a conservative perfect storm

            When Ronald Reagan assumed the Presidency in 1981 the GOP had control of the executive branch of government and one half (the Senate) of the legislative branch.  They would maintain that control over the next 6 years, finally losing control of the Senate in 1986.

            During that time, not so much at the behest of Reagan but under his benign neglect, the party began putting into place a two-pronged strategy aimed at remaking the landscape of America into, essentially, the “Gilded Age” revisited.  If that phrase isn’t familiar to you, it refers to the years roughly from 1880-1920 when everything in America was about preserving whatever best served industry and insuring that industry’s leaders gained and maintained incredible wealth.  It was the age of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers—that illustrious crowd.  Think Jay Gatsby.

            One prong of the Republican strategy was to remove as many constraints on unrestricted industrial growth as possible.  Corporate tax rates were lowered, but probably more importantly, an incredible array of tax loopholes—which didn’t have to be enacted by Congress or debated publically—were written into the tax code to make it easier for corporations to avoid the tax liabilities that remained. 

            That same philosophy was applied to individual tax rates.  The marginal tax rate on the wealthiest went from 70% to 36%.  Middle class tax rates were reduced as well, but not by anything near the same percentage.  Notably, when it became clear even to Reagan that the promised “trickle-down”  wasn’t happening, the middle class tax rates went back up.  The top rates did not.

            The second prong was an idea first promulgated in the 1930’s by far-right advocacy groups and reinvigorated in the ‘80’s under the leadership of Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist, who were then the President and CEO of College Republicans.  The idea was to “defund” the left, that is, to find ways of either denying funding up front to organizations or persons who supported liberal agendas, or to drain their money supplies on the back end by involving them in costly, if frivolous, legal actions.

            There is a lengthy chapter in Thomas Frank’s book, “The Wrecking Crew,” devoted to the specific actions taken by College Republicans and other conservative groups to accomplish this end.  Suffice it here to say that it was, in the ‘80’s, and has continued to be in all the decades since an extremely effective and increasingly popular far right tool.

            In 1981, the Heritage Foundation published a treatise called Mandate for Leadership which laid down over 2000 policy recommendations for the Reagan administration.  Among them was this argument for defunding the left: “Unless conservatives can break the moral monopoly still enjoyed by persons indifferent to the well-being of the American private sector and by proponents of expanded government power, an effort to reform domestic policies is likely to reduced to the level of tinkering.”

            In 1984, an organization called the Capital Research Center was founded by Willa Johnson, a former Reagan administration staffer.  It was funded by the Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolph Coors and Joseph Olin foundations (the unholy trinity of far-right activism).  Its principle objective was to chip away at the funding of any organization it deemed liberal.

            Defunding the left and feathering industrial nests took a bit of a back seat between 1986 and 1994 when the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress, but with the Gingrich revolution of 1994, when the GOP reclaimed both houses, both strategies returned with a vengeance.  Grover Norquist rose from the ashes to which he had been consigned and, as president of Americans for Tax Reform, led a full-out assault on the left, declaring in an essay appropriately entitled “Buying a Movement,” "We will hunt [liberal groups] down one by one and extinguish their funding sources.”

            The first prong was equally re-activated, primarily in the welter of deregulation that Bill Clinton didn’t propose, but seldom opposed.  That welter would of course become a deluge when George W. Bush took over in 2002.

            What’s the point of this history?  Simply this.  What we are seeing in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other places under Republican governance is the perfect storm Abramoff, Norquist and their fellow conservative strategists dreamed of in the 1980’s.

            The Republican party rode to power in Washington and in a frightening number of states in 2010 on a wave created by a horrible economy, a wildly unpopular Speaker of the House, a highly successful spin campaign that painted an economic stimulus program that kept the economy from plunging from Great Recession to Great Depression and a health care law that—while clearly imperfect—did make health care available to nearly everyone and did not include death panels, and the rabid frothings of a far-right fringe called the Tea Party whose influence, thanks largely to Fox, was greatly in excess of its numbers.

            What we have seen since then, on both the state and federal level, is a concerted effort to remove what protections remain for the middle and lower classes, to remove as well what regulations remain to constrain the rapacity of big business and to insure that liberal policies and ideas are buried as deeply as possible.

            Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s current proposal to eliminate (essentially) the right of public employee unions to engage in collective bargaining has nothing to do with fixing Wisconsin’s budget shortfall.  The unions agreed up front to the exact concessions he initially asked for.  Effectively dismantling the union does nothing for the current budget problem, but it does insure that Walker would never again have to bargain over state employee salaries, working conditions, health care or pensions.  It also guarantees that he never again would have to worry about a union openly opposing his election, which all the public employees unions save two did in the last election.  Interestingly, the two that did not oppose him—police and firefighters—have been exempted from his proposal.

            This is defunding the left in a way that must have Norquist dancing in the streets.  It certainly has Fox ebullient.  But what we are seeing here is not just action on the defunding the left prong of conservative strategy.  Protecting, indeed enlarging, corporate interests is hard at work here too. 

            Wisconsin’s projected budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year is 137 million dollars.  Included in Walker’s current proposal are tax breaks and reductions for business totaling 117 million dollars.  In other words, over 80% of the state’s projected budget shortfall is the result of corporate tax cuts.   Leave Wisconsin’s current tax code as is, and all but 20 million of the deficit disappears.

            Nor is this all.  Buried in Walker’s current proposal is a clause that will allow him to sell any state owned business or agency to the private sector without soliciting bids and with nothing to prevent him from accepting a bid of say, one dollar.  In other words, Walker (or his successors) could decide that maintaining a state police force is too much government and simply sell it, for whatever price he wants, to a private company.  There’s nothing in his proposal in fact that would even require the company to which he sold it to have any background or experience in security.

            Lest anyone think, “Oh well, this might not be so bad. Private industry can probably be much more efficient,” let me remind you of the debacle we have recently been through with private contractors in Iraq.  Literally hundreds of billions of dollars squandered there with no apparent results except the significant enriching of companies like Haliburton and Blackwater.

            Recent polls have indicated that America opposes what Walker is trying to do to his state’s unions by nearly two to one (60% to 33% in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll).  Perhaps more significantly, the country opposes (56% to 37%) cutting the pay or benefits of public employees to reduce deficits.  And despite the efforts of virtually every Republican governor and an unending chorus from Fox aimed at painting public employee salaries and benefits as excessive, 61% of Americans consider them either “about right” or “too low” for what they do.

            Those numbers are of no consequence to the true believers in Republican controlled statehouses.  The most rabid among them, and Scott Walker would have to be included in that group, see this as the golden moment when the ideal they have been pursing for three decades can finally come to fruition.

            There is a part of me that says, let it be.  These people are in a position to strip the middle class of what little it has left because the middle class voted them in.  Be careful what you wish for comes to mind.

            There is another part of me that longs for someone in a position to do so—the President comes to mind—to rise up and call this conservative activism out, spell out in terms even the dullest among us can understand how grotesquely these policies will widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and perhaps even make clear how defunding “liberal” agendas like education, science, infrastructure, energy conservation, etc. is insuring a future that not even the wealthiest among us will want to endure.

            Of course, the wealthiest will have the option of relocating to an island with great beaches.  The rest, of us, not so much.