The Conscience of a Liberal

9 WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION

Voters don’t vote solely in their own self-interest—in fact a completely self-interested citizen wouldn’t bother voting at all, since the cost of going to the polling place outweighs the likely effect of any individual’s vote on his or her own well-being. Some people may vote against “big government” on principle, even though they’re likely to be net beneficiaries of government programs, while others may support generous social programs they themselves aren’t likely to need. Yet we would expect the preferences of voters to reflect their self-interest to some extent. And they do: Voters in the bottom third of the income distribution are considerably more likely to favor higher government spending, government job programs, and so on than are voters in the top third.[1] For “big government”—the welfare state—does two things. First, it’s a form of insurance: It protects people from some of the risks of life, assuring them that whatever happens they won’t starve in their later years or, if they’re over sixty-five, be unable to afford an operation. Second, it broadly redistributes income downward.

Consider, for example, the effects of Medicare. Medicare is a very effective form of social insurance. It provides peace of mind even to those who end up paying more into the system, in taxes and premiums, than they receive in benefits. Quite a few Americans in their late fifties or early sixties think of themselves as trying to hang on until they reach Medicare—paying health insurance premiums they can’t afford, or living anxiously without insurance hoping not to get seriously ill, until they finally reach the magical sixty-fifth birthday.

But there’s another reason Medicare is popular. Although it’s rarely advertised as such, it’s a redistributive program that takes from an affluent minority and gives to the less affluent majority. The benefits guaranteed by Medicare are the same for everyone, but most of the taxes that support the program—which are more or less proportional to income[2]—are paid by no more than 25 percent of the population. Remember, in terms of income the United States is Lake Wobegon in reverse: Most of the people are below average. So a government program that taxes everyone while providing benefits to everyone is bound to look like a good deal to most Americans.

The redistributive aspect of Medicare is characteristic of the welfare state as a whole. Means-tested programs like Medicaid and food stamps obviously redistribute income, but so do middle-class entitlements. Americans in the bottom 60 percent of earners can expect to receive significantly more in Social Security benefits than they paid in FICA taxes, while those in the top 20 percent can expect to receive less than they paid.[3]

Given this, we should expect public opinion to move left as income inequality increases—that is, voters should become more supportive of programs that tax the rich and provide benefits to the population at large. This is to some extent borne out by polling: Even as the Republican Party was moving far to the right, public opinion surveys suggest that the public, if anything, moved slightly to the left.

The main source of information on long-term trends in U.S. public opinion is American National Election Studies, an organization that has been asking consistent questions in public polls going back, in some cases, to the 1950s. The most revealing are three questions that bear more or less directly on the size of government and the generosity of the welfare state.

One question addresses medical care, asking people to place themselves on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 representing strong support for a government plan that covers medical costs, and 7 support for relying on private payments and insurance companies. In 1972, 37 percent of those surveyed answered 1, 2, or 3, showing support for government health insurance, while 35 percent answered 5, 6, or 7. In 2004 support for government health insurance was up to 42 percent, while opposition was down to 27 percent.

A second question asks whether the government should “see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living.” In 1972, 28 percent thought the government should do that, while 40 percent thought the government “should just let each person get ahead on their own.” In 2004 those numbers were 31 and 42 percent respectively—there were fewer fence-sitters or undecided, but the average position was unchanged.

Finally, a third question asks whether the government should provide more or fewer services and spending. Unfortunately, that question only goes back to 1982, when 32 percent wanted smaller government, 25 percent bigger. By 2004 only 20 percent wanted smaller government, while 43 percent wanted bigger government.

These data suggest that the electorate has, if anything, moved to the left. Maybe it hasn’t moved leftward as much as one might have expected given rising inequality. But public opinion, unlike the Republican Party, hasn’t shifted sharply to the right. Yet the fact is that the Republicans keep winning elections—an observation that lost some but by no means all its force after the 2006 midterm. What explains the GOP’s electoral success?

A movement that seeks to cut taxes while dismantling the welfare state has inherent problems winning mass public support. Tax cuts, especially the kind of tax cuts movement conservatives want, deliver most of their benefits to a small minority of the population, while the pain from a weakened safety net hits far more widely. Organization and money can to some extent make up for the inherent unpopularity of conservative policies—but winning elections normally requires that movement conservates find some way to change the subject.

In his famous 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank offered a bleak picture of working-class voters easily duped, again and again, by sideshows:

How true is this picture? I was bowled over by Frank’s book when it appeared, and I still think it’s a masterfully written essay on movement conservatism’s genius at exploiting emotional issues and its hypocrisy on governing priorities. But political scientists, notably my Princeton colleague Larry Bartels—who wrote a scholarly response titled “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?”—have called into question the extent to which working-class voters really have been duped.

The reality is that voting has become more, not less, class-based over time, which is just what you’d expect given the change in the nature of the Republican Party. In the fifties and sixties the GOP was run by men following Eisenhower’s doctrine of “modern Republicanism,” men who accepted the legacy of the New Deal. In those decades high-income whites were barely more likely to consider themselves Republicans, or vote for Republican candidates, than were low-income whites. Since movement conservatism took over the GOP, however, a strong class division has emerged. The affluent increasingly vote Republican, while lower-income whites, especially outside the South, are actually more likely to vote Democratic than they were half a century ago.

Still, something has allowed movement conservatism to win elections despite policies that should have been unpopular with a majority of the voters. So let’s talk about the noneconomic issues that conservatives have exploited, starting with the issue that Frank oddly didn’t mention in that glorious rant: race.

Ask the man or woman in the street to free-associate on the name Ronald Reagan, and he or she will probably answer “tax cuts” or “defeating communism.” But Reagan didn’t start his run for the presidency with rallies on economic or foreign policy. During his 1976 bid for the Republican nomination, he made his mark by grossly exaggerating a case of welfare fraud in Chicago, introducing the term “welfare queen.”[5] He didn’t mention the woman’s race; he didn’t need to. He began his 1980 campaign with a speech on states’ rights at the county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Everyone got the message.

Considering how much has been written about the changes in American politics over the past generation, how much agonizing there has been about the sources of Democratic decline and Republican ascendancy, it’s amazing how much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican.

Before I discuss this political shift, let’s get some historical perspective. The United States has been politically to the right of other advanced countries for a long time. Spending on subsidies and transfers—basically, welfare state spending—has been a smaller share of GDP in the United States than in Europe since the nineteenth century. By 1937 European countries were already spending as much on welfare-state programs, relative to the size of their economies, as the United States would be spending in 1970, after the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.

What explains this difference? That’s an old question, going back at least to Werner Sombart’s 1906 book, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? The difference has been attributed to everything from high wages—“All socialist utopias come to grief,” wrote Sombart, “on roast beef and apple pie”[6]—to underlying cultural attitudes. But the most systematic recent assessment, by Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, three Harvard economists, concluded that the most important factor in America’s enduring exceptionalism is probably race: Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. Since minorities are highly over-represented amongst the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute particularly to minorities. The opponents of redistribution have regularly used race based rhetoric to fight left-wing policies. Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of redistribution. Within the US, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.[7]

This conclusion is borne out both by the history of political fights over key welfare-state programs and by the shape of regional politics today.

Start with the New Deal reform that didn’t happen: universal health insurance. Every advanced country except the United States has a universal health care system; how did we miss out? Perhaps the best opportunity to create such a system came in the late 1940s, when Harry Truman attempted to create a system that would have looked essentially like Medicare for the whole population. Opinion polls suggested overwhelming public support for universal care (as they do today). But as described in chapter 4, Truman’s bid failed in the face of opposition from two crucial groups: the American Medical Association and Southern whites, who would have gained from the program because of their low incomes but who opposed it out of fear that it would lead to racially integrated hospitals.[8]

The effects of race on support for the welfare state are also clear from a comparison across U.S. states. Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote show that there’s a strong correlation between a state’s racial makeup and its policies: Broadly, the higher the black fraction of a state’s population, the lower its social spending per person. To some extent this may reflect the fact that Southern states are, despite the northward migration of African Americans and the convergence of regional incomes, both blacker and poorer than the rest of the United States. But it’s more than that: Even after taking levels of income into account, the correlation remains.

To make the point more concrete, suppose we compare politics and policy in Massachusetts and Virginia. The two states are roughly comparable both in average and in median income per capita—which tells us that the states have similar levels of income and that there aren’t big differences in the extent to which income is concentrated at the top. Yet the politics are dramatically different: Massachusetts is famously liberal, while Virginia has long been deeply conservative. (That may now be changing, but the blueing of Virginia is a very recent phenomenon.) You can do similar pairwise comparisons between other states of the old Confederacy and their Northern economic counterparts; in most though not all cases the more southerly, blacker state is far more conservative. It’s hard not to conclude that race is the difference.

Yet the New Deal coalition included the South, for reasons discussed in chapter 4. There was raw self-interest: The South was long a poor region, which gained disproportionately from the welfare state. There was history: The Republican Party remained, in Southern minds, the party of Lincoln. And there was the initial willingness of Northern liberals to make a bargain with the devil, tacitly accepting Jim Crow in return for Southern support on the broader welfare-state agenda.

Eventually, however, the marriage between Southern whites and the rest of the Democratic Party broke down over irreconcilable differences. The process began with Barry Goldwater, who took a strong states’ rights position and came out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Aside from Arizona, all the states Goldwater won in the 1964 election were in the South. In 1968 much of the South went for George Wallace, but Nixon picked up several border states. By 1980 Reagan could win Southern states with thinly disguised appeals to segregationist sentiment, while Democrats were ever more firmly linked to civil rights and affirmative action. In fact the real mystery is why it took so long for the South’s congressional delegation to flip.

What share of the political rise of movement conservatism can be attributed to the Southern switch? What the numbers suggest is that the switch accounts for all of the conservative triumph—and then some.

Compare the makeup of the House of Representatives on two dates half a century apart. After the 1954 election Democrats had just begun what would turn out to be a forty-year dominance of the House, holding 232 out of 435 seats. After the 2004 election Republicans had exactly the same number of seats the Democrats had had in 1954, giving them the largest majority they ever achieved in their twelve-year rule. So where did the Republicans gain their advantage? The answer is that the Democrats actually gained seats outside the South. More than all of the Democratic net loss to the Republicans came from the Southern switch.

The Southern switch reflects a change in the voting behavior of white Southerners. In 1954 Southern whites at all levels of income were vastly more likely to vote Democratic than were their counterparts in the North. By 2004 low-income Southern whites were no more Democratic than low-income whites elsewhere in the country, while middle-and upper-income Southern whites were disproportionately Republican. In the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections whites outside the South favored Bush, but only by modest margins. In the South they voted for Bush by margins of 35 or more percentage points, enough to outweigh the overwhelmingly Democratic vote of Southern blacks.[9] Without those Southern white votes Bush wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near chad-and-butterfly range of the White House.

The overwhelming importance of the Southern switch suggests an almost embarrassingly simple story about the political success of movement conservatism. It goes like this: Thanks to their organization, the interlocking institutions that constitute the reality of the vast right-wing conspiracy, movement conservatives were able to take over the Republican Party, and move its policies sharply to the right. In most of the country this rightward shift alienated voters, who gradually moved toward the Democrats. But Republicans were nonetheless able to win presidential elections, and eventually gain control of Congress, because they were able to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. End of story.

Or maybe that isn’t quite the end of the story. Even before the 2006 election, some analysts—notably Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland—suggested that the Republicans had overreached, and had themselves become vulnerable to a regional flip comparable to the one that drove the Democrats from power.[10] Just as the Democrats continued to hold many Southern congressional seats long after the historic marriage of convenience between New Dealers and Dixiecrats had broken down, relatively moderate districts in the rest of the country continued to send Republicans to Congress long after the GOP congressional delegation had become, in practice, a solid right-wing voting bloc. Indeed, a number of those Republicans finally lost their seats in 2006. After the 2006 election 42 percent of the seats still held by Republicans were in the South—not far short of the 47 percent Southern share of Democratic seats in 1954.[11]

All that said, one thing remains something of a puzzle: What do Southern whites think they’re actually getting out of the GOP? Republicans in Washington haven’t made the world safe for segregationists again—and to be fair, it’s doubtful whether many Southerners would seek a return to Jim Crow even if the feds allowed it. What Reagan offered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was mainly symbolism—a stick in the eye of censorious Yankees—rather than a real prospect of rolling back the achievements of the civil rights movement. Maybe Frank’s book should have been called What’s the Matter with Dixie? and the rant should have gone like this: “Vote for the good old days of Southern pride; receive Social Security privatization.” And when Bush did in fact try to use his 2004 “mandate” to privatize Social Security, the South was almost as opposed to the proposal as the rest of the country.[12]

Race, then, was essential to the ability of conservatives to win elections in spite of economic policies that favored a minority over the majority. But what about other forms of distraction?

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” So declared Karl Rove, George Bush’s chief political strategist, in a 2005 speech.[13]

Rove was, we now know, fighting the last, um, war: By 2005 the debacle in Iraq was rapidly eroding the public’s perception that Republicans are better than Democrats at protecting the nation. But where did that perception come from, and how much did it help Republicans win elections?

It’s often asserted that the Republican national security advantage dates back to the Vietnam War, and specifically to Richard Nixon’s landslide 1972 victory over George McGovern. But as so often happens when we look closely at the real political history of this country, it’s far from clear that what everyone knows is true. Rick Perlstein has argued that the even the 1972 election was more of a personal defeat for McGovern than a rejection of the Democrats, who actually gained in the Senate and suffered only modest losses in the House.[14]

More to the point, the available polling evidence does not indicate that the public viewed Democrats in general as weak on national security in the years immediately following the fall of Saigon. As late as October 1979 a poll commissioned by the Republican National Committee, asking which party would do a better job of “maintaining military security,” found 29 percent of voters naming the Republicans, 28 percent the Democrats, and 21 percent saying both would do a good job.[15] The perception that Democrats are weak on national security—a perception that made the partisan exploitation of 9/11 possible—didn’t really settle in until the 1980s. And it had very little to do with the realities of defense or foreign policy. Instead it was a matter of story lines, and above all about the Rambofication of history.

Defeat is never easy to acknowledge. After World War I many Germans famously came to believe in the Dolchstoßlegende, the myth that German forces had been “stabbed in the back” by weak civilian leaders. And from the fall of Saigon onward there were Americans who, like their counterparts in post–World War I Germany, became receptive to stab-in-the-back theories, to the claim that the military could have won the war if only civilians hadn’t tied its hands. When memories of the Vietnam War in all its horror and futility were still fresh, however, they were a small if vocal minority.

If there was a moment when these theories went mainstream, it was with the success of the 1982 film First Blood, the first Rambo movie, in which Rambo declares, “I did what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn’t let us win.” He also rails against “those maggots at the airport, protesting, spitting, calling me baby-killer”—and images of protesters spitting on returning servicemen have become ingrained in popular culture. There’s no evidence that this ever actually happened; there are no credibly documented cases of returning veterans having been spat upon or called baby killers. Nonetheless, the myth of liberals disrespecting the troops became fixed in the public’s mind.

After the stab in the back came the revenge fantasies. Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)—which reinvented the deranged, damaged vet of the first movie as an action hero—tapped into a market for fantasies in which rebellious military men in effect refought the war, and won it.

The newly belligerent mood of the nation clearly worked to the advantage of conservatives. The actual record of liberals in opposing the Vietnam War probably wasn’t that important: By the 1980s the realities of what happened had largely slipped from public memory. What mattered, instead, was the way movement conservatives’ fear and loathing of communism resonated with the desires of a nation rebounding from post-Vietnam syndrome. When Reagan described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” liberals and moderates tended to scoff—not because they were weak on national security, but because they were pragmatic about what it took to achieve security. But many Americans loved it.

Movement conservatism’s efforts to identify itself as the nation’s defender were aided by the fact that the military itself, always a conservative institution, became much more so after the mid-seventies. In 1976 a plurality of military leaders identified themselves as independents, while a third identified themselves as Republicans. By 1996 two-thirds considered themselves Republicans.[16] This shift in political identification probably had several causes. One was that military leaders, who were less able than civilians to put the Vietnam defeat behind them, may have been especially susceptible to the stab-in-the-back myth. It may also have had something to do with budgets: Carter presided over the post-Vietnam shrinkage of the military, Reagan vastly increased military spending, then Clinton presided over another decline, this time after the fall of the Soviet Union. Regional politics also played a role. As one account[17] put it:

Last but not least, there may also have been a “values” component: As American society became more permissive, the military—where adultery is still considered a crime under certain circumstances—grew increasingly alienated. The sexual revolution, which we usually associate with the sixties, didn’t go mass-market until the seventies, a point emphasized by the title of one of John Updike’s many novels about adultery and the human condition, Memories of the Ford Administration.

As movement conservatism gained power, then, it was increasingly able to wrap itself in the flag—to claim to be stronger on national security than the other side, and to claim the support of a large majority of military leaders.

It’s hard to make the case, however, that the perceived Republican advantage on national security played a crucial role in any national election before 9/11. That perception did hurt Democrats on several occasions: The image of Michael Dukakis in a tank helped lose the 1988 election, and the fracas over gays in the military contributed to the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. Military votes made the difference in 2000, but so did many other things: In an election that close any factor that gave the GOP a few thousand votes can be called decisive.

It was only with the 2002 and 2004 elections that national security became a true election-winning issue. Faced with business scandals, a weak economy, and the normal tendency for the president’s party to lose seats in midterm elections, Republicans should have lost ground in 2002, ending up with Democratic control of the Senate and, quite possibly, of the House as well. But the nation rallied around George Bush, as he promised to punish the “evildoers” responsible for 9/11 and bring in Osama dead or alive. And Bush’s party engaged in raw political exploitation of the atrocity, including ads in which the faces of Democrats morphed into Saddam Hussein. The result was a big victory for the GOP.

By the 2004 election doubts about the Iraq War were growing, but much of the electorate was still in a state of denial. On the eve of the election a majority of voters still believed that the United States did the “right thing” in invading Iraq, was on a path to victory, or both.[18] And national security almost certainly gave Bush his winning margin.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, there were many pronouncements to the effect that the perceived Republican advantage on national security would help cement a permanent Republican majority. Thus Thomas Edsall, whom I’ve already credited for his prophetic 1984 book, The New Politics of Inequality, argued in his 2006 book Building Red America that national security would prove an enduring source of GOP advantage: “Any weakness on national defense that dogs the Democratic Party is substantially amplified in the context of a ‘long war.’”[19]

Yet there is a good case to be made that the successful exploitation of security in 2002 and 2004 was an inherently limited, perhaps inherently self-defeating strategy. Unless the United States is actively engaged in major warfare, national security tends to recede as an issue. The elder George Bush learned that in 1992: The 1991 Gulf War temporarily gave him an 80 percent approval rating, but a year later the public’s attention had shifted to economic concerns, and the Democrats regained the White House in spite of public perceptions that they were weak on defense issues.

The same thing initially seemed to be happening to the younger Bush: By the summer of 2002 his approval rating had descended from the stratosphere, and public attention was shifting to corporate scandals and the weak economy. Then came the buildup to war with Iraq. We may never know exactly why the administration wanted that war so badly, but military adventurism does have the effect of giving national security, an issue that the Republicans thought they owned, continuing salience.

The problem, which eventually became all too apparent, is that keeping concerns about national security on the front burner means picking fights with people who shoot back—and in real life the bad guys have better aim than they did in the Rambo movies. The quagmire in Iraq wasn’t an accident: Even if the Iraqis had welcomed us with flowers and sweets, there would have been a bigger, worse quagmire down the line. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” a British official told Newsweek in 2002.[20]

What’s more, movement conservatism and major war efforts don’t mix. Any major military mobilization prompts calls for equal sacrifice, which means tax increases, a crackdown on perceived profiteering, and more. Both world wars led to a rise in union membership, an increase in tax progressivity, and a reduction in income inequality—all anathema to conservatives. Much has been written about the disastrous lack of planning for post-invasion Iraq. What isn’t emphasized enough is that the Bush administration had to believe that the war could be waged on the cheap, because a realistic assessment of the war’s cost and requirements would have posed a direct challenge to the administration’s tax-cutting agenda. Add to this the closed-mindedness and inflexibility that come from the bubble in which movement conservatives live, the cronyism and corruption inherent in movement conservative governance, and the Iraq venture was doomed from the start.

The national security issue seems to have given movement conservatism two election victories, in 2002 and 2004, that it wouldn’t have been able to win otherwise, extending Republican control of both Congress and the White House four years beyond their natural life span. I don’t mean to minimize the consequences of that extension, which will be felt for decades to come, especially on the Supreme Court. But defense does not, at this point, look like an enduring source of conservative advantage.

We believe that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans.

So declares the 2006 platform of the Texas Republican Party, which also pledges to “dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.

There are two different questions about the role of religion and moral values in the politics of inequality. One is the extent to which believers who don’t accept the separation of church and state—what Michelle Goldberg, in her hair-raising book Kingdom Coming, calls Christian nationalists—have taken over the Republican Party.[21] The other is the Tom Frank question: The extent to which mobilization of “values voters,” and the use of values issues to change the subject away from bread and butter issues, have allowed the GOP to pursue an antipopulist economic agenda.

On the first question, the influence of the Christian right on the Republican Party, the answer is clear: It’s a very powerful influence indeed. That Texas Republican platform doesn’t represent fringe views within the party, it represents what the activist base thinks but usually soft-pedals in public. In fact it’s surprising how long it has taken for political analysts to realize just how strong the Christian right’s influence really is. Partly that’s because the Bush administration has proved so adept at sending out messages that only the intended audience can hear. A classic example is Bush’s description of himself as a “compassionate conservative,” which most people heard as a declaration that he wasn’t going to rip up the safety net. It was actually a reference to the work of Marvin Olasky, a Christian right author. His 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, held up the welfare system of nineteenth-century America, in which faith-based private groups dispensed aid and religion together, as a model—and approvingly quoted Gilded Age authors who condemned “those mild, well-meaning, tender-hearted criminals who insist upon indulging in indiscriminate charity.”[22]

In the spring of 2007 the Bush administration’s management of the Justice Department finally came under close scrutiny, and it became clear that the department had, in important respects, been taken over by the Christian right. A number of key posts had gone to graduates of Regent University, the school founded and run by evangelist Pat Robertson; the Civil Rights Division had largely shifted its focus from protecting the rights of minority groups to protecting the evangelizing efforts of religious groups. At the Food and Drug Administration, Bush appointed W. David Hager, the coauthor of As Jesus Cared for Women—a book that recommends particular scriptural readings as a treatment for PMS—to the Reproductive Health Advisory Committee; Hager played a key role in delaying approval for the “morning-after” pill.[23] Bush’s 2006 choice to head family-planning services at the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Eric Keroack, worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling center that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”[24] And there are many more examples.

The Christian right we’re talking about here isn’t merely a group of people who combine faith with conservative political leanings. As Goldberg puts it in Kingdom Coming, Christian nationalism seeks “dominion.” It’s a “totalistic political ideology” that “asserts the Christian right to rule.”[25] The influence of this ideology on the modern Republican Party is so great today that it raises the question of who’s using whom. Are movement conservatives using religion to distract the masses, as Thomas Frank argued, or are religious groups co-opting corporate interests on their way to dominion?

The important thing for our current discussion is to keep a sense of perspective on the electoral significance of the religious right. It’s a well-organized group that can play a crucial role in close elections—but it’s not large enough to give movement conservatives the ability to pursue wildly unpopular economic policies. Whites who attend church frequently have voted Republican by large margins since 1992, which wasn’t the case before. But there are two qualifications to this observation. First, a lot of this shift represents the switch of the South, a far more religious region than the rest of the country, to the GOP. Second, the divergence between the highly religious and the less devout reflects movement in both directions: The secular minded and those who wear their faith lightly have shifted toward the Democrats. That’s why whatever mobilization of religious voters has taken place hasn’t been enough to prevent white voters outside the South from trending Democratic.

Again, mobilized evangelical voters can swing close elections. Without the role of the churches, Ohio and hence the nation might have gone for Kerry in 2004. But religion doesn’t rise nearly to the level of race as an explanation of conservative political success.

Another factor needs to be brought into the mix of explanations for conservative political success: The typical voter is considerably better off than the typical family, partly because poorer citizens are less likely than the well-off to vote, partly because many lower-income residents of the United States aren’t citizens. This means that economic policies that benefit an affluent minority but hurt a majority aren’t necessarily political losers from an electoral point of view. For example, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has produced several estimates of the ultimate effect on different income classes of the Bush tax cuts, assuming that the lost revenue is made up somehow, say by cuts in social programs. One estimate assumes “lump-sum” financing—that is, each American suffers the same loss of government benefits, regardless of income. On this assumption everyone with an income below about $75,000 is a net loser. That’s about 75 percent of the population. The losses would be modest for people in the $50,000 to $75,000 range. Even so, however, the tax cuts ought to be very unpopular, since 60 percent of the population has incomes below $50,000 a year. But Census Bureau data tell us that fewer than 40 percent of voters have incomes below $50,000 a year. So maybe the tax cuts aren’t such a political loser after all.

McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal present data suggesting that the upward bias of voters’ incomes, as compared with the incomes of all U.S. residents, has increased substantially since the early 1970s. One reason may be the decline of unions, which formerly did a lot to mobilize working-class voters. Another is the rapid rise of the immigrant population, especially since 1980.[26]

Over the longer term, immigration will help undermine the political strategy of movement conservatism, for reasons I’ll explain at length in chapter 10. In brief, movement conservatives cannot simultaneously make tacitly race-based appeals to white voters and court the growing Hispanic and Asian share of the electorate. Indeed, the problems created for the GOP by the intersection of immigration and race were already manifest in the 2006 election. For the past twenty-five years, however, immigration has helped empower movement conservatism, by reducing the proportion of low-wage workers who vote.

As I pointed out in chapter 2, large-scale immigration helped sustain conservative dominance during the Long Gilded Age, by ensuring that a significant part of the low-wage workforce was disenfranchised. The end of large-scale immigration in the 1920s had the unintended consequence of producing a more fully enfranchised population, helping shift the balance to the left. But the resurgence of immigration since the 1960s—dominated by inflows of low-skilled, low-wage workers, especially from Mexico—has largely re-created Gilded Age levels of disenfranchisement. The charts in McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal suggest that immigration is a significant but not overwhelming factor in low voting by people with low income, that it’s a contributing factor to conservative success, but not the core one. The disenfranchisement effect is, however, something liberals need to think hard about when confronting questions about immigration reform.

One last, unavoidable question is the issue of fraud. To what extent does the political strategy of movement conservatism rely on winning elections by cheating? We can dismiss objections of the form “How can you suggest such a thing?” Voting fraud is an old American tradition, as I explained when describing Gilded Age politics. And movement conservatism is and always has been profoundly undemocratic. In 1957 the National Review praised Francisco Franco, who overthrew Spain’s elected government and instituted a reign of terror, as a “national hero.” In 2007 the Conservative Political Action Committee was addressed by all the major Republican presidential candidates except John McCain. After former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney spoke to the gathering, he gave a warm welcome to the next speaker, the columnist Ann Coulter,[27] who has declared that we need to “physically intimidate liberals.” Given this history there’s no reason to believe that leading figures in the movement would balk on principle at stealing elections.

In fact there’s no question that vote suppression—the use of any means available to prevent likely Democratic voters, usually African Americans, from casting legitimate ballots—has been a consistent Republican tactic since the party was taken over by movement conservatives. In 2000 Florida’s Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, conducted what the New York Times called a “massive purge of eligible voters,” disproportionately black, who were misidentified as felons. Without that purge George W. Bush would not have made it to the White House.[28] In Georgia the Republican legislature passed a voter identification law in 2005 that a team of lawyers and analysts at the Justice Department recommended rejecting because it was likely to discriminate against black voters—but the team was overruled the next day by political appointees.[29] And this was part of a broader strategy that—characteristically for movement conservatism—involved the collaboration of political appointees within the government and private-sector operations with funding from the usual sources, in this case the “American Center for Voting Rights,” which was founded by the general counsel for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and suddenly disappeared in 2007 when the firing of U.S. attorneys who refused to go along with bogus voter-fraud charges became a major scandal. Here’s how McClatchy Newspapers described the strategy:

So vote suppression is a part of the movement conservative political strategy. It can be decisive in close elections, which means that as a quantitative matter vote suppression is in the same class as the mobilization of the religious right—but not in the same class as the exploitation of white racial backlash, which remains at the heart of movement conservatism’s ability to achieve electoral success.

The truly frightening question is whether electoral cheating has gone or will go beyond vote suppression to corruption of the vote count itself. The biggest concern involves touch-screen electronic voting machines. In August 2007 the state of California sharply restricted the use of touch-screen machines after an audit by University of California researchers confirmed voting activists’ worst fears: Machines from Diebold, Sequoia, and other major suppliers are, indeed, extremely vulnerable to hacking that alters election results. This raises the question—which I won’t even try to answer—of whether there was in fact electronic fraud in 2002 and 2004, and possibly even in 2006. More important, there is the disturbing possibility that the favorable political trends I’ll discuss in the next chapter might be offset by increased fraud. And given the history of movement conservatism, such worries can’t simply be dismissed as crazy conspiracy theories. If large-scale vote stealing does take place, all bets are off—and America will be in much worse shape than even pessimists imagine.

So what’s the matter with America? Why have politicians who advocate policies that hurt most people been able to win elections? The view that movement conservatives have found sure-fire ways to distract the public and get people to vote against their own interests isn’t completely false, but it’s been greatly overstated. Instead the ability of conservatives to win in spite of antipopulist policies has mainly rested on the exploitation of racial division. Religion and invocations of moral values have had some effect, but have been far less important; national security was decisive in 2002 and 2004, but not before. And there are indications that most of the ways movement conservatism has found to distract voters are losing their effectiveness. Racism and social intolerance are on the decline, and the Iraq debacle has gone a long way toward discrediting the GOP on national security. Meanwhile concerns about inequality and economic insecurity are on the rise. This is, in short, a time of political opportunity for those who think we’ve been going in the wrong direction. The remainder of this book lays out the dimensions of that opportunity, and what we should do with it.