Why conservatism equals terrible government-and always will

Ending the conservative era requires organizing, yes, but also hard thinking and shrewd analysis. When progressives of the future look back at how they triumphed, one of the people they'll thank is Greg Anrig. Drawing inspiration from the work of the early neoconservatives who demolished public support for liberal programs, Anrig casts a sharp eye on conservative ideas and nostrums and shows that many of them simply don't work because they are rooted more in ideological dreams than in reality. Facts are stubborn things, Ronald Reagan once said, and Anrig makes good use of them in this important and engaging book.

-E. J. Dionne, syndicated columnist and author of Why Americans Hate Politics

Greg Anrig's wide-ranging and perceptive book looks beyond the ideology of the right and offers a persuasive account of the many policy failures that have emerged out of the conservative movement. Anrig has put the Bush administration and the right to a test that they themselves have carefully avoided. He has held them accountable not for their ideas, but for their performance.

-Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of History, Columbia University

In this well-researched and witty book, Anrig critiques 'right-wing ideas' by examining what the policies and programs that embodied them have wrought over the last three decades.While giving several conservative ideas their due, he finds their record to be mixed at best.

-John J. DiIulio Jr., political science professor and first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

With fastidious research and unimpeachable facts, Greg Anrig establishes the sound proposition that competent governance is incompatible with disbelief in government. The odd combination of the religious right dictating personal morality, 'neoconservatism' preaching unilateral interventionism, and radical libertarian tax cuts have cast our Republic adrift from its moorings. Restoration of common sense to government is long overdue.

-Gary Hart, Former United States Senator

Why conservatives can’ t govern– and why conservative ideas will continue to flop

Even as many leading conservatives have conceded various Bush administration failures, they have mainly blamed incompetence rather than the real culprit: the policies that the right advocated for years as it successfully waged the " war of ideas." Respected commentator Greg Anrig connects the dots linking the conservative movement’ s well-funded network of thinkers and advocates to the disasters of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, New Orleans, the federal budget, and other travesties.

Greg Anrig (New York, NY) is Vice President of programs at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, and former Washington correspondent for Money magazine. He has written online for the American Prospect and Mother Jones, co-edited volumes of essays about civil liberties, immigration, and Social Security, and is a regular contributor to the liberal blog tpmcafe.com.

Greg Anrig explains that the reason the Bush administration is failing is not because they're incompetent, but because conservative ideology inevitably leads to this result.  They're doing exactly what they had hoped to do when they came to power, and they've failed.  The Conservatives Have No Clothes will take a look inside the roots of that failure, and lay out point-by-point the ways that conservatism makes for terrible government.

 

The conservative agenda works like this:  

Step 1)  Take a hard to solve political problem and pretend it's something else entirely. 

Step 2) Create an easy to implement plan that only works on paper.

Step 3) Implement plan in a way that adds a new disaster to the original, unsolved problem.

 

This is how we turned a search for bin Laden into a quagmire in Iraq, inner city poverty into the farce of No Child Left Behind, and a mild economic slowdown into the incomprehensibly large budget deficit. 

 

While the Bush presidency may have failed, the think tanks and wise men that created his policies show no sign of letting up. This book will be a field guide to examining--and shooting down--whatever ever crazy thing they come up with next.