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The Big Con

Check out the first chapter of Jonathan Chait's new book, The Big Con, about the hijacking of the Republican party and the U.S. economy by a gang of far-right "supply-siders" in league with the richest Americans.

There is something distinctly cultlike about their thinking. Their canon is presumptively infallible, and any apparent failure must instead be seen as an impetus to recommit themselves to doctrinal purity. Last spring, in an example typical of this thinking, the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel diagnosed the Republican Party's ailments thusly: "The base is in the dumps, disenchanted with a party that has lost sight of its economic moorings." The solution? Tax cuts, and lots of them. Strassel ran through how all the leading Republican presidential candidates had pledged their fealty to the governing supply-side faith. Each of them promised to make permanent all of Bush's tax cuts, but of course this was a given. The competition was between which candidate would promise even deeper cuts in upper-bracket rates.

As a diagnosis of what ails the Republicans today, this was, of course, insane. Bush signed a major tax cut each of the first six years of his presidency. Whatever the GOP's political liabilities may be, an insufficient commitment to tax-cutting is obviously not among them. To propose that the road to victory lies in recommitting the party to even more upper-bracket tax cuts requires a detachment from reality that would have been the envy of the Manson gang. But this is the sort of thinking that now predominates in conservative and Republican circles, and the obeisance of all the leading GOP presidential hopefuls shows just how deeply it has sunk in.

jon posted this at 12:58 AM
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