Source: Congressional Budget Office, “Historical Federal Effective Tax Rates,” http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdoc.cfm?index=7718&type=1.
For the most part these tax changes passed on near-party-line votes. The Clinton-Gore tax increase of 1993 passed the House without a single Republican vote; the Bush tax cut of 2003 passed the House with only one Republican voting against, and only seven Democrats voting in favor. The 2005 Gasoline for America’s Security Act—basically a set of tax breaks for oil companies—passed by a one-vote margin, with only thirteen Republicans voting no and not a single Democrat in favor.
The record on spending can seem less clear-cut, but that’s only because the parties have been less able to implement their agendas.
Reagan initially tried to make deep cuts in Social Security, only to abandon the attempt in the face of overwhelming congressional and public reaction. Reagan did, however, manage to push through new rules that reduced benefits under the food stamp program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and unemployment insurance. Clinton famously tried to introduce a form of universal health care—and completely failed. He did, however, preside over a substantial increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit, which raises the incomes of low-wage workers.
After the 1994 election gave Republicans control of Congress, they tried—as we have seen—to undermine the financing of Medicare. They failed, and Bush the younger actually pushed through a significant expansion in Medicare, to cover prescription drugs. But this was clearly intended to provide political cover, and the new program was designed in a way that favored drug company interests. Moreover, by introducing a large subsidy for Medicare Advantage plans, in which tax money is funneled through private-sector middlemen, Bush’s Medicare bill took a major step toward Gingrich’s goal of privatizing the program. In 2005 Bush sought to partially privatize Social Security, while cutting promised future benefits; if implemented, Bush’s plan would have eliminated traditional Social Security within a few decades. Like Reagan’s attempt to scale back Social Security, however, this attempt quickly failed.
So the difference between the parties is not an illusion. Republicans cut taxes on the rich and try to shrink government benefits and undermine the welfare state. Democrats raise taxes on the rich while trying to expand government benefits and strengthen the welfare state.
And the public has picked up on the change. In the sixties and seventies, voters tended to be more or less evenly divided on the question of whether there was a significant difference between the parties. By 2004, however, 76 percent of Americans saw significant differences between the parties, up from 46 percent in 1972.[3]
“Comprehensive health insurance,” declared the president, “is an idea whose time has come in America. Let us act now to assure all Americans financial access to high quality medical care.” Was that Bill Clinton speaking? No, it was Richard Nixon, whose Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan, proposed in 1974, broadly resembled plans being offered by liberal Democrats like John Edwards today. The legislation never got very far, however, because Nixon was soon enveloped in the Watergate affair.[4]
Modern movement conservatives sometimes say, contemptuously, that Nixon governed as a liberal. And in terms of economic and environmental policy, it’s true, at least by today’s standards. In addition to proposing universal health care, Nixon pushed for a guaranteed minimum income. On the revenue side, Nixon pushed through a tax increase in 1969, including creation of the alternative minimum tax, which was intended to crack down on wealthy Americans who managed to use tax shelters to avoid taxes. On another front he passed the Clean Air Act, and sent dozens of environmental measures to Congress. Veterans of the Environmental Protection Agency have told me that the Nixon years were a golden age.
Nixon, in short, was a transitional figure. Although he used many of the political tactics associated with movement conservatism, he was a pragmatist rather than an ideologue, as were many Republicans. The character of the Republican Party changed rapidly in the post-Nixon years. In 1984 Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post published The New Politics of Inequality, a remarkably insightful and prescient analysis of the changes already taking place in American politics. At the core of his analysis was the renewal and radicalization of the Republican Party that, in his view, took place in the mid-to-late 1970s:
Such previously hostile and mutually suspicious groups as the corporate lobbying community; ideological right-wing organizations committed to a conservative set of social and cultural values; sunbelt entrepreneurial interests, particularly independent oil; a number of so-called neo-conservative or cold war intellectuals with hard-line views on defense and foreign policy who, although sometimes nominally Democratic, provide support for the politics and policies of the GOP; economists advocating radical alteration of the tax system, with tax preferences skewed toward corporations and the affluent—all of these groups found that the Republican Party offered enough common ground for the formation of an alliance.[5]
In other words, movement conservatism had taken over the GOP.
Ronald Reagan was the first movement conservative president. Within Ronald Reagan’s inner circle, views that had once been confined to what Eisenhower described as a “tiny splinter group” reigned: David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, considered Social Security an example of “closet socialism,” while fervent supply-siders, who believed that cutting taxes would increase revenue, were given key positions in the Treasury Department and elsewhere in the government. Reagan also did his best to reverse Nixon’s environmental achievements, slashing the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency and gutting its enforcement activities. His first secretary of the interior, James Watt, was a fervent antienvironmentalist with strong ties to the religious right who quintupled the amount of public land open to coal mining. Watt was famously forced to resign after boasting that his staff included “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”[6]
Reagan’s ability to impose a movement conservative agenda was, however, limited by political realities. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives throughout his administration. Republicans held a majority in the Senate until his last two years in office, but many Senate Republicans were still Eisenhower-style moderates. These political realities forced Reagan to moderate his policies. For example, although his inner circle wanted to slash Social Security benefits, he was eventually forced to secure Social Security’s finances with a tax increase instead.
3.
American National Election Studies, “The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior,” table 2B-4, http://electionstudies.org/ nesguide/toptable/ tab2b_4.htm.
4.
“Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan,” February 6, 1974, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4337.
6.
Francis X. Clines, “Watt Asks That Reagan Forgive ‘Offensive’ Remark About Panel,”