[NYTr] Krugman: A Failed Revolution

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

The New York Times - Dec 29, 2006
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/opinion/29krugman.html


A Failed Revolution

By Paul Krugman

After first attempting to deny the scale of last month's defeat, the
apologists have settled on a story line that sounds just like Marxist
explanations for the failure of the Soviet Union. What happened, you
see, was that the noble ideals of the Republican revolution of 1994 were
undermined by Washington's corrupting ways. And the recent defeat was a
good thing, because it will force a return to the true conservative
path.

But the truth is that the movement that took power in 1994 - a
movement that had little to do with true conservatism - was always based
on a lie.

The lie is right there in "The Freedom Revolution," the book that
Dick Armey, who had just become the House majority leader, published in
1995. He declares that most government programs don't do anything "to
help American families with the needs of everyday life," and that "very
few American families would notice their disappearance." He goes on to
assert that "there is no reason we cannot, by the time our children come
of age, reduce the federal government by half as a percentage of gross
domestic product."

Right. Somehow, I think more than a few families would notice the
disappearance of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - and those
three programs alone account for a majority of nondefense, noninterest
spending. The truth is that the government delivers services and
security that people want. Yes, there's some waste - just as there is in
any large organization. But there are no big programs that are easy to
cut.

As long as people like Mr. Armey, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay were
out of power, they could run on promises to eliminate vast government
waste that existed only in the public's imagination - all those welfare
queens driving Cadillacs. But once in power, they couldn't deliver.

That's why government by the radical right has been an utter failure
even on its own terms: the government hasn't shrunk. Federal outlays
other than interest payments and defense spending are a higher
percentage of G.D.P. today than they were when Mr. Armey wrote his book:
14.8 percent in fiscal 2006, compared with 13.8 percent in fiscal 1995.

Unable to make good on its promises, the G.O.P., like other failed
revolutionary movements, tried to maintain its grip by exploiting its
position of power. Friends were rewarded with patronage: Jack Abramoff
began building his web of corruption almost as soon as Republicans took
control. Adversaries were harassed with smear campaigns and witch hunts:
Congress spent six years and many millions of dollars investigating a
failed land deal, and Bill Clinton was impeached over a consensual
affair.

But it wasn't enough. Without 9/11, the Republican revolution would
probably have petered out quietly, with the loss of Congress in 2002 and
the White House in 2004. Instead, the atrocity created a window of
opportunity: four extra years gained by drowning out unfavorable news
with terror alerts, starting a gratuitous war, and accusing Democrats of
being weak on national security.

Yet the Bush administration failed to convert this electoral success
into progress on a right-wing domestic agenda. The collapse of the push
to privatize Social Security recapitulated the failure of the Republican
revolution as a whole. Once the administration was forced to get
specific about the details, it became obvious that private accounts
couldn't produce something for nothing, and the public's support
vanished.

In the end, Republicans didn't shrink the government. But they did
degrade it. Baghdad and New Orleans are the arrival destinations of a
movement based on deep contempt for governance.

Is that the end for the radical right? Probably not. As a
long-suffering civil servant once told me, bad policy ideas are like
cockroaches: you can flush them down the toilet, but they keep coming
back. Many of the ideas that failed in the Bush years had previously
failed in the Reagan years. So there's no reason to assume they're gone
for good.

Indeed, it appears that loss of power and the ensuing lack of
accountability is liberati?g right-wingers to lie yet again: since last
month's election, I've noticed a number of Social Security privatizers
propounding the same free-lunch falsehoods that the Bush administration
had to abandon in the face of demands that it present an actual plan.

Still, the Republican revolution of 1994 is over. And not a moment
too soon.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company