Losers, left and right

ONE OF THE odd things about the current political moment is that everybody thinks they’re losing. Liberals are bitter that the government has been run for years by incompetent reactionaries. And even those hopeful ones who anticipate winning control of Congress in November know in the back of their minds that the only thing they’ll gain is the ability to limit the damage George W. Bush could inflict on the country. Conservatives, meanwhile, are bitter that Bush’s presidency is going down in flames, and they blame the Republican Party for abandoning small-government principles.

But in politics, somebody has to win every fight. So it can’t really be the case that everybody is losing, can it?

Actually, it can. We don’t realize it, though, because ideologues tend to think that if they’re doing badly, the other side must be doing well. Call it the zero-sum fallacy.

This mistaken belief is equally powerful on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Start with the left. Liberals in recent years have grown fascinated with the machinery of the new right. They look at the vast apparatus of think tanks, direct-mail fundraising networks, publications, talk-show hosts and other propaganda organs that the right has created and see an unstoppable machine. This is why liberals have thrown themselves into the task of creating a countervailing set of institutions to match what the right has done. New institutions such as the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and all sorts of online organizing tools are the left’s attempt to mimic the right.

The model you hear invoked constantly is the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign. In 1964, conservatives took control of the GOP. To be sure, it was annihilated in the ensuing election. But, as envious liberals point out, those same conservatives put in place a movement that in 1980 won the presidency and seized control of the national agenda with Ronald Reagan’s victory.

But how successful, really, were those conservatives? That’s a complicated question, but here’s a simple answer: In 1964, the federal government spent 18.5 cents of the American economic dollar. In 2005, it spent 20.5 cents. This is not what small-government conservatives would call progress. So, yes, the conservatives have amassed a lot of power in Washington. But I’m not sure their “success” is the sort that liberals really ought to emulate.

When conservatives see this same expansion of government, they see liberalism triumphant. My colleague, Jonah Goldberg, is a good example. Last fall, in a column in which he called Bush’s domestic spending “lavish” and “spectacular,” he wrote that, far from being ruled by conservatives, government was in the hands of “moderates, squishes, apostates, New York Times-pleasing ‘mavericks,’ centrists and all the others who want to ‘get beyond labels’ or get a standing ovation from the Brookings Institution.”

From the liberal or centrist standpoint, this statement is mystifying. The Bush presidency has been rife with acts of big government, but nearly all of them have been the sorts of things liberals and centrists abhor. The Medicare giveaway, the corporate tax bill, the unprecedented pork, the tariffs -- all were designed for no other purpose than to maximize the profits of pro-Republican business entities. Brookings types were aghast at all of them.

The mistake Goldberg and other conservatives make here is in thinking that because these policies were bad from a conservative point of view, they must be good from a liberal (or, at least, a moderate) point of view. In fact, they were awful from any point of view, save that of their direct financial beneficiaries.

The politics that has dominated Washington the last half-dozen years is a corrupt brand of right-wing corporatism. People who reside in the highest 1% of the income spectrum or have K Street lobbyists at their command have done very well. But the philosophical program that most conservatives advocate -- and by “most” I’m excluding the small minority who value tax cuts over everything else -- has lost.

Conservatives and liberals both feel beleaguered for a good reason. The fact is, both of them have been losing.