Conservatives have failed

QUOTE

The State of Conservative Government, 2006
By Simon Rosenberg

From: Top Reader Blogs

Tonight the President reports to the nation on the State of the Union. We 
will hear soaring rhetoric, powerful words, a President resolute and 
determined. We will hear of victories, progress, and pride. He will tell a 
compelling story - and very little of it will be true.



The truly compelling story of this decade is one that Bush doesn't want 
told - the rapid and dramatic failure of conservative government. Finally in 
a position of virtually unchecked power after decades in the political 
wilderness, modern conservatives have failed quickly and utterly at the most 
basic responsibilities of governing, leaving our nation weaker and our 
people less prosperous, less safe and less free.


Seduced by the temptations of power, these movement ideologues also quickly 
came to believe that the rules of our democracy did not apply to them. The 
result is one of the farthest-reaching episodes of corruption and criminal 
investigations into a governing party in our history.

Jan 31, 2006 -- 03:04:12 PM EST

Over the past month NDN has been working across party lines to forge a 
better path for the nation, and spell out its plans for 2006. For more on 
our aspirations this year for the nation and our community, visit 
www.ndn.org. This memo is the latest in an ongoing series of NDN analyses of 
the conservative movement, its Republican allies, and the challenges it 
poses to progressive politics.



Overview



Tonight the President reports to the nation on the State of the Union. We 
will hear soaring rhetoric, powerful words, a President resolute and 
determined. We will hear of victories, progress, and pride. He will tell a 
compelling story - and very little of it will be true.



The truly compelling story of this decade is one that Bush doesn't want 
told - the rapid and dramatic failure of conservative government. Finally in 
a position of virtually unchecked power after decades in the political 
wilderness, modern conservatives have failed quickly and utterly at the most 
basic responsibilities of governing, leaving our nation weaker and our 
people less prosperous, less safe and less free.


Seduced by the temptations of power, these movement ideologues also quickly 
came to believe that the rules of our democracy did not apply to them. The 
result is one of the farthest-reaching episodes of corruption and criminal 
investigations into a governing party in our history.



To fully appreciate the State of the Union, we need a deep understanding of 
the conservative movement and its rise to power. Jumpstarted a little more 
than fifty years ago by William F. Buckley's National Review, the 
conservatives began their long march to power by investing billions of 
dollars in a modern infrastructure to combat the entrenched position of 
progressives in government. They used this infrastructure - think tanks, 
for-profit media, superior and innovative forms of electioneering - to 
defeat an aging progressive movement, and now have more power than at any 
time since the 1920s.



In recent years America has learned what life is like under a true 
conservative government. With near absolute power, conservatives have 
pursued their agenda with little compromise or input from progressives. The 
latest chapter of the great conservative story - the Bush years - may have 
been one of political victories, but it has also been one of disastrous 
governance. The broad and deep failures of the Bush government should cause 
all Americans to reappraise the virtue of this grand conservative 
experiment, recognizing that even after 50 years and untold billions of 
dollars, they have yet to come up with a true alternative to 20th century 
progressive government - which did so much good, for so long.



A review of the Bush Years



Let's review what the last five years of conservative government has 
produced:



A middle class in retreat - Despite healthy gains in corporate profits, GDP 
and productivity, the current recovery has created far fewer jobs than any 
previous recovery in modern times. Moreover, real wages have continued to 
fall, and the average family is taking home less pay today than 5 years ago. 
Add to that surging costs for health care, college tuition and energy; count 
more in poverty, in bankruptcy and without health insurance; toss in the 
rapid deterioration of the American pension system; and recognize that 
Republican tax cuts targeted primarily at the rich have left the middle 
class carrying a greater share of the overall tax burden, and it becomes 
clear that the upshot of the conservative era is that the average American 
has to struggle harder than ever to get ahead.



A government that cannot pay its bills - In just five years, the 
conservatives have unraveled the Clinton administration's achievement of 
putting America on a sound fiscal footing and creating the resources to 
tackle the coming costs of the retiring baby boom. The conservatives reduced 
revenues and increased spending more than any other administration in modern 
times. The results were predictable. America has the largest deficits in its 
history and trillions in additional long term debt. To fund the budget and 
trade deficits of conservative government, we now have to borrow close to a 
trillion dollars a year from Asian and Persian Gulf governments. This has 
left us dangerously ill-equipped to finance the looming retirement of the 
baby boom and has compromised our ability to tackle those new challenges 
that will inevitably emerge.



No safer today - Despite the muscular rhetoric of the 9/11 era and billions 
of dollars spent, the conservatives have been basically unable to recognize 
and organize around the new terrorist threat here at home. They ignored 
repeated warnings about Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. Despite two wars and 
billions of dollars spent on the War on Terror globally, Osama Bin Laden is 
still at large, and terrorism attacks worldwide have increased dramatically. 
The bipartisan 9/11 Commission just a few months ago gave the administration 
dismal grades for its efforts to protect the homeland, a result that was no 
surprise to everyone who watched the Department of Homeland Security's 
dismal performance during and after Hurricane Katrina. Even some Republican 
senators, concluding that the Administration has upset the critical balance 
between liberty and security, have called for basic changes in the Patriot 
Act and early hearings on the new revelations about illegal wiretaps.



A foreign policy in ruins - However laudable the overall goal of promoting 
democracy in the Middle East, the Administration's actual policies in Iraq 
have cost thousands of American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, and 
much of our prestige and influence around the world. The White House began 
with a campaign to exaggerate the threat; it failed to rally the world to 
the cause; incredibly, it had no plans for the peace after our soldiers 
successfully defeated Saddam, opening the door to the bloody insurgency; it 
has chronically scrimped on both troop levels and supplies for our fighting 
forces; it has never found WMD's - the stated cause for our entering Iraq; 
our torture techniques have violated the Geneva conventions and undermined 
America's moral leadership in the world; our occupying presence in Iraq, 
like the Soviets in Afghanistan, has fueled the global jihadist movement; 
and in its efforts to defend its actions at home, the Administration has 
repeatedly lied (as in the finding late last year that Congress never had 
the same access to intelligence as the President) and smeared its critics.


While all Americans hope for the best for the people of Iraq, the region 
itself, and for our troops, the cost, in both real terms and the opportunity 
costs, have been colossal - much greater than anyone could have reasonably 
expected when the conservatives began all this over three years ago.



Meanwhile, as we have struggled to achieve a successful outcome in Iraq, 
anti-American forces have gained power and momentum in both the Middle East 
and Latin America. The rise of Hamas, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, Hugo 
Chavez and his allies in our neighbors to the South all present America with 
a more hostile and complex global environment. Add to that the continuing 
tensions on the Korean Peninsula and the administration's weakening of 
global institutions, and it is a fair judgment that President Bush will 
leave behind a world more hostile and threatening to America and its 
interests than the one he inherited.



War on Hispanics - In one of the darkest moments of this new conservative 
era, in late 2005 the Republican House voted to felonize, arrest and deport 
the 11 million undocumented men, women and children working and living among 
us. While we all agree that our porous border presents a very significant 
national security challenge, these provisions of a large and ineffective 
bill constitute one of the most shameful, xenophobic and racist acts by our 
government in recent American history.



Absolute power corrupts absolutely - In what may become the defining act of 
this conservative era, the leaders of the conservative movement in and out 
of government became corrupted on a scale unprecedented in recent American 
history. Criminal investigations are underway of people in the White House, 
the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Pentagon and other cabinet 
departments, the lobbying and advocacy community, and the private 
contractors in Iraq. One of the President's senior advisors has been 
indicted for arguably treasonous activities, others are under investigation 
and another has been arrested and charged. A senior Republican operative was 
recently convicted of election-related felonies in New Hampshire. One 
Congressman, Duke Cunningham, is on his way to jail, as, it appears, are 
former Majority Leader Tom DeLay and several of his cronies. The Abramoff 
scandal now includes a known Mafia figure rubbing out one of his rivals, and 
a member of Congress speaking out against the murdered figure from the floor 
of the House.

The administration attempted to appoint a business associate of Abramoff's 
to be the number two official at Justice, re-assigned a U.S. Attorney 
looking into Abramoff in 2002, just "promoted" the lead investigator into 
the Abramoff Affair, and overruled the recommendations of the Justice 
Department's career Civil Rights staff on political cases in Texas and 
Georgia. Contracting in the Katrina rebuilding and Iraq reconstruction has 
been rife with fraud, abuse and bribery. Journalists here and in Iraq have 
been paid to toe the conservative movement's line.



At a more esoteric and perhaps more pernicious level, modern conservatism 
has defined decency down. Lying is now so common that it often goes 
unreported, and smears of American war heroes like Senators John McCain, 
John Kerry and Max Cleland, as well as Congressman John Murtha, have become 
so standard as to illicit little outrage from the media. The corrosive 
"whatever it takes" tactics of modern conservatives have undermined the 
civility required to make democracy work.



Conclusion



Despite all of their bravado and political power, history will not be kind 
to today's Republican leaders and the modern conservative movement. A 
reasonable first draft of history would catalogue how President Bush and his 
allies led us unprepared into Iraq, left the Middle East and Latin America 
more radicalized than they found it, were slow to recognize the danger of 
Katrina and seemingly abandoned the people of New Orleans to suffer, left 
sick seniors without their medicines, suppressed meaningful debate and 
action on a host of grave, global environmental challenges, allowed the 
average real incomes of Americans to fall by thousands of dollars without a 
response, knowingly violated the Geneva conventions and lied about it, 
fought to arrest and deport millions of people working quietly among us, 
pursued a fiscal strategy which added trillions of dollars to our children's 
debt, under funded their signature education reform by tens of billions of 
dollars, received failing grades from the 9/11 Commission, illegally spied 
on American citizens, and arrogantly acted as if the rules of democracy and 
human decency didn't apply to them.



As we reflect on the state of conservative government, let's recognize what 
a quixotic and calamitous experiment this conservative movement has become. 
It may have been fifty years and tens of billions of dollars in the making, 
but it has been exposed as a politically potent but intellectually immature 
movement, one whose generations in the wilderness produced an ideology 
unprepared and uninterested in the real challenges of governing. Finally 
unleashed, this ivory-tower conservatism has collided with the realities of 
a complicated world and produced a government that has weakened America.


The next chapter in the story of conservatism has yet to be written. Will 
they learn from their mistakes, work with the Democrats, and fashion a 
bipartisan approach to our challenges? Or do they recede deeper into their 
fantasies, continue to wage war against all imagined enemies domestic and 
foreign, and continue down the current path of drift and decline?



It is too early to tell how this next chapter will unfold. We all know which 
path would be best for America at this challenging time. We at NDN pledge to 
do everything we can to extend our hand to members of both parties 
interested in getting past these disappointing years, cleaning up the mess 
and working together to craft a better future for our nation.



As NDN has written in recent weeks, it is our hope that the sheer magnitude 
of the administration's failures will enable responsible members of both 
parties to wrest control of our government from the conservative ideologues 
and begin the work of ushering in a more constructive era. NDN and its 
allies helped to produce successful government in the 1990s. We left the 
world at peace, the budget in surplus, and the country in unprecedented 
prosperity. Our hope is that as we lay out a better agenda for our great and 
good nation, we will begin with the one approach that worked so well in 
recent years - the governing approach of the modern Democratic Party.

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http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2006/1/31/15412/9630 


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