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.

(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.