conservatism. The hard right had already taken over the College Republicans by 1972, when none other than Karl Rove was elected the organization’s chairman. Other notable College Republican alumni include Rick Santorum, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and Jack Abramoff. Movement conservatives run the Republican National Committee, which means that they are responsible for recruiting congressional candidates; inevitably they choose men and women in their own image. The few remaining Republican moderates in Congress were, with rare exceptions, first elected pre-Reagan or, at the latest, before the 1994 election that sealed the dominance of the Gingrich wing of the party.
One last point: The institutions of movement conservatism ensure a continuity of goals that has no counterpart on the other side. Jimmy Carter tried to establish a national energy policy that would reduce dependence on imported oil, and that was that; nobody expected Bill Clinton to pick things up where Carter left off. Ronald Reagan tried and failed to slash Social Security benefits; movement conservatives took that as merely a tactical setback. In a now-famous 1983 article, analysts from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation called for a “Leninist strategy” of undermining support for Social Security, to “prepare the political ground so that the fiasco of the last 18 months is not repeated.”[16] That strategy underlay George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize the system—and until or unless movement conservatism is defeated as thoroughly as pre–New Deal conservatism was, there will be more attempts in future.
The mechanics of the widening partisan divide are clear. Bitter partisanship has become the rule because the Republicans have moved right, and the GOP has moved right because it was taken over by movement conservatives. But there’s still the question of ultimate cause. Wealthy families who hate taxes, corporate interests that hate regulation, and intellectuals who believe that the welfare state is illegitimate have always been with us. In the fifties and sixties, however, these groups were marginal, treated by both parties as cranks. What turned them into a force powerful enough to transform American politics?
Movement conservatives themselves, to the extent that they think about the reasons for their rise at all, see it as a tale of good ideas triumphing over bad. The story goes something like this: The Great Depression, combined with leftist propaganda, misled people into believing that they needed a big government to protect them. The institutions of big government, in turn, became self-perpetuating. But brave men, from Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan, gradually taught Republicans that government is the problem, not the solution. And the partisan divide is there only because some people still haven’t seen the light.
At the opposite extreme from this heroic account of political change is the almost mechanistic view that growing economic inequality is the root cause of movement conservativism’s rise. As I explained in chapter 1, I began working on this book with that view, which goes something like this: Money buys influence, and as the richest few percent of Americans have grown richer thanks to unequalizing forces like technical change, they have become rich enough to buy themselves a party. In this view, the rise of movement conservatism is a by-product of rising inequality.
It’s certainly more plausible to think that the drastic rise in income inequality since the 1970s transformed American politics than to attribute it all to the brilliance of a few intellectuals. But the hypothesis that the rising concentration of income empowered the economic elite, driving the rightward shift of the GOP, runs up against a problem of timing. The sharp rightward shift of the Republican Party began before there was any visible increase in income inequality. Ronald Reagan was nominated in 1980, a year in which the rich were no richer, relative to the average American, than they had been during the Eisenhower years. In Congress the political shift began with the 1976 and 1978 elections. As Edsall points out, “the hard core of junior, ideologically committed Republican senators” grew from four in 1975 to eleven in 1979, with a corresponding shift also taking place in the House.[17] The takeover of the College Republicans by movement conservatives took place even earlier: Karl Rove was elected chairman in 1972. And the key institutions of movement conservatism were created at about the same time. For example, the Heritage Foundation was created in 1971. The Business Roundtable, which merged several loosely organized groups into a powerful lobby on behalf of procorporate politics—eventually forming the basis of Santorum’s K Street meetings—was formed in 1972, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was reborn as a significant lobbying force shortly after.
Add to this the evidence I laid out in chapter 7, that changes in institutions and norms lay behind much of the rise in inequality and that political change is what led to those changes in institutions and norms, and the mechanistic view that inequality moved the Republicans to the right loses most of its plausibility. It’s likely that rising income concentration reinforced the rightward trend of the GOP, as the number and wealth of donors able to lavish funds on suitably hard-line politicians grew. But something else must have gotten the process going.
That something, I believe, is the constellation of forces described in chapters 6 and 7. To recapitulate the story: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the “new conservatives,” the narrow, elitist group centered around the
This convergence of forces was strong enough to nominate Barry Goldwater, but only because the Republican establishment was caught by surprise. And Goldwater lost the election by a landslide. Nonetheless the movement went on, and learned. Reagan taught the movement how to clothe elitist economic ideas in populist rhetoric. Nixon, though not a movement conservative, showed how the dark side of America—cultural and social resentments, anxieties over security at home and abroad, and, above all, race—could be exploited to win elections.
That last part was crucial. The ability to turn hard-right positions into a winning strategy, not a futile protest, brought in the large-scale funding that created the movement conservative institutions—the “vast right- wing conspiracy” we know today.
That, however, brings us to the second puzzle I identified early in this chapter: Why have advocates of a smaller welfare state and regressive tax policies been able to win elections, even as growing income inequality should have made the welfare state more popular? That’s the subject of the next chapter.
9 WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION
Voters don’t vote solely in their own self-interest—in fact a completely self-interested citizen wouldn’t bother voting at all, since the cost of going to the polling place outweighs the likely effect of any individual’s vote on his or her own well-being. Some people may vote against “big government” on principle, even though they’re likely to be net beneficiaries of government programs, while others may support generous social programs they themselves aren’t likely to need. Yet we would expect the preferences of voters to reflect their self-interest to some extent. And they do: Voters in the bottom third of the income distribution are considerably more likely to favor higher government spending, government job programs, and so on than are voters in the top third.[1] For “big government”—the welfare state—does two things. First, it’s a form of insurance: It protects people from some of the risks of life, assuring them that whatever happens they won’t starve in their later years or, if they’re over sixty-five, be unable to afford an operation. Second, it broadly redistributes income downward.
Consider, for example, the effects of Medicare. Medicare is a very effective form of social insurance. It provides peace of mind even to those who end up paying more into the system, in taxes and premiums, than they receive in benefits. Quite a few Americans in their late fifties or early sixties think of themselves as trying to hang on until they reach Medicare—paying health insurance premiums they can’t afford, or living anxiously without insurance hoping not to get seriously ill, until they finally reach the magical sixty-fifth birthday.
But there’s another reason Medicare is popular. Although it’s rarely advertised as such, it’s a redistributive program that takes from an affluent minority and gives to the less affluent majority. The benefits guaranteed by Medicare are the same for everyone, but most of the taxes that support the program—which are more or less proportional to income[2]—are paid by no more than 25 percent of the population. Remember, in terms of income the United States is Lake Wobegon in reverse: Most of the people are
