As many mainstream Republicans have been echoing the anger and paranoia of the far-right, some sane conservative voices have been trying to break through the static. In an essay posted on the Capital Gains and Games blog, written in response to the death of Irving Kristol (the father; the son, as the writer points out, is another matter altogether), Bruce Bartlett writes:
The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.
Bartlett is no liberal. He was domestic policy advisor to President Reagan and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1988-1993 (under President Bush). He has served on the staffs of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. I disagree with some of Barlett's economic theories and with his (very unscientific) understanding of climate change, but I certainly agree with his assessment of the Republican party today. Sane people on either side of the political spectrum are alarmed by the lack of civility in public discourse, the paranoia manifested in the outrageous myths circulated about current domestic and international policies, and what amounts to demonization of the President.
In a recent column in Forbes, Bartlett addresses the Republican mantra that cutting spending will ameliorate the fiscal problem. It won't work, he writes, because Congress will resist cutting spending, no matter which party is in control of Congress, because the nature of the federal budget has changed, and because the population has changed (aging population will resist cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicare). And Republicans, he points out, never seriously address cutting entitlement programs:
On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.
He also addresses the oft-repeated lie that Reagan cut spending:
When I raised these facts [about Medicare and the increasingly aging population] with a prominent Republican recently he counted that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn't. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.)
In a column on fiscal responsibility, Bartlett addresses the myth that tax cuts always illustrate fiscal responsibility:
Beginning in 1982, [Reagan] supported higher taxes almost every year of his presidency.....Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, promised during the 1988 campaign that he would never raise taxes--read my lips: no new taxes, he said at the Republican convention. But faced with large deficits and the need for Democratic congressional support for deficit reduction, he abandoned that pledge in 1990 and supported a large tax increase in return for tough spending controls.
Bartlett goes on to discuss how Clinton's tax increase, roundly criticized by Republicans, triggered "a huge economic expansion" and a surplus that George W. Bush inherited and then squandered:
Taxes were cut willy-nilly throughout the Bush years, and spending shot up for wars, new entitlement programs and any Republican-sponsored pork barrel project. Bush left office with a deficit of 3.2% of GDP--a reversal of 5.6% of GDP compared to the surplus he inherited."
In his article "The GOP's Misplaced Rage," Bartlett addresses the anger of those town-hall meetings we saw over the summer:
I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.
Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.
And Bartlett puts forth the idea that this Republican anger is not born out of any real disenchantment with liberal policies but out of the petulance of having lost an election:
In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto.
There is plenty with which I can disagree with Bruce Bartlett, I'm sure, but his sane conservative voice reminds us that liberals and conservatives can find common ground in order to make our republic truly strong. Loudly supporting fringe behavior such as Joe Wilson's shouting out to the President of the United States "you lie" is not the way to do that. The Republican Party needs to back away from the abyss.
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