The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing
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Written by Greg Anrig.
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Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
Why conservatism equals terrible government-and always will"Ending the conservative era requires organizing, yes, but also hard thinking and shrewd analysis. When progressives of the future look back at how they triumphed, one of the people they'll thank is Greg Anrig. Drawing inspiration from the work of the early neoconservatives who demolished public support for liberal programs, Anrig casts a sharp eye on conservative ideas and nostrums and shows that many of them simply don't work because they are rooted more in ideological dreams than in reality. Facts are stubborn things, Ronald Reagan once said, and Anrig makes good use of them in this important and engaging book."
-E. J. Dionne, syndicated columnist and author of Why Americans Hate Politics
"Greg Anrig's wide-ranging and perceptive book looks beyond the ideology of the right and offers a persuasive account of the many policy failures that have emerged out of the conservative movement. Anrig has put the Bush administration and the right to a test that they themselves have carefully avoided. He has held them accountable not for their ideas, but for their performance."
-Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of History, Columbia University
"In this well-researched and witty book, Anrig critiques 'right-wing ideas' by examining what the policies and programs that embodied them have wrought over the last three decades.While giving several conservative ideas their due, he finds their record to be mixed at best."
-John J. DiIulio Jr., political science professor and first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
"With fastidious research and unimpeachable facts, Greg Anrig establishes the sound proposition that competent governance is incompatible with disbelief in government. The odd combination of the religious right dictating personal morality, 'neoconservatism' preaching unilateral interventionism, and radical libertarian tax cuts have cast our Republic adrift from its moorings. Restoration of common sense to government is long overdue."
-Gary Hart, Former United States Senator
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Dale Brayden thinks this book is Worth Reading.
I only skimmed the first few chapters of this book - it was just more detail and more analysis than I wanted. The main take-away for me was that right-wing policies have consistently failed because they are fundamentally flawed policies. Some on the right would have you believe that Bush's presidency has been a failure because of the simple incompetence and corruption of this administration. But the fact is that Bush's policies have failed in the same way that Bush I's, Reagan's, and Nixon's policies failed, and for mostly the same reasons.
Anrig points out that the right-wing has a consistent strategy: 1) if there is an actual problem that government can solve, divert attention from that problem onto a pseudo-problem from which political hay can be made; 2) implement some sort of privatization scheme to 'solve' the pseudo-problem; 3) leave it to the Democrats to clean up the resulting mess. Think, for example, of the problem of underfunded and chaotic inner-city public schools. Right-wingers turned that specific (and solvable) problem into the notion that public schools generally are failures (because of unionization and bureaucracy, of course!). Then they pushed through private-school measures (vouchers, tax credits, etc.) in a successful attempt to further weaken public schools. The private schools (including and especially home-schooling) are deeply religious-based for the most part, so supporting them with public money is unconstitutional and just plain wrong. More tellingly, private schools have done no better than public schools once results are adjusted for income and ethnicity. So the right-wing has managed to gut the public schools and reduce our overall educational base; spend more money than it would have cost to fix the original, actual, problem; and divert billions of dollars into private education corporations that then funnel part of their profit back to the right-wing of the Republican party.
This pattern repeats itself again and again. And it is a strategy that was and remains an explicit recommendation of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. This is not incompetence, it is deliberate malfeasance, and is part of a decades-long strategy to gain permanent political control of the country.