Jonathan Chait: The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington
Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics (2007, Houghton
Mifflin)
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:
- Introduction: The Power of Audacity
- Drill and Cough: W.'s Environmental and Energy Policies
- Déjà Vu-doo Economics: The Real Faith-Based Policy
- When Laissez Isn't Fair: How a Business President Handles Business
Fraud
- 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.
