Reading E. J. Dionne Jr.’s Why the Right Went Wrong provides an illuminating contrast to Jane
Mayer’s Dark Money. Both cover the
same history: the Republican Party and conservatism since the 1950s. But
whereas Mayer focuses on the mechanisms by which economic and social
right-wingers took over the Republican Party and drove public discourse to the
right, Dionne’s story is one of how their ideas developed and changed over
time.
The overarching narrative Dionne relates is the gradual
movement of mainstream Republicanism away from accommodation with the New Deal
and towards the extreme social and economic policies of the John Birch Society.
Dionne tells his tale with an unexpected naivety, rarely if ever questioning the
purity of motives of right-wingers. He may disagree with them, but he presents
them as principled individuals. Unlike Mayer, Dionne never details how inextricably
intertwined the ideas of the funders of conservatism were with their own
self-interest. He never explores the way economic right-wingers have exploited
the fears and mythologies of social conservatives. His picture of Bush II is not
as a crony capitalist who misled the public so his associates could benefit
from government war contracts. No, in Dionne’s rendition (pun intended), George
the Torturer is a “compassionate conservative” against whom less forgiving and
more right-wing conservatives rebelled. We never learn from Dionne the extremes
of lying and manipulation in which a few ultra-wealthy families and their
educated and well-paid factotums have gone to subvert the Democratic process.
Another difference between the two books is that Mayer’s
describes the complete battlefield of ideas in the American system, including
the dense network of nonprofit organizations, think tanks and university
centers that promulgate and promote the ideas that animate politics, what
William Domhoff called the “public policy model” by which an oligarchy can
control the democratic process. By contrast, Dionne limits himself to the final
stage of the process, elections and a few pieces of major legislation. By doing
so, I believe he underestimates the degree to which a handful of billionaires
have high-jacked the political process, which is the major theme of Mayer’s
tome.
Reading both these
books in the same month also made me realize the profound impact that two actions
the Reagan administration took have had on the course of U.S. history since the
1980s. First, there was the massive Reagan tax break to the wealthy he pushed
through early in his first term, which gave billionaires enormous amounts of new money
to fight against social welfare programs and for lower taxes, at the same time
giving them more incentive to do so, i.e., more wealth to shelter. Mayer
doesn’t explicitly connect the tax cut to increased rightwing spending on
politics, but she makes it impossible for the thoughtful reader not to draw
that conclusion.
Dionne drops the other shoe: In Reagan’s second term his Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) ended the Fairness Doctrine, which required the holders of television or
radio broadcast licenses to present controversial issues of public importance
in a manner the FCC deemed honest, equitable, and balanced. By ending the
Fairness Doctrine, Reagan enabled radio and television stations to broadcast
partisan ideologues such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity without
having to air opposing views. The billionaires bought up stations, created
networks and created the many voices who made and still make the same false
statements about unions being bad, taxes being too high, and the nation being
overrun by immoral and unreligious outsiders (recently to include the President
himself!). While the creation of hundreds of shell organizations to promote
fallacious research and self-serving theories helped the billionaires move the
conversation to the right inside the beltway, the right-wing radio and TV
demagogues reduced these ideas to simple messages and insults for those in
America’s heartland.
Throughout his book,
Dionne postulates that there is a good conservatism and a bad conservatism. The
bad conservatism “resisted movements on behalf of African-Americans, workers,
women and other groups facing exclusion,” whereas the good conservatism offers
“incremental adaptation” as an alternative to change that is too radical or
comes too quickly. In describing good conservatism, he evokes Edmund Burke, the
18th century British politician who supported the American Revolution but not
the French one. In Dionne’s reading, conservatives go wrong when they oppose all
change and do the right thing when they merely try to direct change in an
appropriate direction, e.g., in using a private model to provide universal
healthcare.
But Dionne’s differentiation
turns conservatism into nothing more than an attitude or a point of view. The
good conservative accepts the basic premises of a mixed economy and a
state-sponsored safety net for the poor, elderly and disadvantaged, but wants
to make sure we are careful about change and make it according to basic
American and constitutional principles.
Unfortunately, the
core of the conservative movement since the New Deal has comprised a number of explicitly
stated bad ideas that would turn back the clock on centuries of progress, such
as no government regulation, no unions, no minimum wage, low taxes on the
wealthy, no Social Security, market solutions to all social problems and
enforcing the public morality of the 19th century on private individuals.
Supporting these conservative views is an ugly and mostly implicit mix of
nativism, racism and sexism.
In other words,
conservatives are not the most reasonable among those who want to improve the
world, as Dionne wants them to be and imagines they once were. Instead, they
have a consistent political platform that over the past 35 years has set the
United States on the path of becoming a nation of a few rich and mostly poor.
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