Up from Conservatism by Michael Lind

Author:Michael Lind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press Paper Backs

Chapter 7

Three Conservative Hoaxes

How the Right Has Fooled the American People About Taxes, Education, and Illegitimacy

Since the 1960s, conservative politicians, journalists, and intellectuals have succeeded in shifting the national consensus to the right on many issues. Chief among these are the disputed subjects of taxation, education, and welfare. On these three matters, conservatives have managed to convince many centrists and neoliberals to agree, if not with the details, then with the general drift of their arguments. Thanks to the success of conservatives in altering the terms of political debate in the United States, many Americans now take it for granted that excessive taxation has burdened the American economy; that America’s system of public education is among the worst in the world; and that excessively generous welfare is a contributing factor to, if not the primary cause of, a dramatic increase in illegitimacy among poor blacks in the inner cities.

All three of these conservative dogmas have become part of the conventional wisdom. More important, they provide the legitimacy for the major domestic policy initiatives of the present-day American right. The claim that low productivity growth in the United States is the result of the discouraging effect that high taxes produce on investors and corporations is the theory that justifies the tax-cut program of Newt Gingrich’s congressional Republicans, as it justified the upper-bracket tax cuts of the Reagan era. The claim that America’s public schools are in critical condition appears to support the radical cure proposed by the right: “school choice” or public financing of private schools, including private religious schools. Finally, the assertion that the federal government has inadvertently encouraged illegitimacy by means of welfare is the primary argument invoked by the coalition of economic and social conservatives that has sought to dismantle the federal commitment to welfare dating back to FDR’s New Deal.

Conservative arguments about supply-side economics, the failure of public education, and the epidemic of illegitimacy are familiar, widely believed, and respected even by adversaries of conservatism. There is only one problem: they are demonstrably wrong. The facts, when objectively examined, do not support conservative views about taxation, public education, and illegitimacy. On these three subjects, the right is not merely wrong, but dead wrong. This has ramifications outside of the world of scholarship, inasmuch as misguided policies based on fallacies promulgated by the conservative movement—beginning with supply-side economics—have already done enormous damage to the prosperity and social fabric of the United States.

It would be tragedy enough if conservatives had been innocently mistaken in promoting fallacies about taxation, education, and welfare. The tale of conservative thought about these issues is not a tragedy, though; it is a scandal. Repeatedly, since the late 1970s, conservative politicians, public policy experts, and journalists have ignored, dismissed, or (as in the case of the Sandia report about American public education, discussed below) attempted to suppress evidence that contradicts conservative dogma about social policy. What is more, the same small group of conservative Republican intellectual impresarios including Robert Bartley, editorial page editor of the

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