The Conscience of a Liberal

invasion Iraq. What isn’t emphasized enough is that the Bush administration had to believe that the war could be waged on the cheap, because a realistic assessment of the war’s cost and requirements would have posed a direct challenge to the administration’s tax-cutting agenda. Add to this the closed-mindedness and inflexibility that come from the bubble in which movement conservatives live, the cronyism and corruption inherent in movement conservative governance, and the Iraq venture was doomed from the start.

The national security issue seems to have given movement conservatism two election victories, in 2002 and 2004, that it wouldn’t have been able to win otherwise, extending Republican control of both Congress and the White House four years beyond their natural life span. I don’t mean to minimize the consequences of that extension, which will be felt for decades to come, especially on the Supreme Court. But defense does not, at this point, look like an enduring source of conservative advantage.

The Moral Minority

We believe that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

So declares the 2006 platform of the Texas Republican Party, which also pledges to “dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.

There are two different questions about the role of religion and moral values in the politics of inequality. One is the extent to which believers who don’t accept the separation of church and state—what Michelle Goldberg, in her hair-raising book Kingdom Coming, calls Christian nationalists—have taken over the Republican Party.[21] The other is the Tom Frank question: The extent to which mobilization of “values voters,” and the use of values issues to change the subject away from bread and butter issues, have allowed the GOP to pursue an antipopulist economic agenda.

On the first question, the influence of the Christian right on the Republican Party, the answer is clear: It’s a very powerful influence indeed. That Texas Republican platform doesn’t represent fringe views within the party, it represents what the activist base thinks but usually soft-pedals in public. In fact it’s surprising how long it has taken for political analysts to realize just how strong the Christian right’s influence really is. Partly that’s because the Bush administration has proved so adept at sending out messages that only the intended audience can hear. A classic example is Bush’s description of himself as a “compassionate conservative,” which most people heard as a declaration that he wasn’t going to rip up the safety net. It was actually a reference to the work of Marvin Olasky, a Christian right author. His 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, held up the welfare system of nineteenth-century America, in which faith-based private groups dispensed aid and religion together, as a model—and approvingly quoted Gilded Age authors who condemned “those mild, well-meaning, tender-hearted criminals who insist upon indulging in indiscriminate charity.” [22]

In the spring of 2007 the Bush administration’s management of the Justice Department finally came under close scrutiny, and it became clear that the department had, in important respects, been taken over by the Christian right. A number of key posts had gone to graduates of Regent University, the school founded and run by evangelist Pat Robertson; the Civil Rights Division had largely shifted its focus from protecting the rights of minority groups to protecting the evangelizing efforts of religious groups. At the Food and Drug Administration, Bush appointed W. David Hager, the coauthor of As Jesus Cared for Women—a book that recommends particular scriptural readings as a treatment for PMS—to the Reproductive Health Advisory Committee; Hager played a key role in delaying approval for the “morning-after” pill.[23] Bush’s 2006 choice to head family-planning services at the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Eric Keroack, worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling center that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”[24] And there are many more examples.

The Christian right we’re talking about here isn’t merely a group of people who combine faith with conservative political leanings. As Goldberg puts it in Kingdom Coming, Christian nationalism seeks “dominion.” It’s a “totalistic political ideology” that “asserts the Christian right to rule.”[25] The influence of this ideology on the modern Republican Party is so great today that it raises the question of who’s using whom. Are movement conservatives using religion to distract the masses, as Thomas Frank argued, or are religious groups co-opting corporate interests on their way to dominion?

The important thing for our current discussion is to keep a sense of perspective on the electoral significance of the religious right. It’s a well-organized group that can play a crucial role in close elections—but it’s not large enough to give movement conservatives the ability to pursue wildly unpopular economic policies. Whites who attend church frequently have voted Republican by large margins since 1992, which wasn’t the case before. But there are two qualifications to this observation. First, a lot of this shift represents the switch of the South, a far more religious region than the rest of the country, to the GOP. Second, the divergence between the highly religious and the less devout reflects movement in both directions: The secular minded and those who wear their faith lightly have shifted toward the Democrats. That’s why whatever mobilization of religious voters has taken place hasn’t been enough to prevent white voters outside the South from trending Democratic.

Again, mobilized evangelical voters can swing close elections. Without the role of the churches, Ohio and hence the nation might have gone for Kerry in 2004. But religion doesn’t rise nearly to the level of race as an explanation of conservative political success.

Disenfranchised Workers

Another factor needs to be brought into the mix of explanations for conservative political success: The typical voter is considerably better off than the typical family, partly because poorer citizens are less likely than the well-off to vote, partly because many lower-income residents of the United States aren’t citizens. This means that economic policies that benefit an affluent minority but hurt a majority aren’t necessarily political losers from an electoral point of view. For example, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has produced several estimates of the ultimate effect on different income classes of the Bush tax cuts, assuming that the lost revenue is made up somehow, say by cuts in social programs. One estimate assumes “lump-sum” financing—that is, each American suffers the same loss of government benefits, regardless of income. On this assumption everyone with an income below about $75,000 is a net loser. That’s about 75 percent of the population. The losses would be modest for people in the $50,000 to $75,000 range. Even so, however, the tax cuts ought to be very unpopular, since 60 percent of the population has incomes below $50,000 a year. But Census Bureau data tell us that fewer than 40 percent of voters have incomes below $50,000 a year. So maybe the tax cuts aren’t such a political loser after all.

McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal present data suggesting that the upward bias of voters’ incomes, as compared with the incomes of all U.S. residents, has increased substantially since the early 1970s. One reason may be the decline of unions, which formerly did a lot to mobilize working-class voters. Another is the rapid rise of the immigrant population, especially since 1980.[26]

Over the longer term, immigration will help undermine the political strategy of movement conservatism, for reasons I’ll explain at length in chapter 10. In brief, movement conservatives cannot simultaneously make tacitly race-based appeals to white voters and court the growing Hispanic and Asian share of the electorate. Indeed, the problems created for the GOP by the intersection of immigration and race were already manifest in the 2006 election. For the past twenty-five years, however, immigration has helped empower movement conservatism, by reducing the proportion of low-wage workers who vote.

As I pointed out in chapter 2, large-scale immigration helped sustain conservative dominance during the Long Gilded Age, by ensuring that a significant part of the low-wage workforce was disenfranchised. The end of large-scale immigration in the 1920s had the unintended consequence of producing a more fully enfranchised population, helping shift the balance to the left. But the resurgence of immigration since the 1960s—dominated by inflows of low-skilled, low-wage workers, especially from Mexico—has largely re-created Gilded Age levels of disenfranchisement. The charts in McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal suggest that immigration is a significant but not overwhelming factor in low voting by people with low income, that it’s a contributing factor to conservative success, but not the core one. The disenfranchisement effect is, however, something liberals need to think hard about when