The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: heckuva job, lucky duckies, movement conservatism, Social Security, United States, Iraq War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

"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 neo-conservatives 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

Product Description

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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (September 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470044365
• ISBN-13: 978-0470044360
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #493,441 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An essential guide to the arguments progressives need to be making, September 29, 2007

By	Iago the Critic (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

I was eager to read this book as soon as I first heard about it from a "book club" discussion involving Greg Anrig on the "TPM Cafe" blog site. To paraphrase Yeats, the fundamental problem with American politics today is that those with the best ideas lack all conviction, and those with the worst (and provably failed) ideas are "full of passionate intensity." This book is an essential step toward fixing that. Progressives need to highlight conservatism's unending failures much, much more often than they do; it is just bizarre that, today, we've got the political heirs of Herbert Hoover making economic policy, the heirs of Jim Crow segregationists (if not the old segregationists themselves) making social policy, the Bible-thumping last holdouts against modern biology making cultural and science policy, and the heirs of Gen. Edwin Walker and the John Birchers making foreign and military policy. If more people recognized those continuities, conservatives would have no credibility whatsoever, and wouldn't be able to continue holding the power that allows them to keep on repeating versions of the same idiotic mistakes (Iraq, Katrina, etc.). Anrig's book is a blow struck against this historical amnesia. Plus he's a very good writer. If you want to understand why so many things have been going wrong, and/or want to be better armed for political arguments with conservatives, you really should read this.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Case for the Prosecution, September 30, 2007

By	Charles R. Morris - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are a number of books denouncing the idiocies that pass for right-wing policy making, but most make the case in broad strokes and rarely penetrate beneath the headlines. Anrig's book is the first I've seen that really builds the detailed case. His book goes issue-by-issue, agency-by-agency, deep into the third and fourth layers of policy-making and execution. FEMA, charter schools, regulatory disasters, tax giveaways -- they're all here, along with the politicization and corruption of the process and the demoralization of the people in the trenches who try to make government work. It's a powerful case, crisply and clearly written.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Every American should read this book, September 30, 2007

By	BevD (Cincinnati Ohio) - See all my reviews

Not just Progressives, but every American who wonders where it all went wrong in this country and wants to make it right, should read this book.

Anrig describes for us the ideas of American Twentieth Century conservatism and the failure of the movement to move beyond the most facile and superficial arguments to provide an intellectual and honest base for their philosophy. While conservatives are experts at setting up progressive strawmen and batting them around (and have in fact a cottage industry which endlessly churns them out) they've failed to offer any substantial arguments to support their ideas - because, as Anrig so clearly points out, there are none.

Greg Anrig, in his exceptionally well written book, has given the progressive movement and all Americans the answer to the question, "how did we lose our way?" and more importantly, tells us how to find a way forward.