Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (29 page)

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The earliest use of the phrase
socially liberal but fiscally conservative
in all 5 million books and other publications digitized by Google was in 1978, in Charles Koch’s magazine
Inquiry: A Libertarian Review,
to refer to the new ideological territory that Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis and President Carter were both trying to claim.

As the right marched on victoriously through the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, even what appeared to be occasional reversals weren’t really setbacks for the
economic
right. For instance, just after rejecting Bork, the same Democratic-majority Senate promptly and unanimously confirmed Reagan’s choice of Anthony Kennedy for that Supreme Court seat. Justice Kennedy is known today as a moderate because of his liberal votes on abortion and gay rights, but on
economic
questions—concerning unions, campaign spending, regulation—he was for thirty years an absolutely reliable hard-line supporter of big business.

And even though the Democrats controlled the House with huge majorities throughout the 1980s and early ’90s and won the Senate back for six years, the federal government consistently treated business and the rich spectacularly well. The top income tax rate for the wealthiest was cut from 70 to 50 percent in 1982. It would’ve been prudent to stop there for a while and see how that worked out. But no: in the second Reagan term, the top rate was cut again to 38.5 percent, then once more to 28 percent—along with a large reduction of the income threshold for the highest bracket, which meant that somebody making $1 million or $10 million a year would now be taxed at the same rate that a teacher or plumber was taxed on everything they earned above the equivalent of $40,000. The cut in the top tax rate on profits from selling stocks was also cut in half between 1976 and 1982, another enormous boon to the rich, since three-quarters of those gains go to the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans. As it started its second decade of existence, the Business Roundtable successfully lobbied to make sure corporate taxes were significantly cut as well.

But the strategists on the right understood the downside of success, the dangers of complacency and backsliding. For their long war, the counter-Establishment needed to expand to fight specialized campaigns and to retain its ferocity even as it became the Establishment. Many essential subcommandants made the right’s permanent revolution, but three in particular are worth a closer look. Each concentrated on a different constituency and area of focus, and each had a different temperament, but all were unwavering zealots.

If tax rates could be cut as easily as they’d been in the 1980s, the rich right and big business knew, those rates could just as easily be raised back to where they’d been for the preceding half-century. The surge of popular antitax anger in the 1970s that led to Reagan’s election mainly concerned
local
taxes and could dissipate unless it was somehow specifically institutionalized, with its own campaign and fighters in the long war. A preference for relatively lower taxes and smaller government budgets had been a Republican tenet for generations, along with a wish for a somewhat lighter regulatory hand, but only in the 1980s and ’90s did taxes—
REGULATION BAD, TAXES
WORSE
—turn into the prime doctrinal phobia and bond for the American right. It didn’t happen by accident.

More than any other single person, Grover Norquist is to blame. Like me, he was an upper-middle-class suburbanite who became a Nixon campaign volunteer around the time he hit puberty and attended Harvard College in the 1970s. Unlike me, he never decided that “adolescent libertarianism” was redundant and moved on. Moreover, he settled on taxation as his lifelong libertarian single-issue obsession at just the right moment and stuck with it forever. After college he ran a conservative Washington antitax group, and in the 1980s he created his own more extreme version, Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), funded over the years by the familiar (Koch, Olin, Scaife) right-wing foundations.

Norquist’s stroke of evil genius was to dream up at age twenty-nine the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which in 1986 made the Republicans’ antitax fixation official. It’s a document that obliges legislators (and governors) who sign it to “oppose net tax increases,” “any and all” of them, for as long as they’re in office. Because it’s, you know, a
solemn
oath,
it must be cosigned by two witnesses, and the group’s FAQ answer (in 2020) to the question, “Can the language of the Pledge be altered to allow exceptions?” is “No. There are no exceptions to the Pledge.” Fortunately for Ronald Reagan, the pledge didn’t exist during his first five years in office, when he signed into law six major tax increases amounting to the equivalent of $300 billion. Soon swearing fealty to Norquist’s demand was practically required of congressional Republicans, and three decades later 85 percent of the Republicans in the House and Senate still feel obliged to sign it.

The simplicity and absolutism of the pledge are both its genius and its evil. In addition, Norquist remained single-minded about promoting and enforcing it and avoiding mission creep. It made him among the most influential leaders of the right, libertarian economics division. He was a close adviser to Newt Gingrich before Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995. For more than a quarter century, he has presided at the so-called Wednesday Meeting, a weekly gathering of Washington right-wingers at his offices. ATR has been as effective as the NRA (on whose board Norquist served for eighteen years) as an ideological enforcer of hard-right orthodoxy among Republicans in Washington, possibly as responsible for unnecessary U.S. government dysfunction as the NRA is for unnecessary American gun deaths.

Since the pledge began, the top federal income tax rate has never again crept higher than it was before 1932. Yet by Norquist’s own measure—the fraction of the economy funneled through the federal government—he and his group have failed. For the thirty-odd years before Americans for Tax Reform began, that government percentage-of-GDP floated up and down between 13 and 19 percent, and for the thirty-odd years since it has floated up and down between 14 and 20 percent. In 1985 it was between 16 and 17 percent, exactly where it was at the beginning of 2020. Instead, what’s changed enormously due to the right’s antitax phobia is the size of the federal
debt
as a percentage of GDP. After bottoming out in the 1970s, when Democrats controlled Congress and the presidency, that total debt number increased by half during the Reagan administration alone.

This history illustrates the true relative importance of the right’s goals concerning fiscal policy and the political economy. Their overriding mission, at which they’ve succeeded smashingly, is to make sure the rich get richer (and big business bigger), and the most direct, unambiguous, universal way of doing that is by keeping their taxes low, no matter the costs. The old Republican goal of budgetary prudence, trying to balance federal revenues and spending, became vestigial.
Fiscal responsibility
rhetorically pops back to life for Republicans only when they’re out of power in Washington, and only as an argument for achieving their secondary goals of reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits and preventing any major expansion of health or education or other social programs.

Norquist is known for his jokey line about his wish to make the federal government smaller—“to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” But he and the Washington right are really not joking about their dream of repealing a century of progress enacted in Washington. Norquist has said in all seriousness that he envisions a government the size of “where we were at the turn of the [twentieth] century,” “up until Teddy Roosevelt”—Roosevelt became president in 1901—“when the socialists took over,” before “the income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.” Getting more specific, he definitely wants a federal budget no larger than it was eighty years ago—in other words, a third of what it is today. If the Republicans were to pursue that goal openly, in earnest, in Congress, it would be political suicide, of course, so they don’t, and instead they take solace in having maximized the wealth of the well-to-do and the power of big business at the expense of everyone else. Beyond shoveling more money to their allies and benefactors and making big new social programs difficult to enact, the blunt tool of the right’s zero-tolerance antitax obsession has had ancillary effects that also serve particular interests, such as making it even harder to tax carbon in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Which might explain, for instance, why the main oil industry lobbying organization is a major funder of Americans for Tax Reform.

The economic right had won. Impossible dreams of the early 1970s had come true in the ’80s and ’90s. Taxes on the rich and on business were low. Businessmen were heroes again. Deregulation of big business and indifference to excessively big businesses had become a bipartisan fad. During the 1980s, federal antitrust enforcement budgets and cases were cut back to the levels of thirty and fifty years earlier. A true libertarian OG who wanted to privatize Social Security, Greenspan became Federal Reserve chairman in 1987 (and stayed in the job into the new century). Democratic presidents now governed like liberal Republicans, instructing Americans that “all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America” (Carter) and that “the era of big government is over” (Clinton). What’s more, the genuine menaces that Republicans had demagogued so successfully for generations—the Soviet Union, inflation, rising crime—rather miraculously ceased to be problems as well, and during the 1990s the economy grew by more than 4 percent a year for four straight years.

Happier days were here again
,
again. But not, at least publicly, according to the right, who turned out to be, as the terrific libertarian journalist Jack Shafer put it back then, “the sorest winners ever recorded in history.” As the twentieth century ended, he wrote, the ideological commissars at
The Wall Street Journal
editorial page “continued to posture as if welfare-statist Democrats…were the ultimate source of political evil,” indulging the “ongoing delusion” that pro-rich-people, pro-business right-wingers were “a downtrodden minority even after the conservative victories.”

In part, the right had been so totally on the outs for so long, and their victories had been so thorough and swift, they worried it might all be reversed if they let their guard down. And some right-wingers were temperamentally such fanatics and outsiders that they found it hard or impossible to adapt to having real governing power. From the 1970s, liberals had been cruising toward the ideological center and beyond, eager to compromise, reasonableness and intellectual flexibility central to their self-identities—which made people on the right who were wingers by temperament feel obliged to keep moving further right.

Paul Weyrich, the cofounder of the Heritage Foundation who loved identifying as a radical, was that kind of diehard, one of the sorest winners. Like Norquist, he was an important ideological warlord. Like Norquist, he teamed up early with Gingrich, in the 1980s making himself the center of a right-wing Washington politburo he assembled for lunches every week—on Wednesdays, before Norquist copied even that from his playbook. Unlike Norquist, Weyrich was not jolly or snarky, and he wasn’t narrowly focused on serving the interests of business and the rich but instead spread his zealotry across the whole array of new right-wing obsessions, especially those of his fellow Christian extremists.

In the 1990s, with Republicans controlling Congress for the first time since the early ’50s and in Clinton a moderate Democratic president who’d just cut taxes and public assistance for the poorest, Weyrich was nevertheless dissatisfied and distraught. He thought the conservative Republican leaders in Congress were capitulators, compromisers, heretics who should be purged. “This is a bitter turn for me,” he said then. “I have spent thirty years of my life working in Washington, working on the premise that if we simply got our people into leadership that it would make a difference….And yet we are getting the same policies from them that we got from their [liberal] Republican predecessors.”

Weyrich’s prominence and personal power-brokering diminished over the rest of his life, even as the revolution he’d helped launch endured through another two-term Republican presidency and beyond. “Most of the successes of the conservative movement since the 1970s,” Norquist said of Weyrich when he died in 2008, “flowed from structures, organizations, and coalitions he started, created or nurtured.” But beyond being a founder and über-bureaucrat of the right-wing counter-Establishment that eventually swallowed and replaced the old GOP, Weyrich was the very personification of the new right-wing masses decades before the Tea Party and MAGA. He was a true believer who needed to keep feeling the rage, for whom politics as well as religion was a fundamentalist crusade where compromise was an abomination, an archetypal Fox News viewer before Fox News existed.
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He wasn’t one of the cynics and operators. Nor was he a consistent libertarian like Norquist, one of the overgrown boys who hated taxes as much as they loved Burning Man and themselves. Rather, Weyrich was the ultimate late-stage Republican because he madly dreamed of returning America to the past in all ways, both the political economy and the culture. He sincerely wanted business unregulated and the rich untaxed and government minimized,
and
he sincerely pined for an explicitly Christian culture bordering on theocracy where women didn’t have equal rights and racial segregation was considered okay.
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