The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing

This is a must-read exploration in the paradox that is right-wing governmental rule, a conundrum that thrives on failure. "The Conservatives Have No Clothes" disrobes the myth of competent "conservative" management. Anrig explains the Bush administration failed not just because of incompetent individuals, but because conservative ideology inevitably produces incompetent government. In this well-researched and masterfully written book, Anrig documents how conservatives fail. Read this book for a restoration of common sense to the understanding of conservative-ruled government. Why it always - and will always - fail. Highly, HIGHLY, recommended.

I read a lot on current affairs but have not come across a book like this. In one place, across a wide range of policy issues (such as education, health care, Social Security, disaster management, the Iraq war, and federal tax, spending and regulatory polices), Greg Anrig sets forth the policies favored and enacted by movement conservatives, the rationale for those policies, and the evidence on their results. He does all of this in a way that is thorough, fair, well documented, and accessible--and devastating. Notwithstanding the focus on the mistakes of individual government officials, Anrig argues that the results of the policies put into law have been awful, yet inevitable because the ideas and thinking underlying them has been fatally flawed. A word about the reviewer who gave this book one star. It is most helpful to have people reviewing books who do not agree with their conclusions. That said, the claim made by this reviewer that Anrig fails to offer positive ideas as to what should be done in these various policy areas to get better results is simply false. It leaves me wondering if the reviewer read the book, or is simply being intellectually dishonest. Clearly implied or stated explicitly in every chapter are Anrig's conclusions as to what better policy would look like. Disagree with those views if you wish. But don't give the book a trash rating on the basis of a demonstrably false view about its supposed shortcomings. This is no cheap, drive-by hit job. Anrig is fair and civil to those with whom he disagrees, qualities which seem too rare in our current season of discontent. Polls show roughly 7 in 10 Americans believe our country is on the wrong track. I recommend this book to readers who want to get a better sense of how that has happened. Bad ideas put into policy do have consequences.

Not just Progressives, but every American who wonders where it all went wrong in this country and wants to make it right, should read this book. Anrig describes for us the ideas of American Twentieth Century conservatism and the failure of the movement to move beyond the most facile and superficial arguments to provide an intellectual and honest base for their philosophy. While conservatives are experts at setting up progressive strawmen and batting them around (and have in fact a cottage industry which endlessly churns them out) they've failed to offer any substantial arguments to support their ideas - because, as Anrig so clearly points out, there are none. Greg Anrig, in his exceptionally well written book, has given the progressive movement and all Americans the answer to the question, "how did we lose our way?" and more importantly, tells us how to find a way forward.

There are a number of books denouncing the idiocies that pass for right-wing policy making, but most make the case in broad strokes and rarely penetrate beneath the headlines. Anrig's book is the first I've seen that really builds the detailed case. His book goes issue-by-issue, agency-by-agency, deep into the third and fourth layers of policy-making and execution. FEMA, charter schools, regulatory disasters, tax giveaways -- they're all here, along with the politicization and corruption of the process and the demoralization of the people in the trenches who try to make government work. It's a powerful case, crisply and clearly written.

I was eager to read this book as soon as I first heard about it from a "book club" discussion involving Greg Anrig on the "TPM Cafe" blog site. To paraphrase Yeats, the fundamental problem with American politics today is that those with the best ideas lack all conviction, and those with the worst (and provably failed) ideas are "full of passionate intensity." This book is an essential step toward fixing that. Progressives need to highlight conservatism's unending failures much, much more often than they do; it is just bizarre that, today, we've got the political heirs of Herbert Hoover making economic policy, the heirs of Jim Crow segregationists (if not the old segregationists themselves) making social policy, the Bible-thumping last holdouts against modern biology making cultural and science policy, and the heirs of Gen. Edwin Walker and the John Birchers making foreign and military policy. If more people recognized those continuities, conservatives would have no credibility whatsoever, and wouldn't be able to continue holding the power that allows them to keep on repeating versions of the same idiotic mistakes (Iraq, Katrina, etc.). Anrig's book is a blow struck against this historical amnesia. Plus he's a very good writer. If you want to understand why so many things have been going wrong, and/or want to be better armed for political arguments with conservatives, you really should read this.