After the 1994 election gave Republicans control of Congress, they tried—as we have seen—to undermine the financing of Medicare. They failed, and Bush the younger actually pushed through a significant expansion in Medicare, to cover prescription drugs. But this was clearly intended to provide political cover, and the new program was designed in a way that favored drug company interests. Moreover, by introducing a large subsidy for Medicare Advantage plans, in which tax money is funneled through private-sector middlemen, Bush’s Medicare bill took a major step toward Gingrich’s goal of privatizing the program. In 2005 Bush sought to partially privatize Social Security, while cutting promised future benefits; if implemented, Bush’s plan would have eliminated traditional Social Security within a few decades. Like Reagan’s attempt to scale back Social Security, however, this attempt quickly failed.
So the difference between the parties is not an illusion. Republicans cut taxes on the rich and try to shrink government benefits and undermine the welfare state. Democrats raise taxes on the rich while trying to expand government benefits and strengthen the welfare state.
And the public has picked up on the change. In the sixties and seventies, voters tended to be more or less evenly divided on the question of whether there was a significant difference between the parties. By 2004, however, 76 percent of Americans saw significant differences between the parties, up from 46 percent in 1972.[3]
“Comprehensive health insurance,” declared the president, “is an idea whose time has come in America. Let us act now to assure all Americans financial access to high quality medical care.” Was that Bill Clinton speaking? No, it was Richard Nixon, whose Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan, proposed in 1974, broadly resembled plans being offered by liberal Democrats like John Edwards today. The legislation never got very far, however, because Nixon was soon enveloped in the Watergate affair.[4]
Modern movement conservatives sometimes say, contemptuously, that Nixon governed as a liberal. And in terms of economic and environmental policy, it’s true, at least by today’s standards. In addition to proposing universal health care, Nixon pushed for a guaranteed minimum income. On the revenue side, Nixon pushed through a tax increase in 1969, including creation of the alternative minimum tax, which was intended to crack down on wealthy Americans who managed to use tax shelters to avoid taxes. On another front he passed the Clean Air Act, and sent dozens of environmental measures to Congress. Veterans of the Environmental Protection Agency have told me that the Nixon years were a golden age.
Nixon, in short, was a transitional figure. Although he used many of the political tactics associated with movement conservatism, he was a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, as were many Republicans. The character of the Republican Party changed rapidly in the post-Nixon years. In 1984 Thomas Edsall of the
Such previously hostile and mutually suspicious groups as the corporate lobbying community; ideological right-wing organizations committed to a conservative set of social and cultural values; sunbelt entrepreneurial interests, particularly independent oil; a number of so-called neo-conservative or cold war intellectuals with hard- line views on defense and foreign policy who, although sometimes nominally Democratic, provide support for the politics and policies of the GOP; economists advocating radical alteration of the tax system, with tax preferences skewed toward corporations and the affluent—all of these groups found that the Republican Party offered enough common ground for the formation of an alliance.[5]
In other words, movement conservatism had taken over the GOP.
Ronald Reagan was the first movement conservative president. Within Ronald Reagan’s inner circle, views that had once been confined to what Eisenhower described as a “tiny splinter group” reigned: David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, considered Social Security an example of “closet socialism,” while fervent supply-siders, who believed that cutting taxes would increase revenue, were given key positions in the Treasury Department and elsewhere in the government. Reagan also did his best to reverse Nixon’s environmental achievements, slashing the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency and gutting its enforcement activities. His first secretary of the interior, James Watt, was a fervent antienvironmentalist with strong ties to the religious right who quintupled the amount of public land open to coal mining. Watt was famously forced to resign after boasting that his staff included “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”[6]
Reagan’s ability to impose a movement conservative agenda was, however, limited by political realities. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives throughout his administration. Republicans held a majority in the Senate until his last two years in office, but many Senate Republicans were still Eisenhower-style moderates. These political realities forced Reagan to moderate his policies. For example, although his inner circle wanted to slash Social Security benefits, he was eventually forced to secure Social Security’s finances with a tax increase instead.
After Reagan, however, the GOP became thoroughly radicalized. Consider the 2004 platform of the Texas Republican Party, which gives an idea of what the party faithful really think: national platforms have to present at least an appearance of moderation, but in Texas Republicans can be Republicans. It calls for the elimination of federal agencies “including, but not limited to, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; the position of Surgeon General; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Education, Commerce, and Labor.” The platform also calls for the privatization of Social Security and the abolition of the minimum wage. In effect Texas Republicans want to repeal the New Deal completely.
In fact movement conservatives want to go even further, as illustrated by the campaign to end taxes on inherited wealth. The estate tax is an ancient institution, introduced in its modern form in 1916. It is the most progressive of federal taxes—that is, it falls more disproportionately on the wealthy than any other tax. In the late 1990s, before the Bush tax cuts, a mere 2 percent of decedents had estates large enough to face any tax at all. In terms of income, the richest 1 percent of the population paid almost two-thirds of the estate tax, and the richest 10 percent paid 96 percent of the taxes.[7]
Since only a handful of voters pay estate taxes, while many voters benefit from government programs the estate tax helps pay for, any party seeking to cater to median or typical voters would, you might think, be inclined to leave the estate tax alone. In fact, that’s what the Republican Party did for seventy years: Its last serious attempt to repeal the estate tax until recent years took place in 1925–26—and this attempt failed in large part because even some Republicans opposed repeal.[8] But in the 1990s the Republican Party once again began making estate tax repeal a priority. And the 2001 Bush tax cuts included a phaseout of the estate tax, with rates going down and exemptions going up, concluding with total elimination of the tax in 2010. In other words today’s Republican party is willing to go further than the Republican Party of the 1920s, the last, golden years of the Long Gilded Age, in cutting taxes on the wealthy.
Some movement conservatives are open about their desire to turn back the clock. Grover Norquist, the antitax advocate who has been described as the “field marshal” of the tax-cut drive, is best known for saying, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”[9] Even more revealing, however, is his statement that he wants to bring America back to “the McKinley era, absent the protectionism,” to the way America was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”[10]
The modern Republican Party, then, has been taken over by radicals, people who want to undo the twentieth century. There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the GOP is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship. There remains, however, the question of how movement conservatives managed to seize and keep control of one of America’s two major political parties.
The nature of the hold movement conservatism has on the Republican Party may be summed up very simply: Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy. That is, there is an interlocking set of institutions
