Jonathan Chait has a provocative op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, the thesis of which is that despite the failue of liberal Democrats to get its policy goals implemented in Congress, the conservatives / GOP are failing as well, specifically in regard to the traditional conservative goals of keeping government from playing a large role in society. He describes this current situation of lose-lose from the opposing political ideologies as a manifestation of the “fallacy of zero-sum politics”.
In advancing his argument, however, Chait ( a columnist at the self-described “centrist Democratic” New Republic) blatantly mischaracterizes the true motives and agenda of the Bush administration and its sychophantic conservative bretheren. He states matter-of-factly:
In 1964, the federal government spent 18.5 cents of the American economic dollar. In 2005, it spent 20.5 cents. This is not what small-government conservatives would call progress. So, yes, the conservatives have amassed a lot of power in Washington. But I’m not sure their “success” is the sort that liberals really ought to emulate.
When conservatives see this same expansion of government, they see liberalism triumphant. [. . .] The Bush presidency has been rife with acts of big government, but nearly all of them have been the sorts of things liberals and centrists abhor. The Medicare giveaway, the corporate tax bill, the unprecedented pork, the tariffs — all were designed for no other purpose than to maximize the profits of pro-Republican business entities. [. . .] The mistake . . . conservatives make here is in thinking that because these policies were bad from a conservative point of view, they must be good from a liberal (or, at least, a moderate) point of view. In fact, they were awful from any point of view, save that of their direct financial beneficiaries.
The politics that has dominated Washington the last half-dozen years is a corrupt brand of right-wing corporatism. People who reside in the highest 1% of the income spectrum or have K Street lobbyists at their command have done very well. But the philosophical program that most conservatives advocate — and by “most” I’m excluding the small minority who value tax cuts over everything else — has lost.
Chait assumes here that the current generation of conservatives really care about keeping government small and efficient, as opposed to hypocritically trying to justify holding down federal outlays on social insurance programs (e.g. Medicare, education, Social Security, infrastructure, job training and microenterprise programs and the list goes on and on. . .) to fund the $2 trillion, illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq, the building of a pointless and expensive missile defense shield, and other assorted wastes of tax revenue. The paleoconservatives, those that believe that the government that governs least is the government that governs best, have been co-opted by the radical, reactionary and military-interventist neoconservatives in 21st Century America. Both of these groups have been conflated by Chait into being merely “conservatives”, but I would argue the bottom line is that the GOP has fought a civil war between these two groups and the neocons have won in economic, social/religious and of course foreign/military policy.
In that sense, the conservatives haven’t lost, as Chait presumes. More accurately, the neocons have continued to marginalize their paleoconservative colleagues. His argument that cutting taxes is the “the philosophical program that most conservatives advocate” ignores reams of empirical evidence to the contrary. “Conservatives”, i.e. neocons, value a lot of other priorities beside tax cuts. And those holding these priorities, such as prosecuting war without end, government invasion of personal privacy and closing the separation between church and state, do not represent the minority of conservatism. . .evidence demonstrates that today they represent the majority and controlling interest of the movement.
Amen, Steve. Chait is a fool. Maybe we should call him, “Broder, Jr.”