majority of the voters of Colorado to discern through that fog that TABOR really was causing serious harm to their state. But because the stakes for the right are so high nationwide in perpetuating the myth that TABOR is working in Colorado, the passage of Referendum C is just another inconvenient development to be processed through the movement's well-oiled spin machine.

(pp. 146-147):

Tabulating the benefits of any given regulation is a far squishier enterprise. By their very nature, regulations are intended to prevent harms that don't have a price tag on them. But cost-benefit analysis doesn't take you very far unless you can compare dollars to dollars. So, for one thing, a human life is assigned with a value so that the benefit of saving one can be computed. The number chosen matters a lot. For example, in the Environmental Protection Agency's analysis of the proposed rules for the Clear Skies initiative, it originally valued a life at $6 million, based on studies of wages for high-risk jobs and surveys asking people what they think a life is worth. In 2003, Graham's OIRA asked the EPA to slash that figure to $3.7 million -- based on surveys alone -- and reduce it by another 27 percent for people over seventy, based on a twenty-year-old British survey that found that older people valued their lives less than younger people did.

(pp. 175-176):

Theories about the virtues of testing linked to some kind of accountability system, whether for students who are denied degrees because they scored low or for schools that face the stigma of being labeled as failing, rest on the presumption that threats provide effective incentives to perform better. No one disputes that setting clear standards and administering exams help to clarify what is expected of students and provide useful information about whether they have lived up to those aspirations. Traditionally, teachers have used test performance to help determine if students need more help in a particular area or if the teachers themselves need to do a better job of communicating material that doesn't seem to be getting through. But it very much remains an open question whether sanctions of one sort or another do anything to improve the educational process.

(p. 180):

NCLB[No Child Left Behind]'s shortcomings also share some of the flaws of Colorado's TABOR amendment. In both cases, the ideologically driven reliance on rigid requirements to produce the desired results assumes that saying it shall be so, will make it so. In the real world, as must parents who have tried that strategy with their children will recognize, strict dictators, in and of themselves, rarely work and often backfire. Like TABOR, NCLB isn't so much about faith in markets as it is a mindset that government workers on their own have little incentive to perform effectively. As it turns out, predictably, ordering them to produce the desired result doesn't do much to lead to that outcome, at least not without producing unhappy consequences. If legislators in Colorado could have magically cut nothing but purported "waste, fraud, and abuse," and public school teachers could heroically improve student performance, democracy already provided plenty of incentives to produce those outcomes. All that inflexible strictures to on their own is create new problems while exacerbating the impression that government is failing -- when it's really the conservative movement's ideas that are failing.

(p. 191):

In the same Economics 101 class where students learn that higher prices reduce demand, they are also told that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" works magic only when a number of conditions are met -- one of which is that consumer must have "perfect information" enabling them to make choices that will satisfy their desires. In health care, the information available tot he public couldn't be much more imperfect. Nonetheless, the conservative movement insists that a higher dose of the market in the form of increased out-of-pocket costs won't harm public health. It's a testament to how successful the right has been in selling its belief system that such a threadbare claim so deeply disconnected from consistently observed real-world experience -- not to mention economic theory -- has become such a dominant force in the debate over health-care reform.

(pp. 209-210):

But proposals to partially privatize Social Security -- all of them, regardless of the particulars -- are less than half baked. That is, the changes that privatization plans would set in motion would directly and inevitably undercut the purported goals of the legislation. All privatization proposals inherently weaken, rather than strengthen, Social Security, the federal budget, and the retirement security of Americans. Those fundamental flaws are matters of mathematics -- rather simple mathematics at that. Dismantling Social Security -- not "saving" or strengthening it -- is precisely the reason why conservatives support privatization. It's the reason why the libertarian Cato Institute has for more than two decades spent untold resources trying to spread fear about the existing system and imparting egregiously misleading claims about private accounts. To pass the political laugh test, privatization proponents have to try to fool people into thinking that somehow their plan will bolster Social Security and the retirement prospects for tomorrow's elderly. but as long as the laws of subtraction and multiplication remain sound, their proposals would inherently do the opposite. That's why Social Security privatization -- far and away the conservative movement's highest domestic aspiration -- was a political failure in 2005 and would inevitably be a policy failure if, save us, it ever became law in the future.

(pp. 216-217):

President Ronald Reagan, who had expressed hostility toward Social Security as "a sure loser" from the 1950s onward, initially assigned David Stockman, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, with the task of responding to the problem. Stockman deeply shared the contempt of his boss for big government and saw an opportunity in the looming shortfall, crafting a package of benefit cuts. Eligibility rules for collecting disability benefits would be tightened. A new cap would be placed on the total Social Security benefits in certain categories that a single family could receive. Payments to particular kinds of dependents would be eliminated. And, most important, benefits to workers who retire before age sixty-five would be reduced by about a third. Under Stockman's plan, assembled with only a handful of others, the penalty for leaving the workforce between the ages of sixty-two and sixty-five would be boosted from 20 percent of the normal Social Security benefit to 45 percent. The changes would take effect almost immediately after enactment, meaning that workers approaching retirement suddenly would discover that they would receive substantially less than they had been expecting. In his book The Triumph of Politics, Stockman describes with a curious sense of pride how he conveyed the proposals to the president in a background paper written in "perfectly incomprehensible Social Security Administration format and jargon which obscured almost everything." The cover memo "explained almost nothing." When Stockman presented the plan directly to Reagan, who was still recuperating from John W. Hinckley Jr.'s assassination attempt just a few weeks earlier, "Only 60 minutes had been allotted for that meeting on May 11 with the president -- not much time to review a plan which in both philosophy and detail reversed 45 years of Social Security history."

Reagan signed off, word got out, and the country went nuts. A little more than a week after the May 11 meeting, the Republican-led Senate voted 96 to 0 for a resolution rejecting Stockman's Social Security cuts. The political debacle sent Reagan's poll ratings into a tailspin and, in the words of the Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, ended "any major assault against the basic premises of the federal budget."

(p. 219):

Twenty-two years after Reagan signed those [Social Security] adjustments into law, without any significant intervening legislation, the Trustees' forecasts showing that the next shortfall isn't due until 2041 demonstrated just how effective the 1983 reforms had been. Nonetheless, at one point Bush even went to the Bureau of the Public Debt in West Virginia as a photo-op before a speech in which he said, "A lot of people in America think there is a trust -- that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you. But that's not the way it works. There is no 'trust fund' -- just IOUs that I saw first hand." In other words, Reagan's "ironclad commitment" was a ruse pulled on the American people. Tarnishing the reputation of the conservative movement's foremost icon is a small price to pay for the right's ultimate prize of tearing down the government's biggest, most successful program.

(pp. 230-231):

It was movement conservatism's approach to public management that caused FEMA to revert from a model agency to a turkey farm, producing the inept response to Hurricane Katrina that appalled all Americans. Movement conservatism gave us the unitary executive doctrine, which, in its disparagement of historical precedent and consensus constitutional scholarship, contributed mightily to the horrors of Abu Ghraib and elsewhere -- undermining America's long-standing moral authority while exacerbating the risk of future terrorism against us. The conservative movement's advocacy of "benevolent hegemony" offered a philosophical justification for invading Iraq even in the absence of indisputable evidence that it was building and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Conservatism falsely promised, again, that large tax cuts for the rich would produce broadly shared economic benefits without leading to large federal deficits. A conservative idea for constraining state taxes and spending caused public services to deteriorate dramatically in Colorado -- an outcome that hasn't stopped the movement from peddling the same idea in other states. Conservative regulatory policy has significantly curtailed the enforcement of laws intended to protect public health and the environment, with harmful consequences. Conservative school reforms, which have shown little sign of working, have sidetracked efforts to pursue other ideas that have demonstrated success. The conservative remedies for what ails the health-care system, which don't even broach the huge problem of uninsured and underinsured Americans, are more than anything a diversion intended to stave off universal coverage. And, finally, conservatism continues to advocate killing Social Security to save it.

The right's ideas, one after another, have failed. Often they have failed in vivid ways that a large swatch of the public reacts viscerally against -- the debacles of FEMA, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Social Security privatization. The core reason why conservatism is failing is also easy to explain. The job of elected officials is to govern. But the modern conservative movement, which flourished from the seeds of deep hostility toward government, produced ideas implicitly designed to weaken the public sector. The right paid lip service to goals like fiscal responsibility, better schools, health care, retirement security, and so on, but that rhetoric's purpose was mainly to generate political support for actions that would have the effect of rolling back government -- the movement's overriding priority. You have to actually believe that government can work to make it work effectively.

Jonathan Chait: The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics (2007, Houghton Mifflin)

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Charlatans and Cranks (pp. 13-15):

For many, many years, Republican economics was relentlessly sober. Republicans concerned themselves with such ills as deficits, inflation, and excessive spending. They did not care very much about cutting taxes, and (as in the case of such GOP presidents as Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford) they were quite willing to raise taxes in order to balance the budget. By temperament, such men were cautious rather than utopian. Over the last three decades, however, such Republicans have passed almost completely from the scene, at least in Washington, to be replaced by, essentially, a cult.

All sects have their founding myths, many of them involving circumstances quite mundane. The cult in question generally traces its political origins to a meeting in Washington in late 1974 between Arthur Laffer, an economic consultant, Jude Wanniski, an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal, and Dick Cheney, then chief of staff to President Ford. Wanniski, an eccentric and highly excitable man, had until the previous few years no training in economics whatsoever, but he had taken Laffer's tutelage. His choice of mentor was certainly unconventional. Laffer had been an economics professor at the University of Chicago since 1967. In 1970 his mentor, George Schultz, brought him to Washington to serve as a staffer in the Office of Management and Budget. Laffer quickly suffered a bout with infamy when he made a wildly unconventional calculation about the size of the 1971 Gross Domestic Product. President Nixon seized on Laffer's number, which was far more optimistic than estimates elsewhere, because it conveniently suggested an economic boom under his watch. When it was discovered that Laffer had used just four variables to arrive at his figure -- most economists used hundreds if not thousands of inputs -- he became a Washington laughingstock. [ . . . ]

Starting in 1972, Wanniski came to believe that Laffer had developed a blinding new insight that turned established economic wisdom on its head. Wanniski and Laffer believed it was possible to simultaneously expand the economy and tamp down inflation by cutting taxes, especially the high tax rates faced by upper-income earners. [ . . . ]

That fateful night, Wanniski and Laffer were laboring with little success to explain the new theory to Cheney. Laffer pulled out a cocktail napkin and drew a parabola-shaped curve on it. The premise of the curve was simple. If the government sets a tax rate of zero, it will receive no revenue. And if the government sets a tax rate of 100 percent, the government will also receive zero tax revenue, since nobody will have any reason to earn any income. Between these two points -- zero taxes and zero revenue, 100 percent taxes and zero revenue -- Laffer's curve drew an arc. The arc suggested that at higher levels of taxation, reducing the tax rate would produce more revenue for the government.

There are several obvious problems with this explanation. For one thing, there's no reason to suppose that any of the principals were even remotely concerned with maximizing government's tax cut of the economy. Conservatives are more likely to argue the opposite: that taxes should be minimized (e.g., to "starve the beast"). So it's unlikely that the Laffer Curve was ever anything more than tax cut camouflage. There's also the question of how much more growth is generated by not taxing the rich than would result from the government spending the foregone tax. I can think of several reasons why that might not even be positive, let alone large enough to recoup the tax loss.

(p. 22):

So if supply-side economics did not come out of the economics profession, where did it originate? It emerged from the writings and discussions of Laffer, Wanniski, and the late Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley. Those three did not do the kinds of things that real economists do, such as write academic papers or submit their findings to peer review. Instead they wrote editorials and columns or sometimes longer articles for magazines like Irving Kristol's The Public Interest. Now, I'm a journalist myself, and obviously I see nothing wrong with journalists writing about economic policy. But Wanniski, Bartley, and their crowd were not merely commenting on economic policy; they were claiming to have disproven the collective wisdom of the economics establishment.

Enter George Gilder and his book Wealth and Poverty (p. 24):

Gilder articulated the new philosophy of the Reagan era in admirably straightforward fashion. "To help the poor and middle classes," he wrote, "one must cut the taxes of the rich." In reflecting the new prestige Republicans wished to see afforded the rich, Gilder defended capitalists as not merely necessary or even heroic but altruistic. "Like gifts, capitalist investments are made without a predetermined return," he wrote. In fact, while capitalists may not be sure of their exact return, they do expect to make more than they put in, which makes an investment unlike a gift in a fairly crucial way. Yet there was enough of an audience for such sentiments that Gilder's book sold more than a million copies. President Reagan handed the book to friends, and advisers such as David Stockman hailed its "Promethean" insight. "Wealth and Poverty," reported the New York Times, "has been embraced by Washington with a warmth not seen since the Kennedys adopted John Kenneth Galbraith.

Wanniski wrote his own influential book, How the World Works (pp. 28-29):

Five years before he wrote his book, Wanniski knew nothing about economics. Within a few years he had formulated a new creed and sold it to a series of powerful opinion leaders and politicians. By 1977, the Republican National Committee formally called for an across-the-board tax cut modeled on the one proposed by Wanniski's closest disciple, Jack Kemp. The next year, Congress enacted a capital gains tax cut that he lobbied for in the halls of the Capitol and championed in the Journal's columns. Two years after the publication of his book, Wanniski found himself advising Ronald Reagan, who ran for president on ideas Wanniski had developed.

A good deal more on Wanniski here, including a spat with Reagan: "Wanniski gave an interview in 1980 about the battle for Reagan's mind among his advisers, all but openly saying that the candidate was a creature of his staff. This brought about a quick expulsion from the inner circle." Also his relationship with Steve Forbes and Bob Dole (after Dole picked Jack Kemp as his 1996 running mate). Also his praise for Louis Farrakhan, Lyndon LaRouche, Slobodan Milosevic (whom he likened to Abraham Lincoln), and Saddam Hussein ("There is no possibility that Saddam gassed his own people"). Also his argument that Hitler invaded Poland because he failed to understand the need to lower taxes.

Chait provides four reasons for the ascendancy of the supply side theories: cracks in the Keynesian consensus due to new problems like "stagflation"; political opportunism ("The Laffer Curve held out the possibility of handing tax cuts to the voters without fretting about the resulting deficits. The GOP would be transformed into the party of Santa Claus, with Democrats, if they stood in the way, stuck playing the Grinchy"); favoritism to the rich ("The lesson for cranks everywhere is that your theory stands a stronger chance of success if it directly benefits a rich and powerful bloc, and there's no bloc richer and more powerful than the rich and powerful"); and widespread ignorance of economics (p. 32):

Irving Kristol, the conservative intellectual who arranged funding for a number of supply-side tracts, including The Way the World Works, has been remarkably candid on this point at least in retrospect. Kristol recalled that when Wanniski tried to convert him to supply-side economics, "I was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities." And in 1995 Kristol breezily confessed in an article: "The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority, so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government."

Then in 1993 Clinton tried raising tax rates, especially for the critical highest bracket (pp. 36-37):

The supply-siders were absolutely certain Clinton's plan would fail. According to their view of the world, deficits matter very little. Raising tax rates would discourage work and investment, causing economic growth to shrink, and ultimately causing tax revenues to wither. The most respectable iteration of this view came from Martin Feldstein, a conservative Harvard economist. Feldstein is a legitimate academic who accepts the tenets of mainstream economics, but he is close to the supply-siders in that he has an unusually high estimation of the effects of tax rates on the rich. This viewpoint has made him an influential conduit to Republican politicians: Bush's top two economic advisers, Lawrence Lindsey and Glenn Hubbard, were both Feldstein protégés. And Feldstein's Harvard credentials gave his opinions a resonance that extends beyond GOP circles. Therefore, when he repeatedly wrote things such as "there is no possibility that the Clinton plan will produce the deficit reduction that it projects" and that the plan "reflects a fundamentally incorrect view of how taxes affect individual behavior," his view was not dismissed as voodoo economics.

In fact, compared to many conservatives, Feldstein was an optimist. A paper by the conservative Heritage Foundation concluded: "Higher taxes will shrink the tax base and reduce tax revenues." The GOP House whip Newt Gingrich, giving voice to the conservative consensus, predicted that the "three hundred billion in new taxes is going to shrink the economy, put people out of work, lower tax revenues."

It is worth recalling some of the conservative rhetoric of the time to see just how vehemently the supply-siders believed this. The Wall Street Journal ran a series of editorials denouncing the tax hike under the headline "The Class Warfare Economy," complete with a graphic of a guillotine. Bartley warned ominously that the tax hike would "cripple" the economy. Lawrence Kudlow, one of the high priests of the supply-side temple, confidently asserted: "There is no question that President Clinton's across-the-board tax increases . . . will throw a wet blanket over the recovery and depress the economy's long-run potential to grow." Indeed, by the time Clinton's plan passed the House of Representatives, the Journal's editorial page stated that the recession had already begun: "We are seeing," the editors opined, "the early signs of the stagflation that we knew so well during the Carter presidency."

Next paragraph goes on to talk about "wealthy citizens who, fearing Clinton's tax policies, decided to flee the country altogether." The result: "The stock market boomed, and the economy enjoyed its longest expansion in U.S. history. Revenues soared higher than the cheeriest optimists could have predicted. Not only was the deficit cut in half, in keeping with Clinton's goal, but it disappeared altogether, to be replaced by a surplus."

Chait moves on to the history of lobbying (p. 50):

As John Judis notes in The Paradox of American Democracy, businessmen saw themselves as responsible for the good of the country as a whole, not just their immediate bottom line. It seems not to have occurred to corporate America to enter the political arena to fight for a bigger piece of the pie. In 1961, just fifty corporations retained Washington lobbyists; these were mainly firms that sold products directly to the federal government. Business went about its business and did not see the need to dominate Washington.

(p. 52):

In a 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell urged business to fund a massive offensive against the left. "The painfully sad truth," he wrote, "is that business . . . often have responded -- if at all -- by appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem . . . The time has come -- indeed, it is long overdue -- for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled [sic] against those who would destroy it." Corporations had grown accustomed to seeing themselves as guardians of the broader national interest, not ideological combatants seeking to maximize their own share. Traditionally they had directed their public involvement toward institutions like the Committee for Economic Development or the Brookings Institution, which steered a center course between capital and labor. Conservatives now insisted that business must abandon this noblesse oblige. As Irving Kristol wrote, "Corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested." In part as a result of these exhortations, corporations began funding a vast apparatus of foundations, think tanks, pressure groups, and media to advance views congenial to their bottom line.

(p. 55):

Republicans, for both partisan and ideological reasons, wanted to kill health care reform and were enraged at business's conciliatory posture. The conservative activist Grover Norquist began convening a weekly meeting of business lobbyists opposed to health care (mostly representing small businesses, which for the most part did not insure their workers and did not want to start) along with conservative groups like the National Rifle Association and right-leaning pundits. These strategy sessions produced, among other things, a concerted effort to pressure business lobbies to withdraw their support for reform. The conservatives denounced groups like the Chamber of Commerce as a sellout to big government and disseminated their attacks through talk radio, taped television spots, and Wall Street Journal editorials. Congressional Republicans boycotted a Chamber awards ceremony and threatened to ignore Chamber lobbying on other issues. Under this pressure, the Chamber reversed itself, and corporate support for health care reform collapsed.

(pp. 58-59):

The Bush administration has routinely -- so routinely it no longer makes news -- appointed lobbyists to oversee their former employers. Harvey Pitt, Bush's first choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, had made his name defending the accounting industry, Ivan Boesky, and anybody else seeking more lenient treatment of financial malfeasance. Pitt took the helm of the SEC and promised a "kinder, gentler" agency where "we aren't going to play gotcha." William Geary Myers III, a lobbyist for cattle grazers seeking to preserve federal subsidies, received an appointment to the Interior Department. Mark Weinberger, the Bush treasury official charged with regulating tax shelters, is a former lobbyist for purveyors of tax shelters. Soon after taking office he declared, "I want to change the 'us' versus 'them' mentality -- the 'us' being government, the 'them' being business."

That is a fitting summation of modern Republicanism. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between business and government, with the former regularly taking on the duties of the latter. In 2001, Enron interviewed several candidates to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Bush ultimately appointed two who met with their approval. Enron's chairman Ken Lay met with the holdover FERC chairman and instructed him that he could keep his job only if he reversed his opposition to energy deregulation. The next year, two of Bush's appointees to a commission regulating lead poisoning revealed that they were first approached not by the administration but by the lead industry itself. The pattern is not merely "influence," it is the wholesale delegation of the tasks of governing.

(pp. 61-62):

The GOP, on the other hand, faces minimal divisions within its economic base. Yes, social conservatives do not always agree with economic conservatives, but the social conservatives focus almost exclusively on social issues and so do not usually weigh in with much force on economic issues. In the economic realm, Republicans enjoy no significant labor, consumer, or environmental support. Their economic base is uniformly corporate. And while businesses can disagree over certain issues -- most notably foreign trade -- they all want to pay as little in taxes, face the least amount of government regulation, and enjoy the most generous subsidies that they possibly can.

(p. 66):

By the time Bush signed an energy bill in 2005, the thin veneer of public purpose behind it had been stripped away almost entirely. It was neither a deregulation bill nor an effort to shift production to certain industries deemed more environmentally sound. It simply consisted of a massive wish list of subsidies for just about every segment of the energy industry. A single sentence, published in the Washington Post in 2003, tells you all you need to know: "The assembled lobbyists -- representing farm, corn, soybean, wind, geothermal, coal, oil and gas interests that benefit from provisions in the 1,100-page bill -- gave [the GOP senator and energy bill champion Pete] Domenici a standing ovation, and he thanked them for helping to push the legislation to the brink of passage, according to one person who was present." One analyst called the energy bill "the sum of all lobbies."

(p. 73):

One of the consistent tasks of the Republican agenda over the last decade has been to nurture the K Street machine. Every new subsidy directed to the business lobby creates a new sector of the economy dependent in some way on its relationship with Washington. The Medicare bill is a classic example. Here is how Robert E. Moffitt, a policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, put it in an interview with the Boston Globe: "The Medicare system has now become a vast arena of special interest politics. It has been transformed from a system where we were providing health care for seniors into a system where there is a massive redistribution of income among health care providers." The various tariffs, the corporate tax bill, the pork barrel spending, and the like all have the same effect. The beneficiaries understand that their interests are best served if they return a portion of their largesse in the form of donations and contribute to the spreading patronage network by employing Republicans in their Washington offices.

(pp. 96-98):

Unlike other ideological radicals, [Grover] Norquist did not wind up cranking out obscure pamphlets or hoarding handmade bombs in a mountain cabin. Instead, he channeled his energies into the Republican Party. Norquist has described himself, aptly, as a "Market-Leninist." In Leninist fashion, he sees politics as a Manichean struggle between what he calls "our team" and "their team." He does not see power as something that can be shared between the two sides -- he famously compared bipartisanship to date rape -- or as something that naturally swings back and forth over time. Rather, he deals in dialectical shifts, such as the inevitable death of the World War II generation, a group that Norquist has called "anti-American" for its statist proclivities, or the rise of stock ownership, which conservatives call "the investor class." "You can't have a hate-and-envy class if 80 percent of the public owns stock," he once declared, "That makes it impossible for Democrats to govern. It spells the end of their world." He frequently refers to the conservative struggle, and its inevitable triumph, as "the revolution."

Norquist, like a James Bond villain, has an irrepressible penchant for spelling out his master plans in their full, nefarious detail. He delights in casting his goals in the coarsest and most sinister terms. According to the journalist Nina Easton, he kept a pet boa constrictor and fed it a series of mice named after the former Democratic whip David Bonior. After the 2004 election, he proposed to the Washington Post that Democrats would become content once they accepted their permanent minority status. "Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans," he noted. "Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate." He once railed against a group of millionaires seeking to preserve the estate tax, which was already scheduled for termination. "They're embarrassing," he said. "They're flopping around like that stupid fish in the boat. It's over, fish! It's done! You're dinner!"

Norquist boasts close links with powerful Republicans, having conferred regularly with Newt Gingrich during his heyday and currently maintaining close ties with Karl Rove and the GOP leadership. he also presides over the Wednesday Group, a weekly meeting often called "the Grand Central Station of the conservative movement." There, the sundry elements of the GOP coalition hash out the party line. Lobbyists, partisans, activists, and conservative journalists all commingle, with the shared sense that they are all part of what Norquist calls "our team." Slate's editor, Jacob Weisberg, once described the vanguard of the conservative movement as the "conintern" -- an apparatus, like the old Bolshevik comintern, designed to encourage intellectual accord within the movement. Norquist's meetings are the heart of the conintern. I spend a lot of time working with the conservative press to make sure that we're all thinking alike and talking alike," Norquist once said. Once hashed out in the Wednesday Group, the party line will soon emanate throughout the conservative media.

(pp. 108-109):

A lone exception to this trend proves the rule. In 2006, William Niskanen, the chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute, measured the relationship between changes in tax levels and changes in spending. He found that the premise of the "starve the beast" strategy was wrong. Indeed, it was backwards. Since 1981, tax cuts tended to spur higher levels of spending, while tax hikes tended to produce lower spending. (In fact, Richard Kogan of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities had found the same thing in 2002, but Kogan was a liberal and therefore predictably ignored.) The moderate columnists Jonathan Rauch of the Atlantic and Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post excitedly wrote up Niskanen's findings. Surely this would demonstrate to the starve-the-beats conservatives the folly of their ways.

Not surprisingly, no rethinking whatsoever ensued.

(pp. 123-124):

All this is to say that Bush seized upon the pretext of a recession to impose the changes he had always wanted. Indeed, he first unveiled his tax cut with the economy at its peak. (He called it "an insurance policy" against recession, which sounds like spraying a fire hose on a house to make sure it doesn't catch fire.) When deficits appeared, Republicans insisted it would be the height of folly to raise taxes during a recession. Then the recession ended, but deficits remained. No problem. The fact that the economy was growing again proved "the tax cuts have worked," and therefore should be repeated. When, inevitably, the economy slowed down again, it was held up as evidence not that the tax cuts failed but that still more are needed.

(pp. 126-127):

This is more or less how conservatives feel about their alliance with the rich. They believe very earnestly that what is good for the rich is good for the country. Some do so from their adherence to the tenets of supply-side economics. Probably a greater number simply believe it in their gut. This isn't the sort of sentiment politicians like to advertise, but it slips out every once in a while. Bill Archer, the Republican former head of the Ways and Means Committee and a current tax lobbyist, once declared, "The engine that pulls the train must continue to be fueled." Phil Gramm, the conservative former senator, used to say, "No poor man ever gave me a job." This is a very old conservative sentiment -- less Adam Smith than Edmund Burke, and one verging on outright plutocracy. It has less to do with the Laffer Curve than an almost mystical faith in the centrality and virtue of the upper class. Tony Snow gave this view a particularly blunt expression when, as a columnist and Fox News talking head, he wrote: "Upper classes have always pulled societies forward economically -- and their conspicuous prosperity has always aroused the jealousies of the lower classes. The envious set out to strip the rich of their lucre, believing mistakenly that by redistributing income they could make everybody affluent."

Section on "Media: The Dog That Didn't Watch" -- starting with an example from Joe Klein where he went soft on Bush in 2000 (Klein wrote: "But, most important, it revealed an essential truth about the current Bush project. This is not a new Republican party but a souped-up version of a previous one: the very proper, mostly eastern-establishment party of the Eisenhower era; the party that existed before the Nixon-Reagan-Gingrich sunbelt rebels used racial fears to crack open the solid Democratic south; the Party that Martin Luther King, Sr., belonged to, for lack of a better option. It was Senator Prescott Bush's party, and it might have been President George H.W. Bush's natural home, too, if all those voodoo economists and gun lovers and abortion haters hadn't been riding so high in the prop wash of the Reagan revolution.") (p. 141):

We shouldn't be too hard on Klein. While his article has proven to be utterly wrong, it was the most common kind of wrongness, shared and repeated endlessly by the most influential journalistic minds. A discerning reader might have noticed at the time Klein's odd belief that the "voodoo economists" -- that is, supply-siders -- had been driven from power when in fact they supported the Texas governor in lockstep and accounted for every one of his economic advisers. But the rest was pure conventional wisdom, assertions that did not have to be supported with any evidence because they were so widely shared. Bush, it was held, represented a new, moderate kind of Republicanism. From this everything else followed: Gore's attacks on Bush's program were silly and overwrought; the election meant little (a premise from which some two and a half million left-liberals concluded that it was as good a year as any to cast a protest vote for Ralph Nader); and, finally, the candidates were properly judged not on their insignificant ideological differences but on aesthetics -- i.e., the superior calmness and tidiness of the GOP ticket.

Actually, we should go hard on Klein, not just for this mistake but for many of the others he's made, like not realizing the Iraq war wouldn't work out so swell. Anyone who thought the Republicans of 2000 had gotten past their "gun lovers and abortion haters" had a pretty weak grasp of their rank and file.

(pp. 180-181):

The line of conservative George W. Bush books is, not surprisingly, a mirror image of this. George W. Bush comes across as a paragon of virtue, all his political triumphs ultimately emanating from the strength of his character. In The Right Man, David Frum, a Bush speechwriter, spoke mostly of Bush's punctuality, his formal attire, and the way he "opened every cabinet meeting with a prayer and scorned the petty untruths of a politician." And his subordinates rightly adored him. Unlike the previous White House, where the staff remained seated when the president entered the room, "the Bush staff rose to their feet with a snap that would have impressed a Prussian field marshal."

The succession of paeans to Bush all followed this formula. They praised his policies, but they inevitably portrayed them as an outgrowth of the great man's personal qualities. Where the Clinton books were characterized by revolting personal detail, the Bush books were characterized by inspiring personal detail. The genre could be called leadership pornography. To wit, John Podhoretz wrote in Bush Country, without any hint of irony, that "those closest to Bush say that his extraordinary physical condition has allowed him to maintain a dazzling degree of focus and concentration on the details of the war on terror and the war in Iraq." It puts one in mind of the stories of Mao's swimming the Yellow River.

(pp. 181-182):

Liberals have produced their own shelf of books about Bush. They are, to be sure, deeply unflattering, and the tone is hardly measured. Unlike the books damning Clinton, though, they generally eschew wild or salacious tales of personal misconduct. (There are, of course, a few notable exceptions, such as James Hatfield's Fortunate Son.) These traditional polemics are dedicated to impugning the Bush administration's policies. The table of contents of The Book on Bush, by Eric Alterman and Mark Green, begins:

1. Introduction: The Power of Audacity
2. Drill and Cough: W.'s Environmental and Energy Policies
3. Déjà Vu-doo Economics: The Real Faith-Based Policy
4. When Laissez Isn't Fair: How a Business President Handles Business Fraud
5. Secrecy and Civil Liberties: "Watch What [You] Say"

And so on, marching earnestly through the forty-third president's domestic and foreign agenda.

Even a book with an inflammatory title, The Bush-Hater's Handbook, by Jack Huberman, is organized alphabetically, and the beginning lists the issue-based offerings: "Abortion, Birth Control, and Reproductive Health; AIDS; Air Pollution; Ashcroft; Axis of Evil; Biological Weapons; Budget and Taxes," etc. It does allow itself a few quick diversions into the personal, but even these instances are limited to public actions or statements -- Bush's mockery of a woman he executed, his crony capitalist business history, and the like -- and they are utterly pallid compared with the hysterical charges leveled against the Clintons.

(pp. 194-195):

The most charitable interpretation of this wanton secrecy is that the Bush administration is fixated on the theory of "executive privilege" -- the belief that the Oval Office needs to assert its legal prerogatives -- and that the president has carried this fixation to zealous extremes. This is not, obviously, a very flattering interpretation -- information, after all, is the lifeblood of democracy. Yet even the charitable explanation is too, well, charitable. In fact, the Bush administration has been notoriously promiscuous about releasing official secrets when doing so suits its own political ends. In 2002, Bush declassified portions of a transcript of a conversation in which Israel's prime minister, Ehud Barak, asked Bill Clinton to pardon the fugitive tax-evader Marc Rich. (It was the first time in American history that a president's discussion with a foreign head of state was declassified.) Clinton asked that the rest of the conversation be declassified as well, insisting that the context would make him look better. Bush refused. Bush has also declassified numerous documents that either seem to make his administration appear vigilant against terrorism or his predecessor appear lax. "Bush is the first president sine Richard Nixon to try to brandish declassification as a political weapon," concluded John Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive. There is no real executive privilege principle at work here. The only principle is the Bush administration's consistent desire to expand its control over what information makes it into the public discourse.

(p. 237):

It is not that conservatives shy away from internal debate, but rather that those debates have a frantic orthodoxy about them. Conservative debates, unlike liberal ones, begin with the premise that there is a single belief system. The debate usually takes the form of an accusation, or mutual accusations, of ideological heresy. Intramural conservative disputes are almost always confined to those few areas, like immigration or certain foreign policy issues, where the conservative litany is not well defined. As we saw earlier, they usually take the form of rival claimants to the true spirit of Reaganism. Conservatives regularly allude to "the conservative movement." Liberals have no corresponding term. This is because there is no liberal movement in anything like the sense that there is a conservative movement.

(pp. 239-240):

After his reelection in 2004, Bush's popularity sank and his legislative agenda ground to a halt. In the conservative mind there was only one possible explanation: Bush had abandoned the faith. As the liberal writer Rick Perlstein has observed: "Conservatism never fails. It is only failed." The swift collapse of Bush's presidency after his reelection was therefore evidence that he could not be a true conservative. The conservative press reverberated with denunciations of him as an ideological turncoat. Where once they spoke of Bush in the same breadth as Reagan, they now compared him to Richard Nixon or George H. W. Bush -- hated moderates who curried favor with the liberal establishment. A previously unknown and unimaginable genre appeared: the conservative anti-Bush book, with titles like Imposter or Conservatives Betrayed. The cult of personality dissipated all at once. Bush's ideological transgressions, once dismissed as a mere annoyance, suddenly came to define him. Before, conservatives had insisted that Bush's lack of enthusiasm for budget-cutting mattered little in the face of his passion for cutting taxes. In its enthusiastic endorsement of Bush in 2000, for instance, the National Review insisted that his "support for tax cuts and Social Security reform is more important than his spending initiatives -- not least because if he succeeds on taxes and Social Security, it will be easier to limit government in the future." The Bush presidency was a test of this starve-the-beast strategy, which is the essential premise of conservative domestic policy. But the conservatives could not admit that their own theory had fallen short, that the strategy and the assumptions behind it had failed. Betrayal was the only explanation.

(p. 247):

Mainstream think tanks -- or, as we now call them, "liberal" think tanks -- grew out of the Progressive Era belief in public policy informed by disinterested expertise and social science research. The Brookings Institution is the preeminent example of a think tank that grew out of this ethos, but many others followed. The scholars at such institutions are not omniscient, and obviously they disagree with one another and get things wrong more than occasionally, but their work grows out of Robert Brookings's goal of promoting research "free from any political or pecuniary interest." (Two of Brookings's former presidents, Michael Armacost and Bruce MacLaury, were Republicans.) The scholars at liberal think tanks move comfortably in the world of academia. The worst thing that could happen to them would be to have their research seen as partisan hackwork.

(pp. 257-258):

Another way to look at the asymmetry between liberal and conservative commentators is to consider Fred Barnes, the executive editor of the Weekly Standard and a regular commentator on Fox News Channel. In the world of conservative commentary, perhaps only George Will enjoys more prestige.

Barnes is widely and eagerly read by political junkies for the same reason that Pravda was devoured by Kremlinologists: he faithfully reflects the thinking of the party leadership, whether or not it has anything to do with conservative principle. In December 2001, for instance, the Bush administration was soaring in opinion polls on the basis of a patriotic upsurge after September 11. It decided to use this political capital to pass through Congress a "stimulus bill," consisting in large part of permanent tax breaks for business favored by K Street long before September 11. Tom Daschle, the Democratic Senate leader, was reluctant to cooperate, and Bush decided to launch a public relations campaign assailing Daschle for his lack of cooperation. As a White House official told the Washington Times, another faithful movement organ, "The orders came down from high to start getting tougher [on Daschle]."

Conservative opinion writers dutifully sprang into action, none more dutifully than Barnes. Barnes wrote a lengthy article laying into Daschle for failing to support Bush's domestic goals. Daschle's theory, Barnes explained disgustedly, was to offer unqualified support for Bush's foreign policy while resisting things like long-term business tax cuts or opening the Arctic Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. Barnes labeled this approach "crass maneuvering."

I must admit that I thought Daschle's support of Bush's wars was indeed pretty crass, but that's another matter. One of our favorite scenes in The Sopranos was noticing Carmella reading Barnes' Bush hagiography, Rebel in Chief.

(pp. 262-263):

Of the many taboos that prevail among conservatives, the one forbidding any serious discussion of inequality is perhaps the strictest. Any forthright examination of this topic will lead one quickly to the realization that American society has been spreading apart rapidly for three decades and that Republican economic policies have without a doubt contributed mightily to this gulf. So conservatives usually ignore the subject of inequality, except perhaps to minimize its scale or importance.

(pp. 264-265):

The current predicament is not altogether unfamiliar to America. A century ago, there were vast disparities in wealth and income, and the political system was dominated by a self-serving elite. What finally turned the tide was a wave of labor violence and radical activism, first around the turn of the century and again during the Great Depression. The business and political elite feared that capitalism itself was under siege and might not survive, and in time it embraced the palliative of modern liberal reform in order to safeguard the free enterprise system.

The elite of that generation, like the elite of today, was conservative by temperament. But their conservatism meant something else -- a sense of social responsibility, a commitment to preserving peace between economic classes. The conservatives of today, on the other hand, have redefined conservatism as an expression of their material self-interest, defined in the narrowest and most short-sighted terms. They have forgotten the lessons of their forebears, and if sanity is to be restored to our political order, they must relearn them.