The question that is really in need of an answer is exactly how the right has risen to power over the last four decades and how and why the right continues to be a dominant political force, despite advancing what should otherwise be very unpopular economic policies. This book provides one of the best and most concise answers to that question that I’ve come across.
The answer, as the authors explain, is fairly straightforward. It begins with a question philosophers and statesmen have been asking about democracy as far back as ancient Greece: What happens when an economic system that concentrates wealth in the hands of the few is combined with a political system that gives the vote to the many?
What happens is two distinct economic classes develop divergent and competing interests. Capitalism creates a class of economic elites that try to preserve their wealth, while democracy gives the vote to the masses, who can collectively vote for wealth redistribution. To prevent this from happening, the economic elites require political representation, and that political representation is the Republican party.
The Republican party, however, faces a daunting task, described by the authors as the Conservative Dilemma:
“Then and now, the basic question for conservative leaders was the same: how to reconcile their allegiance to wealth and power with the need to attract the electoral support of voters without much of either.”
It’s no secret that the right’s core constituency is big business and the wealthy, but to win elections, the right must appeal to a voter base that has little income or wealth. As the authors demonstrate in great detail, all conservative political strategy is centered on finding a way out of this dilemma.
To the right’s credit, they’ve been wildly successful in their solution to the conservative dilemma. It’s a hard sell to tell your voter base that your economic plan essentially amounts to taking all economic growth and channeling it to the top 1 percent of earners while everyone else’s income remains stagnant, as has happened over the last four decades.
This is why the right has figured out that they’d better not talk about economics too much. The better strategy is to create cultural division, to get their voter base to hate the left so much socially and culturally that they are willing to vote against their own economic interests. And in this regard, the right could not have done a better job.
And the left plays right into it by largely ignoring economic issues as well. The right has set the conversation and the left plays right along, in many cases themselves moving far right economically, if not culturally.
The right knows the game they can win: By aligning itself with Christian fundamentalists, the NRA, and conservative media outlets, the Rupublican party spends almost all of its time—not advancing any practical solutions to political problems—but rather cultivating hate and anger towards liberals. If people hate each other culturally, they cannot unite economically should be the motto of the GOP.
The authors also dispel a common and annoying tendency for people to believe that both political parties are equally corrupt and biased. You often hear some variation of this statement: “Sure, the right is biased, but the left is equally guilty.” This is objectively and quantifiably false. Of course the left displays bias on many occasions, but what political scientists have found in the US is a phenomenon known as “asymmetric polarization,” where the right has drifted further right than the left has drifted left.
The Republican party in the US has radicalized, and is now further right compared to 1) its own historical policy stances, 2) conservative parties in other nations, and 3) the economic policy preferences of its own voter base. The left in the US, on the other hand, is considerably to the RIGHT of other liberal parties in other countries. There may be bias on both sides, but it is far from symmetrical.
The right advocates for radical free market fundamentalism, extreme cultural division, nationalism, authoritarianism, and a concentrated attack on democratic institutions and voting rights. For all the liberal bias that does exist, there is simply no left equivalents to these extreme positions.
There is good news, however. As the authors point out, the conservative strategy is not sustainable. Winning elections through constantly criticizing the other party is a tiresome game, and eventually people come to learn that you have no good policy ideas yourself. The fact is, an economic strategy that distributes wealth UPWARDS is a con game that can trick the population for only so long, once we stop distracting ourselves with manufactured cultural divisions.
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