Can you buy skepticism?

If your the Koch-founded/funded Americans for Prosperity with a spare 240 million, the answer is a resounding YES!

From the National Journal.

Heads in the Sand
As climate-change science moves in one direction, Republicans in Congress are moving in another. Why?

by Coral Davenport
Updated: December 2, 2011 | 10:37 a.m.
December 1, 2011 | 3:00 p.m.

Warning: “Climate change is occurring … and poses significant risks to humans and the environment,” reports the National Academy of Sciences.

Sen. John Barrasso is no stranger to science. The Wyoming Republican is an orthopedic surgeon who earned his medical degree from Georgetown University. His rigorous intellect won him Washingtonian magazine’s designation last year as the “brainiest senator,” based on an anonymous survey of Capitol Hill staffers.

Which is why Barrasso’s reaction when a reporter recently asked his views on climate change was so telling. On his way to the weekly Senate GOP luncheon in the Capitol building, Barrasso paused in an empty hallway to chat. When a reporter said, “Senator, can I ask you a question about climate change?” he fell silent and his eyes narrowed. “I’m busy,” he snapped, before turning sharply and striding away.

Two days later, the reporter tried again. Approached in the Capitol, Barrasso smiled and appeared poised to answer questions, inviting the reporter into an elevator with him. As the door slid shut, the reporter asked, “Do you believe that climate change is causing the Earth to warm?” A long silence ensued. The senator eventually let out a slow laugh and said, “This isn’t the time to have that conversation.” As soon as the elevator opened, he clapped his phone to his ear and walked briskly toward the Capitol subway.

It’s not surprising that Barrasso avoids talking about climate change. He’s smart and has a background in science, but he also represents the country’s top coal-mining state—and scientific studies show that coal pollution is one of the primary causes of climate change. Any policy to curb climate change would likely hurt Wyoming’s economy.

Democrats in the same position, such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, have long been open about this conundrum—the need to address the crisis that climate science says is coming while somehow saving the jobs that could be lost in the fossil-fuel industry. Coal-state Democrats don’t necessarily have a solution; plenty of them clam up when asked about controversial proposals such as cap-and-trade and pollution regulations. But it’s rare to find a Democrat who denies outright the overwhelming scientific consensus that carbon emissions from oil, coal, and gas—also known as greenhouse gases—are causing the world’s climate to warm.

That’s not the case for Republicans. Over the past year, GOP politicians have increasingly questioned or flatly denied the established science of climate change. As the presidential primaries heat up, the leading candidates have either denied the verdict of climate scientists or recanted their former views supporting climate policy. As the tea party grows in influence, and the fossil-fuel industry injects unprecedented levels of spending into the electoral system, challenging climate science has become, in some circles, as much of a conservative litmus test as opposing taxes. Conservatives such as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who notoriously called climate change a hoax, once were marginalized. Now Inhofe tells National Journal he feels that he’s “come in from the cold.”


ON THE TRAIL

In his first week of campaigning for president, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that climate change was a theory that “still has not been proven” and was driven in part by a “substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data” to secure research grants. In his book Fed Up! he dismissed climate science as a “contrived phony mess that is falling apart.”

Mitt Romney, who as governor tasked the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Division with creating a policy to fight climate change, has now walked back his pronouncements that human activity causes global warming.

Newt Gingrich, who in 2009 recorded an ad with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling on Congress to take action on climate change, recently called that ad “the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.” Jon Huntsman, the one Republican presidential candidate who stands by views that climate change is real and caused by humans, is reaping support from about 1 percent of GOP primary voters.

Despite the rhetoric on the campaign trail, a quiet but significant number of prominent Republican politicians and strategists accept the science of climate change and fear that rejecting it could not only tar the party as “antiscience” but also drive away the independent voters who are key to winning general elections. “There’s a pretty good-sized chunk of the Republican caucus that believes that global warming is happening, and it’s caused at least in part by mankind,” said Mike McKenna, a strategist with close ties to the GOP’s leadership. “You can tell these guys are uncomfortable when you start to talk about science.”

As recently as the last presidential election, the debate in Republican circles was far different. John McCain’s 2008 campaign ads promised that as president, he would tackle climate change. Not only that, but McCain was a lead sponsor of the first major Senate cap-and-trade bill in 2003. In a 2008 interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson, Sarah Palin asserted that climate change was affecting Alaska, and in the vice presidential debate she said she would support a cap on carbon emissions. In January 2008, then-Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who was head of the National Governors Association, recorded a radio ad with Democrat Janet Napolitano, then Arizona governor, urging Congress to act. “Come on, Congress: Let’s get moving.… Cap greenhouse-gas pollution now,” Pawlenty urged.

What changed? Not the scientific evidence. In fact, recent reports from the National Academy of Sciences show that the data and consensus on the principles of climate change are stronger than ever. The reports have concluded that increasing levels of carbon dioxide, produced primarily by burning coal and oil, are trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. A November scientific report by the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes those rising temperatures will, over the next century, bring an increase in the frequency and intensity of heat waves, heavy precipitation, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and rising sea levels.

In November, Richard Muller, a prominent physicist at the University of California (Berkeley) who was cited by climate skeptics after he questioned some of the data used in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, released the results of his two-year Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, a new study of global temperatures around the world. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Muller wrote, “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.… Global warming is real.”

Here’s what has changed for Republican politicians: The rise of the tea party, its influence in the Republican Party, its crusade against government regulations, and the influx into electoral politics of vast sums of money from energy companies and sympathetic interest groups.

Republicans have long had close financial ties to the fossil-fuel industry, of course. Between 1998 and 2010, the oil-and-gas industry gave 75 percent of its $284 million in political contributions to Republicans. But the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed unlimited corporate spending on campaign advertisements, opened up a whole new avenue for interest groups to influence campaigns by flooding the airwaves with ads that support a political candidate or position. In the 2010 elections alone, the top five conservative and pro-industry outside groups and political action committees—including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Karl Rove-backed PAC American Crossroads, which have close ties to fossil-fuel interests—spent a combined $105 million to support GOP candidates (compared with a combined $8 million that the top five environmental groups spent to back Democrats). Both sides could double those numbers in 2012.

Among the most influential of the new breed of so-called super PACs is the tea party group Americans for Prosperity, founded by David and Charles Koch, the principal owners of Koch Industries, a major U.S. oil conglomerate. As Koch Industries has lobbied aggressively against climate-change policy, Americans for Prosperity has spearheaded an all-fronts campaign using advertising, social media, and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who will ensure that the oil industry won’t have to worry about any new regulations.

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, says there’s no question that the influence of his group and others like it has been instrumental in the rise of Republican candidates who question or deny climate science. “If you look at where the situation was three years ago and where it is today, there’s been a dramatic turnaround. Most of these candidates have figured out that the science has become political,” he said. “We’ve made great headway. What it means for candidates on the Republican side is, if you … buy into green energy or you play footsie on this issue, you do so at your political peril. The vast majority of people who are involved in the [Republican] nominating process—the conventions and the primaries—are suspect of the science. And that’s our influence. Groups like Americans for Prosperity have done it.”


NO WAY OUT

What makes the climate-change problem so difficult for Republicans is that the menu of solutions boils down to an unpalatable handful. Nearly all economists say that the best way to solve the greenhouse-gas problem is with a tax. Put a tax on what you want to reduce—in this case, emissions caused by burning oil and coal—and consumers will use less of it. Politically, that idea has been a nonstarter.

Reagan administration economists came up with a mechanism to cut carbon emissions in a way that harnesses the free market: cap-and-trade. Cap the number of tons of carbon pollution that can be produced, and allow industry to buy and sell permits to pollute. Direct regulation is another way to achieve that goal: Government agencies simply dictating to businesses what they need to do to cut pollution. Most experts say that any global-warming solution will probably also have to include some government spending to promote the development of non-fossil-fuel forms of energy.

All three of these options are anathema to the tea party. So what’s a Republican who believes in climate science—but also believes in the tea party’s ability to influence elections—to do?

“I think that there is some genuine soul-searching going on,” said a GOP operative who, like most of the party’s staffers and strategists interviewed for this story, spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue. “If you look around at the environment, there’s nobody smart [saying], ‘No, there’s nothing going on.’ But the tea party is a political necessity.”

For much of the Republican Party, the current strategy on climate science is to, literally, run away from the question.


CHASING LAWMAKERS

In an effort to survey Republicans on climate change, National Journal reporters reached out to every GOP senator and representative. Over the course of several weeks, reporters either attempted to interview lawmakers in person, or called or e-mailed their offices.

Most, like Barrasso, rebuffed repeated inquiries. Some flatly refused to answer questions when approached in person, and their offices declined to respond to repeated phone calls and e-mail requests. “It’s not a conversation senators feel comfortable having,” a Republican staffer said.

Several aides initially said that their bosses would be happy to take part in interviews or answer written questions—only to follow up later with clipped refusals.

One GOP House staffer wrote to National Journal to ask if the responses could remain anonymous. Upon learning that the comments would be on the record, the aide said that her boss could not respond. “This issue is too gray and thorny for us to answer in the black-and-white terms you’ve laid out,” wrote the staffer—who agreed to be quoted only anonymously.

Here are the questions NJ asked the Republican members of Congress: Do you think climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer? How much, if any, of global climate change do you think is attributable to human activity? What is the government’s most appropriate response to the issue of climate change?

In the end, 65 GOP lawmakers—40 House members and 25 senators across the ideological spectrum agreed to respond.

Twenty of the 65 Republicans said they think climate change is causing the Earth to warm; 13 said that climate change isn’t causing the Earth to warm; and 21 said they didn’t know, the science isn’t conclusive, or they didn’t want to answer the question definitively. Nineteen said that human activities do contribute to climate change—but of those 19, only five said they believed a “significant amount” of climate change was due to human activity, while 14 said they believed human activity contributes “very little” to climate change. Five said they believed that climate change was not at all attributable to human activity.

The only lawmakers who seemed eager to respond to the questions were the full-throated climate-change skeptics. Inhofe, for example, gladly held forth in an interview off the Senate floor about what he views as the false premise of climate science. Later, when his aide told him the office had received a separate query by e-mail, he called a reporter back on her cell phone to be sure his opinion had fully registered.

Freshman Rep. Allen West of Florida, a leading voice in the House’s Tea Party Caucus, was also unequivocal: “I believe in climate change—winter, spring, summer, or fall,” he said. “Do you believe climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer?” he was asked. “No,” he responded firmly.

Among the offices that refused repeated requests to answer questions was House Speaker John Boehner’s. The speaker’s job is to maintain unity in a caucus constantly on the verge of fracturing and to also try to increase his party’s majority in 2012. His advisers fear that taking a clear position on climate change could crack the caucus in two and stop the cash flow from the biggest campaign money machines.

The problem is that Boehner already has taken a position on climate change. In a July 15, 2008, interview on CNN, he said, “I think that John McCain’s position is not really very different from most Republicans’. The fact is that we have had climate change. Clearly, humans have something to do with it.”

But in November 2010, after the tea party juggernaut swept Republicans into power in the House, Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor formulated a strategy to attack the Obama administration relentlessly on fossil-fuel and climate-change regulations but to keep silent on the issue of climate science. Some tea party Republicans, such as Texan Joe Barton, who is Inhofe’s prominent climate-skeptic counterpart in the House, had looked forward to holding hearings aimed at tearing down the established science. Boehner told Barton to lay off—out of fear, as one staffer put it, that such hearings would get the party branded as “flat-earthers.”

“The speaker’s office made a decision early on not to talk about the science,” said a Republican operative who works closely with House leadership and asked to speak anonymously in order to be candid. “The leadership guys said, ‘We’re not going to talk about it; we’re not going to hold hearings on it; we think the science argument’s a loser.’ ”


REVERSING COURSE

No one exemplifies Republicans’ difficulties on climate better than Fred Upton, the Michigander who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the powerful panel charged with writing (and repealing) laws regulating the oil and coal industry’s fossil-fuel emissions. Like his friend Boehner, Upton used to talk about the need to tackle climate change. But the chairman, who in his last campaign received $20,000 from Koch Industries, has had to awkwardly reposition himself to accommodate the new GOP order.

Upton once called climate change a “serious problem” on his website (a phrase he deleted after the 2010 elections), endorsed reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, and sponsored bipartisan legislation to promote the use of energy-efficient lightbulbs. All of that changed after the midterm elections, when he ran against Barton for the chairmanship of the powerful Energy panel. Barton, who likes to say he was “tea party before tea party was cool,” ran an aggressive campaign, challenging Upton’s conservative bona fides (the lightbulb legislation, in particular). Upton tacked hard to the right.

When pressed repeatedly on his views on climate change during an on-stage February interview with National Journal, Upton said he believes that the planet is warming—but not because of human actions. “If you look, the last year was the warmest year on record, the warmest decade on record. I accept that. I do not say that it’s man-made,” Upton said. He has since introduced legislation with Inhofe to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse pollution threatens public health—a move that surprised some of his constituents.

“I’ve heard Fred Upton say he accepts the science of climate change, at a constituent breakfast two years ago,” said Knute Nadelhoffer, director of the University of Michigan’s Biological Station. “Well, now he appears to be ignoring it or agreeing with the deniers. We want to know why. That’s not a responsible way to craft policy.… We have clear patterns of changing climate in the Great Lakes region—more big storms in spring, more floods that are compromising our coastal cities, and more heat waves and droughts in the summer.”

House Democrats, hoping to spotlight such inconsistencies, insisted that Upton’s committee hold a hearing on climate science. Eventually, in March, he did—but counseled by GOP leadership, almost no Republican members showed up.

More recently, a reporter caught up with Upton in the Speaker’s Lobby off the House floor and asked his views on how much human activity may contribute to climate change. The ever-friendly Upton smiled and said, “I’m not going to go there, thanks,” and headed toward the House floor, where reporters can’t follow.


ISSA AND HALL

Less cheerful than Upton was Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the brash chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He has helped spearhead House Republicans’ attacks on EPA’s new climate-change and coal regulations, bashing them with the “job-killing” stigma. Asked if he believed that climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer, Issa responded, “You mean, the global cooling that’s been going on for the last 10 years, according to scientists? The science has just said we’ve had we’ve had 10 years of no warming.”

In fact, last year NASA reported that January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record since the 1880s. The reporter noted the number of such studies—and asked Issa to clarify his answer. “Are you saying, no, you don’t think climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer?”

Issa snapped back angrily, “Do you realize how silly your question is? Your question, if you were going to ask it, is, ‘Do you think increased CO2 is causing the Earth to become warmer?’ I think it may contribute—I have no question that it may be.” He glared at the reporter and said angrily, “Next time, learn to ask your questions,” turned on his heel, and headed back to the House floor.

One senior House Republican who appears comfortable with his positions on climate science is Texan Ralph Hall, chairman of the House Science Committee. Asked if climate change is causing the Earth to become warmer, the lawmaker charged with shaping national science policy responded, “I don’t think it’s the cause. I don’t think we can control what God controls.” Hall said that on the issue of climate science, he is “pretty close” to the stance of his fellow Texan, Rick Perry—believing that climate science may be a conspiracy theory put forth by scientists who are working in concert to receive funding for research. A reporter pointed out that last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a survey concluding that 97 percent of climate-science researchers are in consensus that human activities have led to global warming. “And they each get $5,000 for every report like that they give out,” Hall scoffed. He added, “I don’t have any proof of that. But I don’t believe ’em.”


GOP DISSENTERS

Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., who sits on the House Science Committee, has a special relationship with scientists—they’re her constituents. Her district includes the Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory, which researches high-energy physics and is developing technology that could enable electric cars to travel twice their current distance before recharging. Biggert worries that candidates like Perry will get the party branded as antiscience. “We seem to be moving ahead in a vein that’s not the scientific way,” she said of Republicans. “And that’s a shame, because there are a lot of us that really believe in the sciences and look to scientists. It’s a concern.”

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., a moderate elder statesman who is deeply respected among his party’s old guard, has long been on the record with his worries about the effects of climate change. He signed up his 604-acre farm to participate in the (now defunct) volunteer Chicago Climate Exchange cap-and-trade program, and he has not changed his views about climate science—even though he is expected to be a tea party target in 2012. Lugar calls the Washington climate-change debate “very ill-informed.”

In part, he blames the scientific community for failing to translate and communicate its findings clearly to policymakers in language they can understand. The complexity and nuance is surely ill-suited to the sound-bite simplicity of the Beltway debate. But Lugar says that the only way science can stand up for itself is by entering the fray—loudly, clearly, and simply.

“Many would argue that a predominant number of scientists have said this or that—but whatever they’ve said has not come clearly through to laypersons or members of Congress.… I have gone to conferences for several years and have pled for indicators … that would make a difference in terms of my being able to argue, “ he said. “This may be impractical, but in Times Square, there’s an indicator of how the public debt is rising. We’re going to have to have, for there to be a good public discussion about this, some metric which is understandable.”

But Lugar, like every other lawmaker in Washington, knows full well that Congress has no chance of taking up climate-change legislation any time in the near future. For now, the only policy action that might be possible is battening down the hatches against the floods and droughts that scientists say are on their way—something Lugar saw firsthand when his state suffered devastating flooding earlier this year. “In terms of public policy, we’ll have to deal with more violent storms in the planning of governance for cities that abut rivers and oceans. Whether you buy climate change or not, as a public servant you had better be prepared for many more climate disasters.”


OVERWHELMING SCIENCE

The data showing that combustion of fossil fuels produces emissions that warm the Earth’s atmosphere are ample and historic, and have been rigorously reviewed.

Over the past 18 years, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has produced more than 40 scientific reports and studies on climate change. The most recent, released in May, concludes, “Climate change is occurring, is very likely caused by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems. Each additional ton of greenhouse gases emitted commits us to further change and greater risks…. The environmental, economic, and humanitarian risks of climate change indicate a pressing need for substantial action to limit the magnitude of climate change and to prepare to adapt to its impacts.”

The world’s largest general-scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has published this official statement: “The scientific evidence is clear: Global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society.… The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse-gas emissions is now.”

The world’s major national scientific institutes, including the official academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, and the United Kingdom have independently published concurring conclusions.

So have the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, the American Society of Agronomy, the American Society for Microbiology, the Crop Science Society of America, the Geological Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, and the World Health Organization—among many other scientific bodies.

In June 2010, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that 97 percent of climate scientists agree on the tenets of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, a level of consensus that the journal called “striking,” given the uncertainty often present in scientific research.

No scientific body of national or international standing has offered a dissenting opinion.

“It’s a very, very strong consensus,” says Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council. The level of certainty within the scientific community that burning fossil fuels warms the global atmosphere is comparable, he said, to the level of scientific certainty that vaccines prevent diseases such as measles and polio.

Perry and some other skeptics say that the scientific consensus on climate change is a fraud perpetrated by scientists working in concert—and that climate scientists falsely manipulate evidence to show that climate change is taking place so they can secure funding or prominence. Scientists say that the rigors of the independent peer-review process effectively make the former claim impossible—and that the latter claim simply doesn’t make sense, because what brings the greatest fame and fortune in science is successfully disproving accepted theories.

“The whole system works on evidence, repeatability, doing the same calculations, testing rigorously to get the same result,” Cicerone says. “If you’re working on a topic the public is interested in, there are more and more people watching what you’re doing. You couldn’t perpetrate a fraud if you wanted to.”

Some skeptics also point to the “climate-gate” controversy as evidence that that the body of climate science, or the peer-review process, has been undermined.

In November 2009, just before a major U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, aimed at forging a world treaty to cut fossil-fuel emissions, hackers breached the server of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and released thousands of e-mail exchanges between the university’s climate scientists. A small number of those messages contained language that Republican politicians, including Inhofe and Palin, said indicated that the scientists were attempting to falsify climate data. Every independent review of the e-mails concluded otherwise.

Despite the exoneration, the e-mail release succeeded in changing the public debate in the U.S., where GOP lawmakers continue to point to the East Anglia e-mails as evidence that climate science is not settled—and as a reason not to act on climate change. Last month, just a week before this year’s U.N. climate summit in Durban, South Africa, hackers released a second batch of East Anglia e-mails, culled from the original batch released in 2009, evidently with the aim of once again reigniting climate-science skepticism. Once again, the scientific community said that the e-mails do not disprove the core underpinnings of climate science—but they do give new fuel to climate skeptics.

“The science at East Anglia was fine,” Cicerone says. “But I think [the East Anglia scientists] were just angry. They were too poorly equipped, scruffy, and informal an outfit to show everyone all their data all the time. On the scientific consensus, there’s no impact at all—although on public opinion there was an impact.”


SPEAKING OUT

Some senior Republicans who have left the battlefield of electoral politics are starting to go vocal with their worries about their party’s stance on climate change—and to take action to stave off its electoral consequences. They fear, in the words of one GOP operative, “that the party is going to drive itself off a cliff with this.”

Conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior adviser on McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign who now heads the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, is working with the climate-policy advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet. The New Hampshire-based group has flown Holtz-Eakin to the state several times over the past few months to talk to voters in small living-room meetings about the economic threats of climate change—and the economic benefits of addressing the problem.

Another prominent Republican, John Warner, the former senator from Virginia and secretary of the Navy, is a senior adviser to the Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate, which focuses on the need to develop alternative energy to combat climate change and lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Warner, who cosponsored a major cap-and-trade bill when he was in the Senate, now travels the country, including stops at military bases, calling attention to the national-security concerns of climate change and fossil-fuel dependence.

Working with Warner on the Pew climate-change project is George Shultz, President Reagan’s secretary of State and an adviser to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Last year, Shultz, who is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University, cochaired the “No on Prop. 23” campaign in California, which successfully defended the state’s pioneering cap-and-trade law against an oil industry-led effort to overturn it.

“My own opinion is that this problem is very real,” Shultz told National Journal. “I recognize there are a lot of people pooh-poohing it. Whether they like the science or not, there’s a huge problem coming at us. There’s a huge melt coming in the Arctic regions. There’s melting taking place.” Of Perry and other Republicans who deny climate science, Shultz said, “They’re entitled to their opinion, but they’re not entitled to the facts.”

Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who lost his primary race last year in part because he acknowledged climate change, gives speeches and lectures across the country about the need for conservatives to do likewise and begin working on solutions to the problem. Otherwise, the Republican Party will be labeled antiscience, he warns. Inglis takes his message directly to conservative strongholds such as Federalist clubs and meetings of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Being branded as antiscience is not a good future for us,” Inglis told National Journal. “How can we say to young people, we’re dismissing science? That’s not a good place for our party to be, and it’s not historically where we’ve been. There are conservative voices that will hopefully show the way back to conservatism and away from a populist rejection of science.”

On November 8, William Reilly, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush, blasted his party’s stance on science in a widely reported speech. “For some of the most prominent leaders of the Republican Party, science has left the building,” he said. “Science doesn’t feature prominently in these debates. Republicans once were the party of science where environmental policy was concerned,” Reilly contended. Of House Republicans’ recent unanimous vote to overturn EPA’s scientific finding that climate change poses a public health threat, he said, “There was no explanation justifying a position at odds with the findings of 11 National Academies of Science, including our own.”

Another longtime GOP ally, Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, is also disturbed by the party’s shift toward science denial. Anderson, who is Tim Pawlenty’s pastor and worked with the former Minnesota governor on his state climate-change initiatives, in 2006 joined with other prominent evangelicals in sending a letter to President George W. Bush arguing that no legitimate scientific debate remained on the merits of climate science and that evangelicals had a moral obligation to solve a problem that threatens the world’s most vulnerable people.

“Most evangelicals in other countries believe that there is climate change and that we need to do something. It seems to be an American position to deny that,” Anderson told National Journal. “It’s curious to me that there are people who have taken strong positions and then changed them. Many of the candidates were expressing concern four or five years ago. Whenever there are sea changes on particular issues and many get on board, you wonder what changed the political or cultural climate.”


POLITICAL CALCULATIONS

So, will climate-science skepticism help or hurt the Republican Party in the long run? It’s clear that GOP candidates who want to win the backing of the conservative base and the financial support of tea party PACs believe that denying climate science will help them win primary races—and polls show that they are probably correct.

In a Pew survey last spring, 75 percent of staunch conservatives, 63 percent of libertarians, and 55 percent of so-called Main Street Republicans said there was no solid evidence of global warming. Those views are far out of step, however, with those of the general public: Overall, Pew found, 59 percent of adults say there is solid evidence that the Earth’s average temperature has been getting warmer over the past few decades. GOP candidates’ climate-science skepticism could win primaries but lose general elections.

An August poll conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that 77 percent of respondents would vote for a candidate who said he or she believed that climate change was happening and caused by fossil fuels; only 48 percent said they would vote for a candidate who said that science hasn’t shown that humans are changing the climate. Perhaps most notably for the many Republicans who are desperately trying to avoid being pinned down on climate change, 65 percent said they would vote for a candidate who was silent on the issue.

In the long term, Reilly and other voices within the GOP fear that the party’s inevitable reckoning with science may come too late. “Somehow, we’re operating on two levels of reality,” he said. “One is ideological reality, which seems to work for some ideologues. But there is also the scientific reality. It was Republicans who traditionally have pushed for more science to underpin regulations. Science has suffered most severely in the current Republican Party. The ideologues will deny it right up to a point where there’s … a crisis—and then they won’t anymore.”

Olga Belogolova, Kevin Brennan, Julia Edwards, Amy Harder, Sarah Mimms, Stephanie Palla, Christopher Peleo-Lazar, Dan Roem, Hana Rouse, Julie Sobel, Kate Stonehill, Sean Sullivan, and Matt Vasilogambros contributed

Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer - Bloomberg

Another wealthy VC tries explaining what the current GOP can't wrap it's head around.

Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer - Bloomberg

By Nick Hanauer Nov 30, 2011 4:01 PM PT 411
It is a tenet of American economic beliefs, and an article of faith for Republicans that is seldom contested by Democrats: If taxes are raised on the rich, job creation will stop.

Trouble is, sometimes the things that we know to be true are dead wrong. For the larger part of human history, for example, people were sure that the sun circles the Earth and that we are at the center of the universe. It doesn’t, and we aren’t. The conventional wisdom that the rich and businesses are our nation’s “job creators” is every bit as false.

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

Theory of Evolution

When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.

It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.

Since 1980, the share of the nation’s income for fat cats like me in the top 0.1 percent has increased a shocking 400 percent, while the share for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has declined 33 percent. At the same time, effective tax rates on the superwealthy fell to 16.6 percent in 2007, from 42 percent at the peak of U.S. productivity in the early 1960s, and about 30 percent during the expansion of the 1990s. In my case, that means that this year, I paid an 11 percent rate on an eight-figure income.

One reason this policy is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, I go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally.

It’s true that we do spend a lot more than the average family. Yet the one truly expensive line item in our budget is our airplane (which, by the way, was manufactured in France by Dassault Aviation SA (AM) ), and those annual costs are mostly for fuel (from the Middle East ). It’s just crazy to believe that any of this is more beneficial to our economy than hiring more teachers or police officers or investing in our infrastructure.

More Shoppers Needed

I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the tens of millions of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.

If the average American family still got the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would have an astounding $13,000 more in their pockets a year. It’s worth pausing to consider what our economy would be like today if middle-class consumers had that additional income to spend.

It is mathematically impossible to invest enough in our economy and our country to sustain the middle class (our customers) without taxing the top 1 percent at reasonable levels again. Shifting the burden from the 99 percent to the 1 percent is the surest and best way to get our consumer-based economy rolling again.

Significant tax increases on the about $1.5 trillion in collective income of those of us in the top 1 percent could create hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in our economy, rather than letting it pile up in a few bank accounts like a huge clot in our nation’s economic circulatory system.

Consider, for example, that a puny 3 percent surtax on incomes above $1 million would be enough to maintain and expand the current payroll tax cut beyond December, preventing a $1,000 increase on the average worker’s taxes at the worst possible time for the economy. With a few more pennies on the dollar, we could invest in rebuilding schools and infrastructure. And even if we imposed a millionaires’ surtax and rolled back the Bush- era tax cuts for those at the top, the taxes on the richest Americans would still be historically low, and their incomes would still be astronomically high.

We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business.

(Nick Hanauer is a founder of Second Avenue Partners, a venture capital company in Seattle specializing in early state startups and emerging technology. He has helped launch more than 20 companies, including aQuantive Inc. and Amazon.com, and is the co-author of two books, “The True Patriot” and “The Gardens of Democracy.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Nick Hanauer at Nick@secondave.com.

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Max Berley at mberley@bloomberg.net .

Boston Review — Kenneth Arrow: Economics and Inequality

It is pleasing to be hearing these thoughts and concerns growing out of the Occupy movement.


Boston Review — Kenneth Arrow: Economics and Inequality

Economics and Inequality
Kenneth Arrow

This article is part of Occupy the Future, a forum on lessons to be drawn from the Occupy movement.

The specific problems of the current U.S. economy—the drastic increase in unemployment and sluggish increase in output—overlay a tendency of much longer duration, a drastic and rapid increase in the inequality of income. Every economy of complexity produces an unequal distribution of the good things in life. But the period immediately following World War II showed a considerably increased equality of income compared with either the Great Depression or the previous period of relative prosperity.

Since the middle 1980s, this tendency has been reversed. In the United States, median family income (adjusted for size) has remained virtually constant since 1995, while per capita income has risen at about 2 percent per annum. The difference in income between college graduates and those with only high school degrees increased at a rapid rate, even during the period before 1990 when per capita income grew very slowly. Further, the proportion of the college-age population enrolled in college, which had been rising rapidly, stopped increasing and has remained the same for thirty years.

Clearly, the bulk of the gains from increased productivity went to a small group of upper-income recipients. Indeed, closer study has shown that the bulk of the increase went to the top 1 percent of income recipients and much of that to those in the top .1 percent.

The causes of this growing inequality are varied. There has been a steady attack on the use of the tax system as a means of equalizing income. Income and estate taxes were once the most directly effective factors in redistribution. The top rate in the federal income tax was over 90 percent in the 1950s and is about 35 percent today. The exemption level for estate taxes has risen steadily, ensuring that less and less can be taxed. On the other hand, the earned-income tax credit has actually permitted negative income taxes (payments by the government to the tax filer) at the lowest end.

Shifts in the composition of goods and services have reduced income opportunities for many. Skilled industrial jobs have disappeared, while growing information services require a different set of skills. This shift has undoubtedly been augmented by globalization, which has resulted in considerable imports of manufactured goods. The weakening of unions is in good measure attributable to the relative decline in manufacturing, where unionization is easier.

Contemporaneous with the decline of manufacturing has been the increase of two service industries, finance and health. Profits from the finance sector, which historically have been about 10 percent of all profits, have risen to an extraordinary 40 percent. The sector’s labor needs are, of course, directed in considerable measure to the best-educated.

A proper sense of responsibility has to be enforced by legislation.

The notion of a well-running market is applicable to manufactured goods; different items are produced to be alike and can be evaluated by consumers. But the products of the finance and health industries are individualized and complex. The consumer cannot seriously evaluate them—a situation that economists call “asymmetric information.”

This casts light on the claim that the problem is one of personal ethics, of greed. After all, the search for improvement in technology, and consequently in the general standards of living, is motivated by greed. When the market system works properly, greed is tempered by competition. Hence, most of the gains from innovation and good service cannot be retained by the providers.

But in situations of asymmetric information, the forces of competition are weakened. The individual patient or financial client does not have access to all the relevant information. Indeed, when the information is sufficiently complex, it may be impossible to provide adequate information.

In these circumstances, greed becomes more relevant. There arises an obligation to present the relevant information as fully as possible, an obligation that has been violated in the financial industry. In the medical field, this challenge has to a considerable extent been met historically by standards of proper practice. These may involve revelation of all information, or at least the requirement that differences in information not be exploited.

It is clear that the financial industry is well behind the medical in this respect. A proper sense of responsibility has to be enforced by legislation, as it was in the 1930s. There has been some erosion in the law, for example under the Clinton administration, and in enforcement. The Dodd-Frank law is a step in the right direction, but the influence of the financial industry watered it down and created unnecessary complications.

It is not superfluous to argue that steepening the income tax progression, removing a number of blatant loopholes, such as the special treatment of capital gains, and reducing the exemption level for estates would add considerably to post-tax equality.

Serious times call for more bread and circuses - Part I

It's unlikely that the current Republican party even knows how to look up the word "shame", but it's insightful to see how our election circus plays in foreign countries, in this case, Germany.

A Club of Liars, Demagogues, and Fools

By Scott Horton

The German newsweekly Spiegel takes the latest disclosures concerning Herman Cain and the rise of Newt Gingrich as an opportunity to offer a foreign bird’s-eye view of the current Republican Party and the American media froth around it. My translation:

“Africa is a country. The Taliban rule in Libya. Muslims are terrorists. Immigrants are mostly criminals, Occupy Wall Street protesters are always dirty. And women who claim to have been sexually molested should kindly keep quiet.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of the Republican Party. Or rather: to the distorted world of its presidential campaign. For months it has coiled through the country like a traveling circus, from debate to debate, from scandal to scandal, contesting the mightiest office in the world — and nothing is ever too unfathomable for them… These eight presidential wannabes are happy enough not only to demolish their own reputations but also that of their party, the once worthy party of Abraham Lincoln. They are also ruining the reputation of the United States.

They lie, deceive, scuffle and speak every manner of idiocy. And they expose a political, economic, geographic and historical ignorance compared to which George W. Bush sounds like a scholar. Even the party’s boosters are horrified by the spectacle…

Platitudes in lieu of programs: in serious times that demand the smartest, these clowns offer blather that is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans. But as with all freak shows, it would be impossible without a stage, the U.S. media, which has been neutered by the demands of political correctness, and a welcoming audience, a party base that seems to have been lobotomized overnight. Notwithstanding the subterranean depths of the primary process, the press and broadcasters proclaim one clown after the next to be the new frontrunner, in predictable news cycles of forty-five days.

Spiegel ties the disintegration of the Republican Party to the Tea Party, “a ‘popular movement’ that was sponsored by Fox News and never showed any interest in the business of government — neither in information nor intellect, which are its requisites, but rather in a self-marketing exercise driven by commissions and millions.”

The most important observation Spiegel offers is this: At a time of mounting crisis, when much of the world is looking to the United States for leadership and initiative, the celebration of sleaze and ignorance that has marked the Republican primary is damaging the reputation of the nation as a whole. Even those who despise the G.O.P. should be concerned about the depths to which the party has sunk.

http://harpers.org/archive/2011/11/hbc-90008328 (paywall'd)

The Wisdom of Retrenchment

Another good read from Foreign Affairs Journal

The Wisdom of Retrenchment: The United States can no longer afford a world-spanning foreign policy. Retrenchment -- cutting military spending, redefining foreign priorities, and shifting more of the defense burden to allies -- is the only sensible course. Luckily, that does not have to spell instability abroad. History shows that pausing to recharge national batteries can renew a dominant power’s international legitimacy.

In the wake of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy underwent a profound transformation. Unrestrained by superpower competition, the United States' ambitions spilled over their former limits. Washington increased its military spending far faster than any of its rivals, expanded NATO, and started dispatching forces around the world on humanitarian missions while letting key allies drift away. These trends accelerated after 9/11, as the United States went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, ramped up its counterterrorism operations around the world, sped up its missile defense program, and set up new bases in distant lands.

Today, however, U.S. power has begun to wane. As other states rise in prominence, the United States' undisciplined spending habits and open-ended foreign policy commitments are catching up with the country. Spurred on by skyrocketing government debt and the emergence of the Tea Party movement, budget hawks are circling Washington. Before leaving office earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced cuts to the tune of $78 billion over the next five years, and the recent debt-ceiling deal could trigger another $350 billion in cuts from the defense budget over ten years. In addition to fiscal discipline, Washington appears to have rediscovered the virtues of multilateralism and a restrained foreign policy. It has narrowed its war aims in Afghanistan and Iraq, taken NATO expansion off its agenda, and let France and the United Kingdom lead the intervention in Libya.

But if U.S. policymakers have reduced the country's strategic commitments in response to a decline in its relative power, they have yet to fully embrace retrenchment as a policy and endorse deep spending cuts (especially to the military), redefine Washington's foreign policy priorities, and shift more of the United States' defense burdens onto its allies. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has warned that a cut in defense spending beyond the one agreed to in the debt-ceiling deal would be devastating. "It will weaken our national defense," he said. "It will undermine our ability to maintain our alliances throughout the world." This view reflects the conventional wisdom of generations of U.S. decision-makers: when it comes to power, more is always better. Many officials fear that reducing the country's influence abroad would let tyranny advance and force trade to dwindle. And various interest groups oppose the idea, since they stand to lose from a sudden reduction in the United States' foreign engagements.

In fact, far from auguring chaos abroad and division at home, a policy of prudent retrenchment would not only reduce the costs of U.S. foreign policy but also result in a more coherent and sustainable strategy. In the past, great powers that scaled back their goals in the face of their diminishing means were able to navigate the shoals of power politics better than those that clung to expensive and overly ambitious commitments. Today, a reduction in U.S. forward deployments could mollify U.S. adversaries, eliminate potential flashpoints, and encourage U.S. allies to contribute more to collective defense -- all while easing the burden on the United States of maintaining geopolitical dominance. A policy of retrenchment need not invite international instability or fuel partisan rancor in Washington. If anything, it could help provide breathing room for reforms and recovery, increase strategic flexibility, and renew the legitimacy of U.S. leadership.

DECLINE: DELUSION OR DESTINY?

Power is multifaceted and difficult to measure, but the metrics that matter most over the long term are a country's military capability and economic strength relative to rivals. Using those benchmarks, there is a strong case to be made that although U.S. decline is real, its rate is modest.

The United States invests more in its military manpower and hardware than all other countries combined. As the political scientist Barry Posen argues, this has allowed it to exercise "command of the commons." With its vast fleet of attack submarines and aircraft carriers, the United States controls the seas -- even those that are not its territorial waters and those outside its exclusive economic zone. Its fighter aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles give it unrivaled air superiority. And its dominance of outer space and cyberspace is almost as impressive.

But the United States' return on its military investment is falling. Manpower and technology costs are increasing rapidly. The Government Accountability Office reports that since the end of the Cold War, funding for weapons acquisition has increased by 57 percent while the average acquisition cost has increased by 120 percent. According to the Congressional Research Service, between 1999 and 2005, the real cost of supporting an active-duty service member grew by 33 percent. Meanwhile, the benefits of unrestricted defense spending have not kept up with the costs. As Gates put it, U.S. defense institutions have become "accustomed to the post-9/11 decade's worth of 'no questions asked' funding requests," encouraging a culture of waste and inefficiency he described as "a semi-feudal system -- an amalgam of fiefdoms without centralized mechanisms to allocate resources."

The trend of the last decade is disturbing: as military spending soared, U.S. success abroad sagged. To be clear, the United States continues to field the best-armed, most skilled military in the world. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have bent, but not broken, the all-volunteer force, and the burden of maintaining this formidable force is not unacceptably onerous. The proposed $553 billion base-line defense budget for 2012 represents just 15 percent of the federal budget and less than five percent of GDP. (To put that figure in perspective, consider that the proposed 2012 budget for Social Security spending tops $760 billion.) Yet current trends will make it harder for the United States to continue to purchase hegemony as easily as it has in the past. Changes in military tactics and technology are eroding the United States' advantages. The proliferation of antiship cruise missiles makes it harder for the U.S. Navy to operate near adversaries' shores. Advanced surface-to-air missiles likewise raise the cost of maintaining U.S. air superiority in hostile theaters. Nationalist and tribal insurgencies, fueled by a brisk small-arms trade, have proved difficult to combat with conventional ground forces. U.S. defense dominance is getting more expensive at a moment when it is becoming less expensive for other states and actors to challenge the sole superpower.

Beyond these challenges to the country's military dominance, a weakened economic condition is contributing to the decline of U.S. power. The U.S. economy remains the largest in the world, yet its position is in jeopardy. Between 1999 and 2009, the U.S. share of global GDP (measured in terms of purchasing power parity) fell from 23 percent to 20 percent, whereas China's share of global GDP jumped from seven percent to 13 percent. Should this trend continue, China's economic output will surpass the United States' by 2016. China already consumes more energy than the United States, and calls are growing louder to replace the dollar as the international reserve currency with a basket of currencies that would include the euro and the yuan.

The fiscal position of the United States is alarming, whether or not one believes that Standard & Poor's was justified in downgrading U.S. Treasury bonds. Between 2001 and 2009, U.S. federal debt as a percentage of GDP more than doubled, from 32 percent to 67 percent, and state and local governments have significant debts, too. The United States' reliance on imports, combined with high rates of borrowing, has led to a considerable current account deficit: more than six percent of GDP in 2006. Power follows money, and the United States is leaking cash.

The news is not all doom and gloom. Despite massive federal debt, the United States spent less than five percent of its 2010 budget on net interest payments, limiting the extent to which debt servicing costs have crowded out other spending. The United States still exports more goods and services than any other country and is close behind China as the world's largest manufacturer. In terms of market exchange rate, the U.S. economy is still more than double the size of the Chinese economy, and China faces a raft of obstacles that could slow its rise: domestic unrest, stock and housing bubbles, corruption, an aging population, high savings, and an unproven track record of innovation. Yet the overall picture is clear: the United States' economic supremacy is no longer assured, and this uncertainty will reduce its geopolitical dominance.

In essence, the United States has fallen into a familiar pattern for hegemonic powers: overconsumption, overextension, and overoptimism. But the country also has a resourceful economy and a resilient military; it is not in free fall. Now, it needs a foreign policy to match.

RESISTING THE MYTHS OF EMPIRE

Despite the erosion of U.S. military and economic dominance, many observers warn that a rapid departure from the current approach to foreign policy would be disastrous. The historian Robert Kagan cautions that "a reduction in defense spending . . . would unnerve American allies and undercut efforts to gain greater cooperation." The journalist Robert Kaplan even more apocalyptically warns that "lessening [the United States'] engagement with the world would have devastating consequences for humanity." But these defenders of the status quo confuse retrenchment with appeasement or isolationism. A prudent reduction of the United States' overseas commitments would not prevent the country from countering dangerous threats and engaging with friends and allies. Indeed, such reductions would grant the country greater strategic flexibility and free resources to promote long-term growth.

A somewhat more compelling concern raised by opponents of retrenchment is that the policy might undermine deterrence. Reducing the defense budget or repositioning forces would make the United States look weak and embolden upstarts, they argue. "The very signaling of such an aloof intention may encourage regional bullies," Kaplan worries. This anxiety is rooted in the assumption that the best barrier to adventurism by adversaries is forward defenses -- the deployment of military assets in large bases near enemy borders, which serve as tripwires or, to some eyes, a Great Wall of America.

There are many problems with this position. For starters, the policies that have gotten the United States in trouble in recent years have been activist, not passive or defensive. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq alienated important U.S. allies, such as Germany and Turkey, and increased Iran's regional power. NATO's expansion eastward has strained the alliance and intensified Russia's ambitions in Georgia and Ukraine.

More generally, U.S. forward deployments are no longer the main barrier to great-power land grabs. Taking and holding territory is more expensive than it once was, and great powers have little incentive or interest in expanding further. The United States' chief allies have developed the wherewithal to defend their territorial boundaries and deter restive neighbors. Of course, retrenchment might tempt reckless rivals to pursue unexpected or incautious policies, as states sometimes do. Should that occur, however, U.S. superiority in conventional arms and its power-projection capabilities would assure the option of quick U.S. intervention. Outcomes of that sort would be costly, but the risks of retrenchment must be compared to the risks of the status quo. In difficult financial circumstances, the United States must prioritize. The biggest menace to a superpower is not the possibility of belated entry into a regional crisis; it is the temptation of imperial overstretch. That is exactly the trap into which opponents of the United States, such as al Qaeda, want it to fall.

Nor is there good evidence that reducing Washington's overseas commitments would lead friends and rivals to question its credibility. Despite some glum prophecies, the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from western Europe after the Cold War neither doomed NATO nor discredited the United States. Similar reductions in U.S. military forces and the forces' repositioning in South Korea have improved the sometimes tense relationship between Washington and Seoul. Calls for Japan to assume a greater defense burden have likewise resulted in deeper integration of U.S. and Japanese forces. Faith in forward defenses is a holdover from the Cold War, rooted in visions of implacable adversaries and falling dominoes. It is ill suited to contemporary world politics, where balancing coalitions are notably absent and ideological disputes remarkably mild.

Others warn that the U.S. political system is too fragmented to implement a coordinated policy of retrenchment. In this view, even if the foreign policy community unanimously subscribed to this strategy, it would be unable to outmaneuver lobbying groups and bureaucracies that favor a more activist approach. Electoral pressures reward lucrative defense contracts and chest-thumping stump speeches rather than sober appraisals of declining fortunes. Whatever leaders' preferences are, bureaucratic pressures promote conservative decisions, policy inertia, and big budgets -- none of which is likely to usher in an era of self-restraint.

Despite deep partisan divides, however, Republicans and Democrats have often put aside their differences when it comes to foreign policy. After World War II, the United States did not revert to the isolationism of earlier periods: both parties backed massive programs to contain the Soviet Union. During the tempestuous 1960s, a consensus emerged in favor of détente with the Soviets. The 9/11 attacks generated bipartisan support for action against al Qaeda and its allies. Then, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, politicians across the spectrum recognized the need to bring the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to an end. When faced with pressing foreign policy challenges, U.S. politicians generally transcend ideological divides and forge common policies, sometimes expanding the United States' global commitments and sometimes contracting them.

Today, electoral pressures support a more modest approach to foreign affairs. According to a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Americans would rather the United States share global leadership than go it alone. And a 2010 study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 79 percent of them thought the United States played the role of world policeman more than it should. Even on sacrosanct issues such as the defense budget, the public has demonstrated a willingness to consider reductions. In a 2010 study conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, 64 percent of respondents endorsed reductions in defense spending, supporting an average cut of $109 billion to the base-line defense budget.

Institutional barriers to reform do remain. Yet when presidents have led, the bureaucrats have largely followed. Three successive administrations, beginning with that of Ronald Reagan, were able to tame congressional opposition and push through an ambitious realignment program that ultimately resulted in the closure of 100 military bases, saving $57 billion. In its 2010 defense budget, the Obama administration succeeded in canceling plans to acquire additional F-22 Raptors despite fierce resistance by lobbyists, members of Congress, and the air force brass. The 2010 budget also included cuts to the navy's fleet of stealth destroyers and various components of the army's next generation of manned ground vehicles.

Thus, claims that retrenchment is politically impractical or improbable are unfounded. Just as a more humble foreign policy will invite neither instability nor decline, domestic political factors will not inevitably prevent timely reform. To chart a new course, U.S. policymakers need only possess foresight and will.

THE VIRTUES OF RESTRAINT

Even if a policy of retrenchment were possible to implement, would it work? The historical record suggests it would. Since 1870, there have been 18 cases in which a great power slipped in the rankings, as measured by its GDP relative to those of other great powers. Fifteen of those declining powers implemented some form of retrenchment. Far from inviting aggression, this policy resulted in those states' being more likely to avoid militarized disputes and to recover their former rank than the three declining great powers that did not adopt retrenchment: France in the 1880s, Germany in the 1930s, and Japan in the 1990s. Those states never recovered their former positions, unlike almost half of the 15 states that did retrench, including, for example, Russia in the 1880s and the United Kingdom in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Retrenchment works in several ways. One is by shifting commitments and resources from peripheral to core interests and preserving investments in the most valuable geographic and functional areas. This can help pare back the number of potential flashpoints with emerging adversaries by decreasing the odds of accidental clashes, as well as reducing the incentives of regional powers to respond confrontationally. Whereas primacy forces a state to defend a vast and brittle perimeter, a policy of retrenchment allows it to respond to significant threats at the times and in the places of its choosing. Conflict does not become entirely elective, as threats to core interests still must be met. But for the United States, retrenchment would reduce the overall burden of defense, as well as the danger of becoming bogged down in a marginal morass.

It would also encourage U.S. allies to assume more responsibility for collective security. Such burden sharing would be more equitable for U.S. taxpayers, who today shoulder a disproportionate load in securing the world. Every year, according to Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute, they pay an average of $2,065 each in taxes to cover the cost of national defense, compared with $1,000 for Britons, $430 for Germans, and $340 for Japanese.

Despite spending far less on defense, the United States' traditional allies have little trouble protecting their vital interests. No state credibly threatens the territorial integrity of either western European countries or Japan, and U.S. allies do not need independent power- projection capabilities to protect their homelands. NATO's intervention in Libya has been flawed in many respects, but it has demonstrated that European member states are capable of conducting complex military operations with the United States playing a secondary role. Going forward, U.S. retrenchment would compel U.S. allies to improve their existing capabilities and bear the costs of their altruistic impulses.

The United States and its allies have basically the same goals: democracy, stability, and trade. But the United States is in the awkward position of both being spread too thin around the globe and irritating many states by its presence on, or near, their soil. Delegating some of its responsibilities to allies would permit the U.S. government to focus more on critical objectives, such as ensuring a stable and prosperous economy. Regional partners, who have a greater stake in and knowledge of local challenges, can take on more responsibility. With increased input from others and a less invasive presence, retrenchment would also allow the United States to restore some luster to its leadership.

A MORE FRUGAL FUTURE

To implement a retrenchment policy, the United States would have to take three main steps: reduce its global military footprint, change the size and composition of the U.S. military, and use the resulting "retrenchment dividend" to foster economic recovery at home.

First, the United States must reconsider its forward deployments. The top priority should be to deter aggression against its main economic partners in Europe and Asia. This task is not especially burdensome; there are few credible threats to U.S. allies in these regions, and these states need little help from the United States.

Although Russia continues to meddle in its near abroad and has employed oil and gas embargoes to coerce its immediate neighbors, western Europe's resources are more than sufficient to counter an assertive Russia. A more autonomous Europe would take some time to develop a coherent security and defense policy and would not always see events through the same lens as Washington. But reducing Europe's dependence on the United States would create a strong incentive for European states to spend more on defense, modernize their forces, and better integrate their policies and capabilities. U.S. forces in the European theater could safely be reduced by 40-50 percent without compromising European security.

Asia is also ready for a decreased U.S. military presence, and Washington should begin gradually withdrawing its troops. Although China has embarked on an ambitious policy of military modernization and engages in periodic saber rattling in the South China Sea, its ability to project power remains limited. Japan and South Korea are already shouldering greater defense burdens than they were during the Cold War. India, the Philippines, and Vietnam are eager to forge strategic partnerships with the United States. Given the shared interest in promoting regional security, these ties could be sustained through bilateral political and economic agreements, instead of the indefinite deployments and open-ended commitments of the Cold War.

In the event that China becomes domineering, U.S. allies on its borders will act as a natural early warning system and a first line of defense, as well as provide logistical hubs and financial support for any necessary U.S. responses. Yet such a state of affairs is hardly inevitable. For now, there are many less expensive alternatives that can strengthen the current line of defense, such as technology transfers, arms sales, and diplomatic mediation. Defending the territorial integrity of Japan and South Korea and preventing Chinese or North Korean adventurism demands rapid-response forces with strong reserves, not the 30,000 soldiers currently stationed in each country. Phasing out 20 percent of those forces while repositioning others to Guam or Hawaii would achieve the same results more efficiently.

Reducing these overseas commitments would produce significant savings. A bipartisan task force report published in 2010 by the Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that the demobilization of 50,000 active-duty soldiers in Europe and Asia alone could save as much as $12 billion a year. Shrinking the U.S. footprint would also generate indirect savings in the form of decreased personnel, maintenance, and equipment costs.

Retrenchment would also require the United States to minimize its presence in South Asia and the Middle East. The United States has an interest in ensuring the flow of cheap oil, yet armed interventions and forward deployments are hardly the best ways to achieve that goal. These actions have radicalized local populations, provided attractive targets for terrorists, destabilized oil markets, and inflamed the suspicions of regional rivals such as Iran. Similarly, the United States has a strong incentive to deny terrorist groups safe havens in ungoverned spaces. It is unclear, however, whether large troop deployments are the most cost-effective way to do so. The U.S.-led NATO mission in Afghanistan has established temporary pockets of stability, but it has enjoyed little success in promoting good governance, stamping out corruption, or eradicating the most dangerous militant networks. Nor have boots on the ground improved relations with or politics in Pakistan.

More broadly, the Pentagon should devote fewer resources to maintaining and developing its capabilities for engaging in peripheral conflicts, such as the war in Afghanistan. Nation building and counterinsurgency operations have a place in U.S. defense planning, but not a large one. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have raised the profile of counterinsurgency doctrine and brought prominence to its advocates and practitioners, such as David Petraeus, the retired general who is now director of the CIA. This is an understandable development, considering that the defense establishment was previously unprepared to wage a counterinsurgency war. But such conflicts require enormous commitments of blood and treasure over many years, rarely result in decisive victory, and seldom bring tangible rewards. A retrenching United States would sidestep such high-risk, low-return endeavors, especially when counterterrorism and domestic law enforcement and security measures have proved to be effective alternatives. Although they cannot solve every problem, relatively small forces that do not require massive bases can nevertheless carry out significant strikes -- as evidenced by the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

Curbing the United States' commitments would reduce risks, but it cannot eliminate them. Adversaries may fill regional power vacuums, and allies will never behave exactly as Washington would prefer. Yet those costs would be outweighed by the concrete benefits of pulling back. A focus on the United States' core interests in western Europe would limit the risk of catastrophic clashes with Russia over ethnic enclaves in Georgia or Moldova by allowing the United States to avoid commitments it would be unwise to honor. By narrowing its commitments in Asia, the United States could lessen the likelihood of conflict over issues such as the status of Taiwan or competing maritime claims in the South China Sea. Just as the United Kingdom tempered its commitments and accommodated U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere at the turn of the last century, the United States should now temper its commitments and cultivate a lasting compromise with China over Taiwan.

Disassociating itself from unsavory regimes in the Middle East would insulate the United States from the charges of hypocrisy that undermine public support for its foreign policy throughout the region. And an accelerated drawdown of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would save a considerable amount of money. The current request for $118 billion to support these operations represents a savings of $42 billion compared with last year. Moving even faster to end those conflicts would result in even larger savings. At a time when the U.S. government is under incredible pressure to justify big-ticket spending, what little return on investment these wars promise does not warrant any more patience -- or sacrifice.

FROM PROFLIGACY TO PRUDENCE

The second necessary step for retrenchment would be to change the size and composition of U.S. military forces. Despite Gates' best efforts, the 2012 defense budget remains stuffed with allocations for weapons systems of debatable strategic value. For instance, despite delays, cost overruns, failed or deferred tests, and opposition from U.S. allies, the Obama administration has pledged more than $10 billion for various ballistic missile defense systems and close to another $10 billion to fund the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. And such programs are merely the low-hanging fruit. A nonpartisan task force of leading experts convened by the Institute for Policy Studies recently concluded that the U.S. government could slash more than $77 billion from the 2012 defense budget across eight different programs. New submarines and preliminary payments on what would be the 11th U.S. aircraft carrier -- no other country has more than one -- cannot be the best way to spend $5 billion. Likewise, spending $100 billion over the next ten years to upgrade U.S. nuclear weapons will not alter any adversary's calculations in a positive way.

Deeper defense cuts would force the Pentagon to do what the rest of the United States is already doing: rethink the country's role in a changing world. One problem with present procurement plans is that the strategic rationale underlying certain goals -- a 320-ship fleet for the navy, 2,200 fighter aircraft for the air force -- remains murky. Protecting international trade routes against Chinese aggression is often cited as the justification for such military programs. But precisely how the United States is going to protect its economy by clashing with its third-largest trading partner is rarely explained.

The lack of a clear assessment of the costs and benefits of new weapons systems may also lead to expensive errors. The United States already has an immense lead in aircraft carriers, fourth-generation jet fighters, and mechanized land forces. There are few reasons to squander resources replacing weapons systems that already surpass those of every single rival. Moreover, the fast pace of technological change, in particular when it comes to advanced antiship and air defense capabilities, casts doubt on the wisdom of pouring money into systems that might be obsolete the moment they roll off assembly lines.

In contrast, a modest investment in proven capabilities would bolster U.S. defenses in core regions and give the United States maximum flexibility to respond to future threats. To this end, investments should continue in theater- and naval-based ballistic missile defense systems, which remain the best ways to protect U.S. allies against missile threats. The Pentagon should acquire cheap alternatives to existing systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, in large numbers. Congress should continue to fund research and development, but only enough to ensure that new technologies could be produced promptly when clear and present needs arise. These changes in procurement, combined with a slightly swifter drawdown in Afghanistan and Iraq and a somewhat smaller U.S. Army and Marine Corps, would save the United States a minimum of $90 billion annually.

Savings of that kind would be part of a retrenchment dividend that could be spent on reinvigorating the U.S. economy. Retrenchment begins with the curtailing of foreign policy resources, but it ends only when the resources saved are spent domestically. Although military expenditures are a productive investment, they are not infinitely or incomparably so. And the United States is already past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to defense spending. Washington should prioritize measures to more directly stimulate the U.S. economy and make it more competitive. How exactly to achieve that outcome will surely continue to be the subject of fierce debate. But that debate will be much more meaningful if it is conducted with the aim of investing a retrenchment dividend.

The modest decline of U.S. power, combined with a relatively benign international environment, has provided the United States with a unique opportunity to reduce its foreign policy commitments in a measured manner. To make a virtue of this necessity, policymakers in Washington must resist calls to tighten the United States' tenuous grasp on global affairs, ignore the stale warnings about eroded credibility, and overcome the tired protests of bloated bureaucracies. By reducing its forward deployments, sharing burdens with its allies, limiting its fights in peripheral territories, and paring back wasteful spending on unnecessary weapons, the United States can not only slow its decline but also sow the seeds of its recovery.

David Frum on The Troubled GOP

I've spent a lot of time looking for a sign of the honorable side of conservatism. I have always felt that the best political policy is born from the healthy tension between principled conservatism and principled liberalism. Over the last several years, and built to a fever pitch since the election of Barack Obama, the most insidious usurpation of reasoned conservatism has gripped the throat of the US and brought about a completely dysfunctional political stalemate devoid of any sign of the "art of the possible".

David Frum, formerly of the AIE and former advisor to George W. Bush and Rudi Giuliani, laments his parties break with reality-based politics. Good read.

"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Newt Gingrich

It’s a very strange experience to have your friends think you’ve gone crazy. Some will tell you so. Others will indulgently humor you. Still others will avoid you. More than a few will demand that the authorities do something to get you off the streets. During one unpleasant moment after I was fired from the think tank where I’d worked for the previous seven years, I tried to reassure my wife with an old cliché: “The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.” She answered, “I was happier when I didn’t know.”

It’s possible that my friends are right. I don’t think so—but then, crazy people never do. So let me put the case to you.

I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John ­McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration. But as I contemplate my party and my movement in 2011, I see things I simply cannot support.

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new ­prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55. Today, the Fed’s pushing down interest rates in hopes of igniting economic growth is close to treason, according to Governor Rick Perry, coyly seconded by TheWall Street Journal. In 2000, the same policy qualified Alan Greenspan as the “greatest central banker in the history of the world,” according to Perry’s mentor, Senator Phil Gramm. Today, health reform that combines regulation of private insurance, individual mandates, and subsidies for those who need them is considered unconstitutional and an open invitation to “death panels.” A dozen years ago, a very similar reform was the Senate Republican alternative to Hillarycare. Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is “socialism.” In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program.

I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess. People may very well say: Hey, wait a minute, didn’t you work in the George W. Bush administration that disappointed so many people in so many ways? What qualifies you to dispense advice to anybody else?

Fair question. I am haunted by the Bush experience, although it seems almost presumptuous for someone who played such a minor role to feel so much unease. The people who made the big decisions certainly seem to sleep well enough. Yet there is also the chance for something positive to come out of it all. True, some of my colleagues emerged from those years eager to revenge themselves and escalate political conflict: “They send one of ours to the hospital, we send two of theirs to the morgue.” I came out thinking, I want no more part of this cycle of revenge. For the past half-dozen years, I have been arguing that we conservatives need to follow a different course. And it is this argument that has led so many of my friends to demand, sometimes bemusedly, sometimes angrily, “What the hell happened to you?” I could fire the same question back: “Never mind me—what happened to you?”

"If we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely." Michelle Bachman

So what did happen? The first decade of the 21st century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression. These shocks radicalized the political system, damaging hawkish Democrats like Hillary Clinton in the Bush years and then driving Republicans to dust off the economics of Ayn Rand.

Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief.

The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers. For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.

Many hope that the tea-party mood is just a passing mania, eventually to subside into something more like the businessperson’s Republicanism practiced in the nineties by governors and mayors like George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, Christine Todd Whitman and Dick Riordan, Tommy Thompson and John Engler. This hope tends to coalesce around the candidacies of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, two smart and well-informed former governors who eschew the strident rhetoric of the tea party and who have thereby earned its deep distrust. But there are good reasons to fear that the ebbing of Republican radicalism remains far off, even if Romney (or Huntsman) does capture the White House next year.

"[Obama] grew up in a privileged way. He never had to really work for anything; he never had to go through what Americans are going through." Rick Perry

1. Fiscal Austerity and Economic Stagnation
We have entered an era in which politics increasingly revolves around the ugly question of who will bear how much pain. Conservative constituencies already see themselves as aggrieved victims of American government: They are the people who pay the taxes even as their “earned” benefits are siphoned off to provide welfare for the undeserving. The reality is, however, that the big winners in the American fiscal system are the rich, the old, the rural, and veterans—typically conservative constituencies. Squeezing the programs conservatives most dislike—PBS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, tax credits for the poor, the Department of Education, etc.—yields relatively little money. Any serious move to balance the budget, or even just reduce the deficit a little, must inevitably cut programs conservative voters do like: Medicare for current beneficiaries, farm subsidies, veterans’ benefits, and big tax loopholes like the mortgage-interest deduction and employer-provided health benefits. The rank and file of the GOP are therefore caught between their interests and their ideology—intensifying their suspicion that shadowy Washington elites are playing dirty tricks upon them.

2. Ethnic Competition
White America has been plunged into a mood of pessimism and anger since 2008. Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal: “63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even ­college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.” Those fears are not irrational. In postrecession America, employers seem to show a distinct preference for foreign-born workers. Eighty percent of the net new jobs created in the state of Texas since 2009 went to the foreign-born. Nationwide, foreign-born workers have experienced a net 4 percent increase in employment since January 2009, while native-born workers have seen continuing employment declines. Which may explain why President Obama’s approval rating among whites slipped to 41 percent in January 2010 and is now testing a new low of 33 percent. The president’s name and skin color symbolize the emergence of a new America in which many older-stock Americans intuit they will be left behind.

It is precisely these disaffected whites—especially those who didn’t go to college—who form the Republican voting base. John McCain got 58 percent of noncollege-white votes in 2008. The GOP polls even higher among that group today, but the party can only sustain those numbers as long as it gives voice to alienation. Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of dispossession and disinheritance.

3. Fox News and Talk Radio
Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”


"I'm ready for the gotcha questions...and when they ask me who is the president of Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I'm gonna say, you know, I don't know." Herman Cain

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it’s tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator ­McCain! Nice job, Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they’re gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are ­actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.

Over the past few years, I have left this alternative knowledge system behind me. What is that experience like? A personal story may be relevant here.

Through the debate over health-care reform in 2009–10, I urged that Republicans try to reach some kind of deal. The Democrats had the votes to pass something. They could not afford to lose. Providing health coverage to all is a worthy goal, and the core mechanisms of what we called Obamacare should not have been obnoxious to Republicans. In fact, they were drawn from past Republican plans. Democrats were so eager for Republican votes to provide bipartisan cover that they might well have paid a substantial price to get them, including dropping the surtaxes on work and investment that supposedly financed the Affordable Care Act. My urgings went unheeded, obviously. Senator Jim DeMint predicted that health care would become Obama’s Waterloo, the decisive defeat that would destroy his presidency, and Republicans accepted DeMint’s counsel. So they bet everything—and lost everything. A major new entitlement has been written into law, financed by redistributive new taxes. Changes in the bill that could have been had for the asking will now require years of slow, painful legislative effort, if they ever come at all. Republicans hope that the Supreme Court will overturn the Affordable Care Act. Such a decision would be the most dramatic assertion of judicial power since the thirties, and for that reason alone seems improbable. Yet absent action by the Supreme Court, outright repeal of President Obama’s health-care law is a mirage, requiring not only 60 votes in the Senate but also the withdrawal of benefits that the American people will have gotten used to by 2013.

On the day of the House vote that ensured the enactment of health-care ­reform, I wrote a blog post saying all this—and calling for some accountability for those who had led the GOP to this disaster. For my trouble, I was denounced the next day by my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal as a turncoat. Three days after that, I was dismissed from the American Enterprise Institute. I’m not a solitary case: In 2005, the economist Bruce Bartlett, a main legislative author of the Kemp-Roth tax cut, was fired from a think tank in Dallas for too loudly denouncing the George W. Bush administration’s record, and I could tell equivalent stories about other major conservative think tanks as well.

I don’t complain from a personal point of view. Happily, I had other economic resources to fall back upon. But the message sent to others with less security was clear: We don’t pay you to think, we pay you to repeat. For myself, the main consequences have been more comic than anything else. Back in 2009, I wrote a piece for Newsweek arguing that Republicans would regret conceding so much power to Rush Limbaugh. Until that point, I’d been a frequent guest on Fox News, but thenceforward some kind of fatwa was laid down upon me. Over the next few months, I’d occasionally receive morning calls from young TV bookers asking if I was available to appear that day. For sport, I’d always answer, “I’m available—but does your senior producer know you’ve called me?” An hour later, I’d receive an embarrassed second call: “We’ve decided to go in a different direction.” Earlier this year, I did some volunteer speechwriting for a Republican contemplating a presidential run. My involvement was treated as a dangerous secret, involving discreet visits to hotel suites at odd hours. Thus are political movements held together. But thus is not how movements grow and govern.

Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen. Call it instead the drying up of conservative creativity. It’s clearly true that the country faces daunting economic troubles. It’s also true that the wrong answers to those problems will push the United States toward a future of too much government, too many taxes, and too much regulation. It’s the job of conservatives in this crisis to show a better way. But it’s one thing to point out (accurately) that President Obama’s stimulus plan was mostly a compilation of antique Democratic wish lists, and quite another to argue that the correct response to the worst collapse since the thirties is to wait for the economy to get better on its own. It’s one thing to worry (wisely) about the long-term trend in government spending, and another to demand big, immediate cuts when 25 million are out of full-time work and the government can borrow for ten years at 2 percent. It’s a duty to scrutinize the actions and decisions of the incumbent administration, but an abuse to use the filibuster as a routine tool of legislation or to prevent dozens of presidential appointments from even coming to a vote. It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that ­middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.

I refuse to believe that I am the only Republican who feels this way. If CNN’s most recent polling is correct, only half of us sympathize with the tea party. However, moderate-minded people dislike conflict—and thus tend to lose to people who relish conflict. The most extreme voices in the GOP now denounce everybody else as Republicans in Name Only. But who elected them as the GOP’s membership committee? What have they done to deserve such an inheritance? In the mid-sixties, when the party split spectacularly between Ripon Republicans, who embraced the civil-rights movement, and Goldwater Republicans, who opposed it, civil-rights Republicans like Michigan governor George Romney spoke forcefully for their point of view. Today, Republicans discomfited by political and media extremism bite their tongues. But if they don’t speak up, they’ll be whipsawed into a choice between an Obama administration that wants to build a permanently bigger government and a conservative movement content with permanently outraged opposition.

This is, unfortunately, not merely a concern for Republican voters. The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society. The American system of government can’t work if the two sides wage all-out war upon each other: House, Senate, president, each has the power to thwart the others. In prior generations, the system evolved norms and habits to prevent this kind of stonewalling. For example: Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

We can debate when the slide began. But what seems beyond argument is that the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system supposedly serves, who must feel they have been subjected to a psychological experiment gone horribly wrong, pressing the red button in 2004 and getting a zap, pressing blue in 2008 for another zap, and now agonizing whether there is any choice that won’t zap them again in 2012. Yet in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted: The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party struggling with more self-­imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party. Changing that party will be the fight of a political lifetime. But a great political party is worth fighting for.

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