| One key to why movement conservatives are so successful is that they are playing a different game than everyone else-even most conservative voters, who really have no idea what they've signed on for.
What they are after, at a minimum, is a return to the Gilded Age system, when big business owned Congress outright, and the country was run directly for their benefit, and little else.
I'm going to be talking about this in an upcoming diary, but to illustrate it a little more fully, I created this standalone diary.
Voodoo Economics: A Case Study
During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan was the focus of attention for competing advisors, including economists. The ones who won out were promoters of what came to known as "supply-side economics"-what George H.W. Bush so aptly called "Voodoo Economics," before he sold his soul to become Reagan's running mate. As Wikipedia explains:
Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that economic growth can be most effectively created using incentives for people to produce (supply) goods and services, such as adjusting income tax and capital gains tax rates. This can be contrasted with the classic Keynesian economics or demand side economics, which argues that growth can be most effectively managed by controlling total demand for goods and services, typically by adjusting the level of Government spending. Supply-side economics is often conflated with trickle-down economics. The term was coined by journalist Jude Wanniski in 1975, and popularised the ideas of economists Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer.
The typical policy recommendation of supply-side economics is the reduction of marginal tax rates, beneficial because of the proponents' view that increased private investment generally brings higher productivity, which increases economic growth, and lowers costs for consumers. This is controversial because cutting marginal tax rates is perceived to offer benefits primarily to the wealthy, which commentators such as Paul Krugman see as politically rather than economically motivated.
Many early proponents argued that the size of the economic growth would be significant enough that the increased government revenue from a faster growing economy would be sufficient to completely compensate for the short-term costs of a tax cut, and that tax cuts could, in fact, cause overall revenue to increase....
Supply-side supporters disagreed with monetarist Milton Friedman and neoclassicist Robert Lucas Jr. by arguing that cutting tax rates alone would be sufficient to grow GDP, lift tax revenues and balance the budget.
Ronald Reagan tried this, and the results were disasterous-by the time he left office, he had almost tripled the federal deficit. Supply-side economics was a flat-out disaster in terms of what it promised. However, the Republicans were not really all that unhappy with what it delivered. In fact, the more conservative ones were downright gleeful.
The deficits continued growing under Bush I, and then when Clinton took over, and raised taxes to try and get a "reality-based" handle on the mess Reagan/Bush had made, his tax increase was one of the key factors that contributed the Democrats loss of Congress in 1994. After that, once in control of Congress, Republicans pushed hard for deep cuts in spending in order to cut the deficits that their superhero, Ronald Reagan, had created in the first place. Once Clinton actually managed to balance the budget-significantly sooner than originally expected-the surplus was then ripe for the plucking by Bush II, who then went well beyond that, quickly creating even larger defiticits than those that Clinton origianlly faced. In turn, these deficits are intended to be used to further decimate the welfare state, forcing the privatization of Social Security and Medicare.
Somewhat naively, Wikipedia goes on to note:
Many politicians and supply-side advocates seem to misundersand the Laffer curve. They claim that every tax cut will increase revenues, when the curve clearly shows that only cutting tax rates to the right of the peak rate will increase revenues.
Cutting tax rates to the left of the peak rate will decrease revenues. Since Reagan's income tax cuts in the 1980s did not increase receipts, the Laffer curve would suggest that further tax cuts will not increase revenues either, since the economy is apparently to the left of the peak. The Bush administration has been reporting record revenues, however those are, once again, coming from FICA taxes, not the income taxes which were cut. Between 2000 and 2004, income tax revenues fell from $1,004.5 billion to $809 billion, while FICA tax revenues increased from $652.9 billion to $733.4.
I call this "naive" since this was hardly an innocent mistake-it was a fundamental aspect of the deception. In any sort of rational policy debate, the first thing one would expect to ask is "assuming this simplistic picture is true [see Martin Gardner's "Technosnarl" alternative below], where is the peak of the curve, and how can we be sure we've got it right?" But this question was never seriously asked in the first place, much less later on. It would have seemed rather obvious that if the argument were correct, European countries, with much, much higher tax rates, would have to be economic basket cases. But this was clearly not the case. The whole argument never held water from the very beginning. Except, of course, there never really was an argument. There was an intense propaganda push to stampede the tax cuts through, and after that there was just more and more repetition of claims about raising revnues by reducing taxes, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
[Martin Gardner's "Technosnarl" from his last column for Scientific American.] |
Behind The Curtain
What lay behind all this was a combination of different things at different orders of magnitude. One thing, simply was the entrenched power of the megacapitalist class, who had never accepted the legitimacy of the New Deal-which also meant, in effect that they had never accepted the legitimacy of democracy. Although they are not the same people, or in most cases part of the lineage of the old-line European aristocracy, their essential ideological allegience tends in that direction. It's not a coincidence that at the same time Reagan was being elected, the cyberpunk authors were inventing a dark vision of a neo-fuedal world order in the near future. This is the logic of the movement conservatives and it so deeply hostile to everything American that most people simply cannot comprehend it. By concentrating their power into building a tight coterie of institutions fitted for ideological warfare, they prepared for a campaign to politically take over the United States, and return it to a 19th Century, Gilded Age model of economics and politics-if not something even more ancient than that.
The Ameican people would never consciously and intentionally sign on for any of this, and so it was absolutely vital to use the technique of the big lie. Previously, conservatives had argued honestly that they wanted to cut government services. This was overwhelmingly unpopular. In the 1964, Gallup conducted a survey for researchers Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, who published their results three years later in the The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion. One of their most striking findings was that a plurality of self-identified conservatives-almost 50%--wanted to expand goverment services, while a clear majority wanted to expand them or keep them the same. Thus, even the conservative base did not support the honest elite conservative position. And so they committed themselves to lying: tax cuts would increase revenue, and government cuts would only target the "welfare queens" of Reagan's imagination.
The Russians Are Coming!
This was not the only aspect of the conservative big lie that came in with Reagan. Another aspect ws the claim that the Soviet Union was trying to win the Cold War-and was on the verge of succeeding. This lie was supported by a precursor of the PNAC cabal, which attacked the accurate CIA estimates that showed the Soviet Union in a weakened state. The propaganda resulting from this big lie lead to a massive military buildup throughout the 1980s, to fight an enemy that never existed-at least not in the form it was supposed to exist. Early on, the argument was even made that the Soviets could only be stopped by confronting them in a nuclear war. The sheer recklessness of the Reagan Administration produced a swift and massive anti-nuclear war movement, calling for a freeze in nuclear weapon buidling and deployment. The Nuclear Freeze Movement swept across the nation, and produced successful state and local referenda that dominated the 1982 mid-term elections-along with a respectable gain of seats by House Democrats. This stunning defeat lead to a quick reversal of strategy by the Reagan Administration, involving yet another big lie-the promise of "Star Wars," a missile shield that would protect the United States from a nuclea attack. The promise was so absurd on its face that thousands upon thousands of scientists signed a pledge refusing to work on it, because it was an obvious fraud.
The Big Lie
There were other big lies in the conservative package as well. In fact, Bush's "war on terror" should be seen as one more example. (We're attacked by a hermit in a cave, and this leads to a war against completely different people that lasts longer than WWII? What part of that is on the level?) But these are enough to make my basic point: conservatives used their concentrated political power not to push rational, realistically plausible policies, but to push fantasies along the lines of the "Big Lie" strategy devisded by the Nazis. This is not to say that they movement conservatives were Nazis. They weren't. Rather, both the Nazis and America's movement conservatives were animated by the same pre- and anti-democratic vision, that of the rule of European warrior-elites and their descendents, before the rise of modern, bourgoise, democratic Europe and America. And the only way they could possibly hope to acheive such a return to the past was through massive lies that would utterly change the mental landscape of the populations they hoped to rule over.
Thus, the first handicap that liberals and Democrats face is the sheer audacity and scope of what movement conservatives are up to. Even after almost 7 years of Bush, they simply cannot believe his audacity and disregard for democratic processess, and they can't believe it, because they do not allow themselves to even consider the even more profoundly anti-democratic aims of the movement that stands behind him. So long as people are playing within the framework of realist policymaking, it makes sense that proposals be reality-tested. More extreme ideas that fail reality-testing will be rejected, and those who promote them will be punished by loss of credibility. But that logic has been consciously and systematically undermined, over a prolonged period of time. As Ron Suskind so famously and so clearly informed us, that is not how the Bush Administration sees itself:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, "Look, I'm not going to debate it with you."
This is a fundamental reality, not just of the Bush Adminstration, but of the entire conservative movement, which has been building along these same lines since the 1960s. So long as liberals and Democrats fail to internalize this reality, fail to recognize that they are facing a fundamental enemy of freedom and democracy, they will continue to be politically ineffective to the point of sheer buffonery. It's not the only factor involved, not by a longshot. But it's sufficient all by itself to put them completely out of commission. |
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