If Thursday night's Republican presidential debate left you feeling as if you were seeing 10 white men from some alternate universe, you would not have been surprised by the feeling if you had seen a debate at the National Press Club in Washington just hours before.
There, William Kristol, one of the main architects of the modern conservative movement, went head to head with Robert Kuttner, the editor of the progressive magazine The American Prospect, at the Failure of Conservatism conference sponsored by the Prospect and the Campaign for America's Future. (You can watch the full debate below.)
Kristol helped build the alternate universe in which nearly all of the Republican candidates, with the exception of libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, spend most, if not all, of their time.
In this universe, the conservatism of Ronald Reagan - whose library served as the stage for the debate - has ushered in what Kristol called "very impressive economic growth over the last quarter century" that not only benefited America but much of the world. Countries like China and India, by implementing Reagan's formula of supply-side economics, deregulation and open markets "brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty."
In foreign policy, meanwhile, neo-conservatism brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War, and would have meant a successful Iraq war if it had not been for the twin evils of President Clinton's underfunding of the military and President Bush's management missteps.
This is, of course, not the world the rest of us live in, and so if the Republican candidates who were trying to sell themselves as Ronald Reagan 3.0 seemed a bit out of touch, it is because conservatism itself gets the real world wrong. How wrong was evident in the Kristol-Kuttner debate.
Kristol's rosy portrait of the economy under conservative government was easily refuted earlier at the conference by William E. Spriggs, the chairman of the economics department at Howard University. Kristol scoffed at "stagflation" and "70 percent marginal tax rates" under President Jimmy Carter, but according to government data compiled by Spriggs, job growth during the Carter administration was actually higher (3.1 percent) than under Reagan's two terms (2.1 percent). During the Clinton administration, job growth was 2.4 percent. Job growth during the terms of both George W. Bush and his father are well under 1 percent. Median family incomes, in constant dollars, rose faster under both Carter and Clinton than they did under Reagan and the two Bushes.
One group, though, that did really well under Reagan conservatism, according to Spriggs, was the nation's top five percent of wage earners. In constant dollars, their average income increased from just over $150,000 in 1980 to around $300,000 in 2005.
But while progressives like Spriggs have statistics, Kristol claims a whole city - New York City, in fact. "We had a very interesting test case in New York," he said, of a city governed under "liberal principles" that he characterized as unsafe and dysfunctional until Giuliani cleaned up the city, cut the tax rates, got tough on crime and forced people off the welfare rolls. Giuliani echoed Kristol's analysis at the presidential debate, saying what he accomplished as mayor was an example of how conservative governing principles should work.
Funny, though, that Giuliani's experiment with urbanized Reaganomics coincided with the Clinton economic boom, a rising tide that lifted liberal and conservative ships alike. And yet, a report prepared for the New York City Council noted that under Giuliani median incomes in Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens actually fell between 1999 and 2002, and rose only by a few dollars in Brooklyn and Staten Island. If Giuliani-style conservative economics were so great for New York, how does he and Kristol explain the finding in the report that "the annual earnings and hourly wages dropped for New Yorkers at the bottom of the earnings ladder from 2003 to 2004 by 5.1 percent and hourly wages declined by 5.5 percent"?
The New York City Giuliani left behind, in fact, ended up being a harsher city for poor people even as much of Manhattan became an opulent, carefree playground for the wealthy. In that respect, it captures what has happened to the country as a whole under conservative rule.
That was just one of the areas in which the conservative analysis of the last three decades, as laid out in the Kuttner-Kristol debate, failed to connect with reality. Many of us remember how Reagan made it seem real - Reagan says, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," and the Soviet Union falls - but how quickly we forget that Reagan was a trained actor working with an admittedly skillfully written screenplay, and that the Soviet Union would have fallen without the dramatics and the billions of tax dollars diverted from domestic needs and spent on weaponry.
The screenplay, however, is no longer resonating with voters who want policies that speak to the economic stresses they and their neighbors are experiencing. "Fewer and fewer and fewer voters are buying either the ideology or the incumbent," Kuttner said, citing a recent Gallup poll that indicated the percentage of voters who believe the rich have too much money and that the government should do more for the poor "are at their highest since 1939."
But what the conservative movement does have going for it, Kuttner pointed out, is money, and those who have lots of it as a result of conservative policies will use it in the political arena to keep the ideology afloat as long as it can. That is why the progressive movement needs to keep boldly and creatively telling the truth about the real effects of conservatism on the nation and the world, and then offer a compelling vision of shared prosperity and a government that serves the common good.
As Kuttner put it, "The challenge for progressives is not to be complacent, and to not assume that the collapse of conservatism is the revival of progressivism. That will take real work."