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The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing Hardcover – September 1, 2007

4.0 out of 5 stars 9

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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.


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Editorial Reviews

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"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

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 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
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 out of 5 stars 9

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4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
9 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2016
You may have wondered as to why at the 2012 Republican Convention, not only was George W.Bush not invited, his name wasn't mentioned. To use Soviet terminology(esp during the Stalin era), "Dubya" was an "unperson" almost as much as those Stalin not only had shot or sent to the Gulag but were even airbrushed out of official Soviet photographs(ie Trotsky, Bukharin, Radek, Zinoviev). No wonder- the Bush Administration( fils) was the living example of the ideological zealotry of movement conservatism, as Greg Anrig chillingly demonstrates in his "The Conservatives HAve no Clothes:Why Right Wing Ideas Keep Failing". Be it tax cuts for the"base" "enhanced interrogation techniques"(that is to say TORTURE to the layman) for so-called "enemy/unlawful combatants" attempts to privatize Social Security, "climate change" (aka global warming) and of course the piece de resistance- "regime change in Iraq" in pursuit of non existent ties between Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime and Al Qaeda!
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!
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2008
If you need to convince someone that the conservative ideal don't work, read this book and take notes. It is full of detailed statistics and minute detail that is referenced out the gazoo. It makes for hard reading. I had to go back several times and make notes just to figure out what he had really said.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2007
Greg Anrig provides a comprehensive critique of all major policies of conservative politics in a compact format generously footnoted to allow the reader to check the sources for him/herself. His book is an interesting read and a great sourcebook for those wishing to know the "other" side's view of the views and practices of the Republicans.

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.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2007
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.
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Top reviews from other countries

M Clark
4.0 out of 5 stars An explanation of how conservative idealology has screwed up government
Reviewed in Germany on January 23, 2019
Although the book was published in 2007, it tells a story that is important for today. it looks closely at the many things conservatives have promoted as successful examples of their ideology in practice and finds that they have in reality been major failures. The analysis of these examples is invaluable.