Buy new:
$9.23$9.23
$4.80
delivery:
Thursday, April 25
Ships from: ccsellables Sold by: ccsellables
Buy used: $6.88
Other Sellers on Amazon
& FREE Shipping
98% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
+ $3.95 shipping
96% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 3 to 4 days.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing Hardcover – September 1, 2007
Purchase options and add-ons
Why conservatism equals terrible government-and always will
Tax cuts that produce gargantuan budget deficits, an ill-conceived war that has diminished America’s ability to defend itself, the quiet evisceration of laws that protect public health, safety, and the environment—after six years of virtually absolute conservative rule, the results of nearly every right-wing policy, program, and initiative can be summed up in a single word: failure. How could a vast, carefully constructed political movement, which so recently patted itself on the back for winning “the war of ideas,” be so utterly feckless when it comes to governing the nation?
In The Conservatives Have No Clothes, the respected policy expert and journalist Greg Anrig offers a scathing indictment of right-wing ideology and reveals point by point how and why the conservative agenda pro-duces terrible government. In a series of devastating critiques, he examines ideas and policies espoused by the right and assesses the degree to which they have delivered (or not) on promises to make America stronger and safer, and our government smaller and more efficient.
According to Anrig, conservatives have developed an unusual—and unusually disastrous—method of governing. The first step is to drown out attention paid to a genuine policy problem, like abysmal inner-city schools or Osama bin Laden, with alarms over an imaginary crisis like the failure of all of America’s public schools or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The second step is to trump up reasons why the imaginary problem requires weakening the government’s domestic capabilities, as with private school vouchers, or exerting unilateral force abroad, as with the Iraq invasion. The third step is to make up stories explaining why the failure isn’t really a failure. The fourth and final step is to leave it to the Democrats to solve both the original problem and the new one created by the conservative policy.
Anrig documents the impact of this sophisticated sabotage on the performance of numerous government agencies, including FEMA, which reverted from a model praised by both parties in the 1990s back into a “turkey farm” for political loyalists under the managerial practices promoted by conservative think tanks. The disastrously inept response to Hurricane Katrina was the result not just of incompetence, but of the right’s ideology. Anrig also shows how movement conservatism’s ideas have inflicted damage on state and local government, causing Colorado’s national rankings in education and health care to plummet to the bottom under the constraints of Grover Norquist’s holy grail, the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights.
Despite their decisive defeat in the 2006 elections, right-wing ideologues show no sign of calling off their war on American government. The Conservatives Have No Clothes offers more than a powerful condemnation of their past offenses; it is a field guide for assessing and responding to whatever they come up with next.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTrade Paper Press
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2007
- Dimensions6.46 x 1.1 x 9.46 inches
- ISBN-100470044365
- ISBN-13978-0470044360
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
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
"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
Review
"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
From the Inside Flap
Tax cuts that produce gargantuan budget deficits, an ill-conceived war that has diminished America's ability to defend itself, the quiet evisceration of laws that protect public health, safety, and the environmentafter six years of virtually absolute conservative rule, the results of nearly every right-wing policy, program, and initiative can be summed up in a single word: failure. How could a vast, carefully constructed political movement, which so recently patted itself on the back for winning "the war of ideas," be so utterly feckless when it comes to governing the nation?
In The Conservatives Have No Clothes, the respected policy expert and journalist Greg Anrig offers a scathing indictment of right-wing ideology and reveals point by point how and why the conservative agenda produces terrible government. In a series of devastating critiques, he examines ideas and policies espoused by the right and assesses the degree to which they have delivered (or not) on promises to make America stronger and safer, and our government smaller and more efficient.
According to Anrig, conservatives have developed an unusualand unusually disastrousmethod of governing. The first step is to drown out attention paid to a genuine policy problem, like abysmal inner-city schools or Osama bin Laden, with alarms over an imaginary crisis like the failure of all of America's public schools or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The second step is to trump up reasons why the imaginary problem requires weakening the government's domestic capabilities, as with private school vouchers, or exerting unilateral force abroad, as with the Iraq invasion. The third step is to make up stories explaining why the failure isn't really a failure. The fourth and final step is to leave it to the Democrats to solve both the original problem and the new one created by the conservative policy.
Anrig documents the impact of this sophisticated sabotage on the performance of numerous government agencies, including FEMA, which reverted from a model praised by both parties in the 1990s back into a "turkey farm" for political loyalists under the managerial practices promoted by conservative think tanks. The disastrously inept response to Hurricane Katrina was the result not just of incompetence, but of the right's ideology. Anrig also shows how movement conserva-tism's ideas have inflicted damage on state and local government, causing Colorado's national rankings in education and health care to plummet to the bottom under the constraints of Grover Norquist's holy grail, the Taxpayers' Bill of Rights.
Despite their decisive defeat in the 2006 elections, right-wing ideologues show no sign of calling off their war on American government. The Conservatives Have No Clothes offers more than a powerful condemnation of their past offenses; it is a field guide for assessing and responding to whatever they come up with next.
From the Back Cover
Why conservatism equals terrible governmentand 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
About the Author
GREG ANRIG is Vice President of Programs at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and former Washington correspondent for Money magazine. He has written online for the American Prospect and Mother Jones, coedited volumes of essays about civil liberties, immigration, and Social Security, and is a regular contributor to the liberal blog tpmcafe.com.
Product details
- Publisher : Trade Paper Press; 1st edition (September 1, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0470044365
- ISBN-13 : 978-0470044360
- Item Weight : 1.16 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.46 x 1.1 x 9.46 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #7,818,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,877 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
So what went wrong? The answer(although Anrig does not connect the dots) lies I suspect in an overly ideological approach to a whole of host of issues( eerily reminiscent of Marxist ideologues now departed from the scene- it;s no coincidence that many so-called neo-conservatives were Trotskyists, Maoists and Stalinist ideologues in their youth or were influenced by same).
"Government is not the solution- government IS the problem!" Ronald Reagan once observed, but with all due respect to the "Gipper", Anrig demonstrates that just because government cannot do everything does not mean that it can or should try to do nothing with a whole degree of social and political problems.
To paraphrase Lincoln Steffens in 1919, the American electorate in both 2008 and 2012, saw the future of what right wing Republicanism and it didn't WORK! Although this book was published in 2007, it was eerily prescient in predicting the likely rejection of Bush's Republican Party at the ballot box when Barack Obama decisively defeated first John McCain in 2008 and then Mitt Romney in 2012.
So(to use the title of a famous polemical pamphlet written in 1903 by Lenin) what is to be done? Well for a start it would help if Democrats ceased trying to steal the GOP's clothes and come up with some ideas of their own- liberalism has a proud history of its own- if FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ Jimmy Carter were all proud to be called or to call themselves liberals then it's good enough for their current day heirs to do. They could make the point that Ayn Rand style laissez faire capitalism is as as heartless in effect(though not as overtly brutally bloody) as Soviet style Communism, that any attempt to return to the "Gilded Age" of 19th century America is, to quote Republican President Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower pretty much nonsensical!
Most people who have even cursory knowledge of current events will not really find much that is fundamentally new. Left-of-center authors have already written scores of volumes excoriating Republican policies. Their fundamental accusations have always been the same: lying about the reasons for going into Iraq, gross mismanagement of the Katrina disaster, and blowing up the national deficit by passing tax cuts for the upper class. Anrig really hasn't said anything new.
But while Anrig is a capable fact-finder, he is scanty on solutions.
Does he want to withdraw all US troops from Iraq? Even many current Democrats in Congress oppose unilateral pullouts.
Does he want to increase taxes to cut the deficit? By how much?
And how would Democrats have handled Katrina differently? Considering that Democrat politicians were in charge in Louisiana during Katrina, it is hard to grasp how the bulk of the rescue-recovery mistakes could be blamed on Republicans, especially when the Democrats there refused the White House's initial offer of help.
The Democrats won back both houses of Congress in Nov 2006 for a single reason: to end US involvement in the Iraq War. Ten months into their term, they have yet to pass even a troop reduction. In fact, troop strength ballooned by 20,000 after the historic election that was supposed to have sent a message a change to the White House.
Like Anrig's book, the Democrats continue to be long on criticism, but short on practical alternatives.

