The title of Jonathan Chait's book is its worst aspect. It makes him seem like a left wing demagogue, which he isn't. But it does force on him this witty introduction:
"I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics - I mean, what's really happening - I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not... so please give me a chance to explain myself when I tell you that 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"
Chait's thesis is hardly novel: In recent decades, the Republican Party has turned a hard right, pulling the entire American political landscape with it. And yet, ironically, the American Public is moving in the opposite direction, becoming increasingly Liberal.
One of Chait's main theses is that journalists, including those in leading outlets, don't understand economics. Yet based on his footnotes, most of Chait's Economics, Sociology and History comes from the popular press. He quotes neither official data nor scholarly literature.
He consequently makes embarrassing mistakes: minor ones, like claiming that Communists wanted the US to enter WWII before the USSR nonaggression pact with Germany, which was actually signed before the war's outbreak (p. 259). Substantial ones, too: he misconstrues the story of the Supreme Court confirmation of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Chait sometimes applies a single label (predominantly "Conservatives") to refer to different groups with different agendas: Libertarians, K-Street Lobbyists, Bush Cronies, etc. And I suspect that at least some of the economic data he offers can be differently interpreted.
And yet... even if Chait isn't right about everything, I think the picture he paints is essentially correct and disturbing.
Since the 1970s, the GOP changed from a moderate party committed to smaller government and balanced budgets to an extremist faction wedded to a socially conservative ideology that few Americans support, and to an economic agenda that virtually none do: Not merely extreme tax cutting, but Corporate well-fare, massive corruption, and a bigger, not smaller government.
How did that happen? Mainly because of the new constituency of the Republican Party. The traditional Republican Party, like the Democrats, had a large constituency, with different interests and ideologies. In classic Madisonian fashion, these various factions and interests mostly balanced each other out: corruption and partisanship were checked by the need not to alienate parts of the delicate conservative coalition.
But the contemporary Republican Party constitutes several tribes with remarkably different goals. The Social conservatives care almost exclusively about so called "moral issues"; the foreign policy hawks about US military preparedness. Skillfully, the small (but moneyed) corporate-well-fare tail managed to wag the economically indifferent dog. Because Social and Hawkish Conservatives don't really care about economics, they don't moderate the Republican Party economically.
Without significant competing economic interests to please, the Republicans lined up behind its two major economic initiatives: Tax Cuts and Corporate hands-out. And they found a new and powerful weapon: the business lobbies.
Traditionally, the business lobbies were fairly unpartisan; they joined interests in both parties to promote their goals as the case demanded. But because each party's positions would shift according to its internal politics, they did not remain committed to any one party. This, says Chait, changed in the 1990s: "when Republican won control of Congress... they set about to reshape [The Lobbies] as a partisan Republican force... Republicans demanded total loyalty from [the Lobbies] and offered total loyalty in return. The business lobby and the GOP would no longer be separate parties with overlapping interests but partners in an ironclad alliance" (p. 56).
The Republican commitment to rabid tax cutting and crony Capitalism faced a serious problem: the majority of the American people do not support those policies. Most Americans support taxing progressively, balancing the budget, and oppose privatizing Social Security.
This is where the "Big Con" comes in: how did the Republicans manage to enact their agenda against a potentially hostile public opinion? Essentially, Chait claim, they did it by lying. Instead of proclaiming their economic agenda, they concealed it: the rationale for the Bush tax cuts kept changing; the extent of its regresivity suppressed; and cronyist policies were disguised by Orwellian renaming: a timber hand out was "the Healthy Forest Initiative"; pollution became the "Clear Sky Act". (Full Disclosure: these are complicated issues, and I am not suggesting anyone take me, or Mr. Chait, as a final authority on them. But I think the general picture is telling).
The Republicans encountered little opposition from the press. Institutionally geared towards "balance" and generally ignorant of economics, environmental science, and the like, the press fell easily into the kind of stories the Republican wanted, stating implicitly that the truth was on both sides and that the Democrats were no better then the republican. It played into the hands of republicans by focusing on the politicians' "character" rather than agendas, and by bestowing equal credibility on both sides. As Paul Krugman famously put it, if the white house were to declare that the Earth was flat, newspapers' headlines would be "Shape of the Earth: Opinions Defer".
But Chait fails to explain why the Republicans advantage in press manipulation: Democrats are on general more educated and media savvy. if Britain's Tony Blair could out spin the best of his rivals, why can't US democrats?
I think Chait underemphasizes the widespread feeling that in the 1970s, America veered too far to the left. In the 1990s, as Bill Clinton acknowledged, even Democrats became "Eisenhower Republicans" (p. 234). The radicalization of the Right may be mostly an over-compensation.
For there are limits to the Republican Revolution: the failure to significantly restrict Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. The major edifice of the New Deal seem to have survived the onslaught of the Radical Republicans. Perhaps the Big Con isn't so big, after all
