Today's conservatives are like the alcohol Prohibitionists of the 1920s -- true believers with no connections to reality.
There was a time when American conservatism was intellectually respectable and politically defensible -back before the GOP thought it would be a good idea to put a smarmy Hollywood huckster up for President. Reagan, however, was in fact smarter than we liberals give him credit for, and the marked decline in what passes for "conservatism" today has been brought about by a hard-core of post-Reagan true believers -as rigid and as fanatical as the worst Islamic Jihadist whose fundamentalist ideology is doing far more harm to our nation than any number of hijacked jet planes crashing into office towers.
Reagan talked a good game, pandering to the worst elements in American politics on issues like taxes, abortion, gay rights, et cetera, in order to advance the interests of corporate America by creating a faux right wing populism. But Reagan least had the good sense to change course when reality clashed with his professed right-wing ideology, as with the Tax Equity & Fiscal ResponsibilityAct of 1982, the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, the Superfund Amendments & Reauthorization Act of 1986 and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987, to name just a few of the cumulative, and necessary tax increases he signed into law which tallied up to a whopping $132.7 billion increase in annual revenues overall.
Of course, Reagan was advised by men who understood that to run a government like a business, you need a revenue stream. There's never been a successful business in the history of the world that deliberately chose to eliminate revenues in order to balance the books. Today's clueless Republican "leaders," however, get all weepy eyed about the "principles" of tax cutting and deregulation that they imagine Reagan stood for in their narrow, selective view of history.
That selective view, of course, has completely written out the eight-year George W. Bush presidency, with the GOP in control of Congress for six years. That was a regime of tax cutting and deregulation put on steroids, and it inevitably led to the economic crash of 2008 with no grown-ups in Washington overseeing the games being played on Wall Street. It was basically a rerun of the "free market" crash of 1929 only with "Big Government" stepping up this time to bail out the miscreant financial and insurance executives instead of us plain folks as with FDR's New Deal.
A Look Deep Inside The Conservative Mind
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