Some parts of the article moved around a little for effect but nothing
has been added;
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/chapters/0923-1st-chait.html?pagewanted=...
...American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing
economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely
greedy, a few of them possibly insane.
The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the
last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the
commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have
been laughed at a generation ago-that
cutting taxes for the very rich is the best
response to any and every economic
circumstance, or that
it is perfectly appropriate to turn the most
rapacious and self-interested elements of the
business lobby into essentially an arm of the
federal government-are now so pervasive,
they barely attract any notice.
...the Republican Party ...the party of social and fiscal
responsibility, was transformed into the party of class warfare. It is
an astonishing tale, and it begins in the mid-1970s with the rise of a
sect of pseudo-economists known as the supply-siders. This small cult
of fanatical tax-cutters managed, despite having been proven
decisively wrong time after time, to get an iron grip on the
ideological machinery of the conservative movement. The supply-siders
were not maverick conservative economists, as you might assume; they
were amateurs and cranks, convinced that their outsider status enabled
them to reach conclusions that had escaped the scrutiny of
professional economists. The most prominent among them spent their
lives advocating a number of patently ludicrous ideas. (One supply-
side guru compared Slobodan Milosevic to Abraham Lincoln. Another said
that American upper-class women "are averse to science and technology
and baffled by it.") While their other preposterous ideas went
nowhere, the equally preposterous notion of supply-side economics took
the political system by storm. Why? Because it attracted a powerful
constituency: the rich.
An almost theological opposition to taxation quickly took hold within
the GOP, opening up the opportunity for business lobbyists to hijack
the party's agenda. And so they did, as described in chapter 2. Far
from being ideological fanatics, these were the most coolly
calculating men. Their distinguishing quality was cynicism. Some of
them were flamboyant crooks, like the gangster wannabe Jack Abramoff.
But most were crooks of a more respectable variety- the kind with
seven-figure salaries and offices at prestigious law firms. All of
them understood that the destruction of the old Republican ethos of
restraint opened up the public coffers to them, and they have availed
themselves and their clients of a massive looting of the Treasury.
Their takeover of the Republican Party took years to complete. The
supply-siders and the business lobbyists had two internal obstacles to
overcome before they could take full control: the Republican rank-and-
file voting base, and the old Republican Washington establishment,
both of which still clung to the old ethos of fiscal responsibility
and public-mindedness. To deal with them there arose a new breed of
ideological enforcer-propagandists, party organizers, lobbyists, or
often (as in the case of prototypes like Grover Norquist and Ralph
Reed) all of these things at once. They drove out the old party
establishment and created a new party line that fused in a seamless
web supply-side ideology with their own financial interests.
There is something distinctly cultlike about their thinking. Their
canon is presumptively infallible, and any apparent failure must
instead be seen as an impetus to recommit themselves to doctrinal
purity. Last spring, in an example typical of this thinking, the Wall
Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel diagnosed the Republican
Party's ailments thusly: "The base is in the dumps, disenchanted with
a party that has lost sight of its economic moorings." The solution?
Tax cuts, and lots of them. Strassel ran through how all the leading
Republican presidential candidates had pledged their fealty to the
governing supply-side faith. Each of them promised to make permanent
all of Bush's tax cuts, but of course this was a given. The
competition was between which candidate would promise even deeper cuts
in upper-bracket rates.
As a diagnosis of what ails the Republicans today, this was, of
course, insane. Bush signed a major tax cut each of the first six
years of his presidency. Whatever the GOP's political liabilities may
be, an insufficient commitment to tax-cutting is obviously not among
them. To propose that the road to victory lies in recommitting the
party to even more upper-bracket tax cuts requires a detachment from
reality that would have been the envy of the Manson gang. But this is
the sort of thinking that now predominates in conservative and
Republican circles, and the obeisance of all the leading GOP
presidential hopefuls shows just how deeply it has sunk in...
...The result has been a slow-motion disaster. Income inequality has
approached levels normally associated with Third World oligarchies,
not healthy Western democracies. The federal government has grown so
encrusted with business lobbyists that it can no longer meet the great
public challenges of our time. Not even many conservative voters or
intellectuals find the result congenial. Government is no smaller-it
is simply more debt-ridden and more beholden to wealthy elites.
And yet the right-wing ascendancy has continued inexorably despite
continual public repudiation...
...Things have gone about as badly as they could have in George W.
Bush's second term. A Republican administration started and lost a
major war in Iraq; presided over an economy that has failed to deliver
higher wages for most Americans; contributed in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina to the near-wipeout of a major American city;
launched a failed assault on Social Security, the most popular social
program in the history of the United States; and saw its members
suffer an almost unprecedented string of sexual and financial
scandals. Still, Democrats find themselves holding only the slimmest
of majorities in the House and Senate. Even if they hold their
majorities in Congress and win the White House in 2008, the structural
forces in Washington will make it nearly impossible to roll back any
significant chunks of the Bush tax cuts, let alone take on crises like
global warming or the forty-five million Americans lacking health
insurance...
...Most people under forty fail to grasp how different American
politics looked three decades ago...
...Today's rightwing position-upper-bracket tax cuts wherever and
whenever possible-was off the right edge of the political spectrum
three decades ago.
The ground has shifted very far under our feet, and its manifestations
are everywhere. In 1979, the highest-earning one-tenth of 1 percent of
all taxpayers-the richest of the rich-took home only 3 percent of the
national income. Today they take home 10 percent. And over that same
span, their average tax rate has dropped from 32 to 23 percent. The
minimum wage has lost nearly half its purchasing power. The health
care plan proposed by Richard Nixon in 1974, if introduced in Congress
today, would be considered radically liberal and probably could not
gain the support of any but a handful of the most left-wing
Democrats...
...The public has been moving steadily left for twenty years, while
Washington has lurched rapidly in the opposite direction.
This isn't supposed to happen. Abraham Lincoln once said, "Public
sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail.
Without it, nothing can succeed." This is the core of the American
civic religion. But over the last thirty years, something has happened
that strikes at that core. The underpinnings of American democracy
have slowly frayed, and in the place of the great moderate consensus
that once prevailed we have seen the rise of an American plutocracy...
...cultural issues have obscured pocketbook ones. Conservatives have
tricked the masses into voting on the basis of social issues, thus
ignoring their economic self-interest. It is certainly true that tens
of millions of potential Democratic voters support the Republican
Party on the basis of its opposition to abortion, gays, and the like.
But the phenomenon of conservative elites using culture and patriotism
to win support from the masses is an old one. Left-wing
populism ...may have failed to take root because of working-class
social conservatism.
If the public is not moving right on economics, and if it is not even
moving right on social issues, then we cannot explain the rise of
right-wing economics by looking at the voters. We can only understand
it by examining Washington...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/chapters/0923-1st-chait.html?pagewanted=...
