Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

As soon as Clinton left office, the new Republican president and Congresses, thanks to their antitax fixation (and the war in Iraq two years later), promptly took us from a budget surplus equivalent to $365 billion to a budget deficit of $534 billion, a reckless and unnecessary trillion-dollar swing in three years. Irving Kristol, that mastermind and key promoter of remaking the political economy, had candidly announced this new strategy of the right—right-wing fiscal recklessness, forcing the left into defensive restraint—in a Wall Street Journal column back in 1980, months before Reagan’s election. In the 1930s and the 1960s, Kristol wrote, “when in office the liberals (or social-democrats, as they should more properly be called) spen[t] generously, regardless of budgetary considerations, until the public permit[ted] the conservatives an interregnum in which to clean up the mess” in the late 1940s and ’50s and ’70s, but with the liberals retaining their status as the activist party….The neo-conservatives have decided that two can play at this game—and must since it is the only game in town….What if the traditionalist-conservatives are right and a [huge] tax cut, without corresponding cuts in expenditures, also leaves us with a fiscal problem? The neo-conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants to shape the future, and will leave it up to his opponents to tidy up afterwards. From then on the right would be activists, ...