Done right: are conservatives just incompetent? Or is it their ideology? Hey, why choose?

• Author: Schmitt, Mark
• Position: The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing - Book review

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The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing by Greg Anrig Wiley, 288 pp.

As even the most committed conservatives have begun to recognize the scale of the debacle, foreign and domestic, of the seven years during which they have held unchecked power, they have begun to plot a slick escape from the consequences. "Oh, that?" they will say. "That wasn't conservatism. That was something completely different." It started out as conservatism, they say, but was corrupted by the culture of Washington, by Jack Abramoff or Tom DeLay. Or, they say, so sorry, we misjudged George W. Bush, failed to see how incompetent he was. Or, as in recent tributes to Karl Rove on his resignation from the White House, they will admit that the single-minded focus on winning elections, bending all policy to that purpose, destroyed the conservative soul. If they have the chutzpah of Rove himself, they will blame Hillary Clinton.

If there were any justice in the world, such claims would take their place in history alongside those of the old Marxists who, as Alan Wolfe noted in these pages last year ("Why Conservatives Can't Govern," duly/August 2006), insisted that the only problem with communism was that it had never been properly implemented. The noble dream, they argued, should not be judged by its real-world manifestations. Maybe so. But in the real world, ideologies are judged by their consequences.

Such justice is unlikely for the recent American right, however, and the evasion of responsibility has been made easier by Democrats' nearly total focus on individual actors: George W. Bush and, to a lesser extent, Rove and Dick Cheney. Thus the spate of books with titles like The Lies of George Bush and Bush's Brain. Now Rove is gone, DeLay is gone, and in sixteen months Bush and Cheney will join them, but their brand of conservatism may never be held to account for its failures in practice.

Two years ago, writing in the American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias coined the phrase "the incompetence dodge" to describe those liberal supporters of the Iraq War who hid defensively behind the claim that the war was a good idea in the abstract but they could not have known it would be executed so poorly. In his new book, The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, Century Foundation vice president of policy Greg Anrig extends the argument of the incompetence dodge to nearly every aspect of...