The Republican Party has only recently understood that Point Bush is indefensible, and is right now realizing that Points Hastert and Gingrich are in danger of being over run by the voters - the House of Representatives is all but assured to go Democratic, absent Osama bin Laden converting to evangelical Christianity on network television, and the Senate will be narrowly divided. 2008 will become a year of contingencies - the nature of the Presidential election, the geography of the races, the outcomes of the last two years.

Thus the Republicans and the right in general are retiring to rally point Reagan. Gidean Rachman asks whether a blogger is capable of coherent thought. The question to ask is whether the right is capable of coherent thought. The answer seems to be "Yes, but that isn't what he is going to write down."

Reagan wasn't about small government, and everyone who repeates this obvious canard is doing public discourse a disservice.

With George Bush's personal approval numbers at 39%, and job approval numbers wallowing in the mid 30's all the theories about American anti-intellecutalism, the hava beer effect and Texas envy are out the window. Seems like Americans just like a guy who promises something for nothing and pretends to the tell the truth, that is, until the multi-trillion dollar bill for nothing comes in the mail. Bush's belief - that the right wing could aggressively use the accumulated military power to transform the nation into a reactionary extension of Texas, has failed, and with it the stars of people like Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz have fallen. The neo-cons, like Sullivan, have jumped off this bandwagon rather quickly. They never really believed in the long slow slog theory of changing the world with military power, they believed that Iraq was Panama with oil. It wasn't. It was Vietnam with oil.

And the second part of that did not make things easier. Americans like steadfast and courageous. They don't like stubborn and stupid.

However the breaking of the Bush boulder is not isolated, the end of the Gingrichite "Republican Revolution" is also at hand. Nancy Pelosi is set to become Speaker of the House, and end the entire closed system that Gingrich and Hastert have built.

In truth the revolution part ended with "Freedom to Farm" and its failure to produce wins for agriculture. After that flirtation with the free market, the Gringrichites went back to the tried and true job of congress - which is to dispense pork based on political power, and not economic power.

The reason for this is that Congress is, and as long as we have a liberal economic system - more on that in a moment - always will be corrupt in the sense that it will funnel money to projects of marginal economic utility. That is, in fact, the point - tax inflation in the cities, and ship it out to the hinterlands, so that the people in the hinterlands neither go broke to metropolitian interests such as banks and transportation networks, nor pour into the cities. In either case the cost of clean up is higher than the cost of maintaining, and there are perceived benefits to having a strong rural and exurban component to the American character. More on this too, shortly.

The end of the Gingrichite revolution and marks the collapse of virtually everything the Republicans have tried to do since 1988. We are now back down to their flat tax of 1986, their consumption tax of 1983, and the creation of the national debt as a vast entitlement system for America's wealthy, and for the countries that are beating us economically.

In short, let us face the actual Reagan record.

The entire reason for the retreat to Reagan is because it allows people who are in their political orientation, which like sexual orientation seems to form before the age of reason, to go back to a time when they were seen as winners and as on the side of good. Standing tall.

The first reality is that Reagan was not generally that popular for that long. As the indespensible Pollkatz shows in his graph, Reagan was above 50% approval for about 5 years of his 8 year presidency, slightly less than bill Clinton. The core of Reagan's run was from late 1983 until mid 1986 - a three year period where it seemed it was "morning in America". Instead, as people have slowly realized over the 2/3rds of a generation since. We were treading water, and have been, with the exception of the dot.com bubble, have been ever since.

Reagan the figure of legend benefits from the previoust 13 years of upheaval and problematic government, the end of LBJ, all of Nixon-Ford and most of Carter seemed to be times that people wanted to forget. Carter and Nixon both seemed to get things going for very brief moments, only to have matters fall apart in their hands. Reagan's slick blue contrast with the earth tone Carter is decenniel as well as political. We'd rather not go back to the 1970's, thank you.

However as Reagan the legend begins to give way to Reagan the historical figure, the myth of libertarian Reagan getting government off of people's backs begins to dissolve before the facts.

The first fact is the fact that Reagan was a big government President. The share of GDP spent by the Federal government did not change materially during his time in office, nor did the level of market competition. By any measure the state sector remained the largest single employer and a driver of economic growth. While there was some deregulation on the margins, the structured markets that were opened have, in many cases, returned to being structured - consider telecommunications, which is rapidly monopolizing again. And Reagan never even pretended to be a social libertarian - a Reagan led Supreme Court even ruled that states could pass laws against particular sex acts between consenting adults, even when the intended to enforce those laws in a discriminatory way. Sullivan, under the Reaganite Supreme Court, is a felon.

And yet the unconvicted felon still longs for Reaganite days, and is trying to rally the right around their brief moment of shining victory over a left that did not seem to have answers for the problems of the 1965-1980 period. Reliving past glories is a fairly sure sign of a political movement that is worn out, tired and empty - and the right is in full memory of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Particularly when that memory is not particularly clear or accurate.

So what was Reagan? - since he was neither in favor of smaller government, nor in favor of libertarian theories of any kind when actually pushed to put them into practice. Consider the dramatic expansion of "the War on Drugs" as a case in point. Reagan hired gold bug ultra-conservatives, but made no material progress on creating a gold-standard America. In fact, the world is farther from a gold standard today than on the day that Margaret Thatcher took office - something that the hard core Austrian Economic follower's recognize.

The answer is that Reaganism and Thatcherism were a revolt against a way of doing business - of the owners of equities against labor, of the hard assed way of doing things against the soft voiced technocrat, and politically, of the suburbs against the city.

The FDR of history is very similar to the FDR of legend in what they did and how they did it - historical FDR is nicked and cut by various bad decisions - how can any one be President for so long without making several - but in the rough outlines, FDR did as he said he would do, and then some. FDR became more liberal as he was President. Ronald Reagan, the figure of living memory legend, and the Historical Reagan - the figure who emerges from studying the actual decisions, laws, results and ideas implemented - diverge wildly. The Historical Reagan is not the Libertarian Conservative Reagan of legend, but, instead, is merely someone who understood that this was the rainy day that had been saved for, and proceded to spend the money.

The Reagan of legend, which Sullivan genueflects to and lovingly plasters with dripping longing - is very different from Reagan the historical figure in most respects. The key overlap is not one of ideology, but one of personality. Reagan brought in hard men and women who liked being hard, government wasn't smaller when he left it, but it was more small souled, and more small minded.

Economically however, Reagan was for people who wanted liberalism without cities, blacks and about half of Keynesian economics. The half that paid for all the spending, specifically. Reagan's hard men and women went on a borrowing spree. Instead of using federal spending to subsidize labor, he used it to subsidize corporations.

There are good arguments to be made that capital gains were overtaxed in 1980 - particularly if one measures the real return on stocks adjusted for inflation - and that some adjustment needed to be made. That the Democratic Party of that moment had gotten into the mode of taxing in order to spend, rather than realizing that eliminating spending that is no longer returning is as liberal, and Keynesian, a thing to do as raising taxes to pay for spending - is an important part of Reagan's political victory. But it doesn't make Reagan any kind of libertarian to have him simply stop taxing and spending anyway, nor does it really change the basis of his economics to use "crude military Keynesianism" as a way of producing a sharp rebound from a double dip recession.

In short, the spending figures show that Reagan's rebound was virtually identical to other post-war rebounds. It was identical in terms of remeployment, wages and just about every other measure of economic activity and production. It fits neatly in the curve of the other rebounds.

So what was going on, if not "getting government off of people's backs" ?

Reagan's difference was not in macroëconomic policy, nor particularly in microëconomic policy, though there were some marginal changes against unions and labor and in deregulation, but these in no way account for much in the size of the total economy. It was mesoëconomic - who got the money was very different than before.

An important part of this change was the shift from subsidizing cities to subsidizing suburbs. One mechanism for this was block grants - which went to legislatures rather than being allocated from Washington, by matching grants or through earmarking by Congressmen. This isn't libertarian, it is neo-confederate, and helped continue the gains the Republicans made in the South.

The shift from spending on cities to spending on suburbia represents and important social shift to be sure - all government, in the end, is giving money and privileges to your friends and hoping they both do good and pay their taxes. Suburbia in 1980 felt neglected, without representation - in some part because of "pizza slice" districts, but also because of the very structure of government programs which focused on poverty - which is a feature far more of cities and rural areas than suburbia. Of suburbia's big issues - inflation, transportation, services, education and family dysfunction - other than inflation, none seemed to be particularly federal problems.

Thus suburbia understood that getting government "off their backs" meant not paying for cities - which they had moved to suburbia to try and escape - and instead handing money directly to state legislatures which were far more dominated by suburban interests. Suburbia wanted away from urban crime, density, costs of infrastructure - and Reagan offered it to them.

Thus Reagan's revolution was far more about the professional class trying to cut the wages of the working class, both directly through reducing labor bargaining power, and indirectly by shifting government spending. In this way, inflation would be contained by reducing the buying power of those on the bottom half of society - and those in the bottom half could then fight it out to see which half of the poor was paid to jail the other half of the poor.

This coalition does not, in any meaningful way, represent a return to small government values, nor in any sense is it economically or socially libertarian. Instead it is entirely friendly to restrictions on access to sex, entirely friendly to erosion of 4th amendment rights, entirely friendly to big government and mounting national debt. The suburban society was growing, and found its political voice. As long as the Republicans remained the party of suburbs, they were the party on the rise.

The relentless critics of Reagan often miss a series of inconvenient truths about the political and economic world as it existed in 1981.

First, the Great Recession was coming, because the Federal Reserve, in concert with other central banks, was going to put the screws in on access to money. The inflation of the 1970's was going to be brought to an end by a very blunt use of Keynesian economics - tightening access to credit, and taking the resulting fall in demand as a means of containing inflation.

The second is that the progressive idea of a United States not dependent on oil for economic growth did not exist at that moment - computer technology, materials technology, economic theory, social organization - none of these existed in a form sufficient to convert a prodigal modern economy into something else. The windmills, solar panels, nuclear power plants, engine designs, biomass technologies were not even close to market.

The third is the great problem of that moment: liberalism had one basic mechanism - treat people better, and they will work harder and smarter. Raise people's standards of living, and this will generate technology and supply to accomplish it. This ran head long into the problem that there was one commodity that could not be substituted away from - oil for transportation - and the monetary base of the United States, since it rests on the value of assets created by a mechanized economy, has a rental value that is much lower than the rental cost of paying money to OPEC. Basically, as long as it is cheaper for an American to pay rent to King Faisal for oil, than to pay the going cost of land, he does this. However, the money that he does this with leaves the US, and stops creating any multiplier effect. The bind of liberalism is that it needed cheap oil to generate jobs and activity, and it needed expensive oil to prevent dollars from flooding out into the world. Like all policy binds, it is lethal to the political regime that fails to reframe the problem.

The forth is that liberalism, the social system, had run its course of people - it was no longer generating new minds of sufficient flexibility to face problems. One can look back on 1977, and plot out a Carter administration that could have survived and flourished. Just as one could see how the Democrats could have won the Presidency in 1968 and held on to power. One could also look at 1960, and realize that if the Republicans had nominated a more credible candidate than Nixon, they might well have defeated John F Kennedy and found a way to become the majority party. But politics and economics are as much about who as about what.

And it is on this point that the Historical Reagan, and the Legendary Reagan, are most alike. It is here that both converge, and it is here that the real heart of the Reagan-Thatcher solution to the problems of instability, trepedation and inflation lies. Reagan and Thatcher brought in hard people. People willing to inflict misery on other people. People willing to lay the lumber down on the working class, and even more so on the day laboring class.

They were willing to warehouse urban criminals in jail forever, they were willing to impose a stagnation tax on wages, and they were willing to let people slip into a permanent state of semi-poverty, floating between jobs on one hand, and lotteries and alcohol on the other. This hardness was projected in foreign affairs, in domestic affairs. It brought with it a wave of people who had been waiting to lay into the "softness" of all kinds - in education, in criminal justice, in economics, in society.

The right might want to run and hide from the reality that they are, in fact, a bunch of conservative inflationists who have a wide streak of political sadism in them, but it does not take long wandering in the wilderness of right wing ranting to realize that what unifies the right wing is not a love of small government, nor a love of rights, nor any particular economic theory, but a personal belief that other people's right to a face stops at your fist, and that problems are best solved by beating the guts out of whoever crosses you - whether in the foreign or domestic environment.

This attitude can be seen in the area of education - a worship of "the Western Canon" by a host of academics who then procede to violate just about every tenet of humanism contained in it. People who thump Adam Smith as if Wealth of Nations were a bible, and biblical literalists who scowl and spit out truisms contained in the 30 verses they bother to memorize. It is a narrow, nasty, creed, and one that gets narrower all the time. It is also what unified the Thatcher, Reagan, Gingrich and Bushite revolutions. Not reason, nor conservatism, nor libertarianism, but a basic faith in the triumph of the will.

Since, at that time, being a hard ass was far, far, far out of fashion in technocratic and liberal circles - people of this persuasion, regardless of their political theories or policy preferences, had only one place to go: the Republican Party. The Republican Party came to be the party of people that happen to other people.

Sullivan and the other neo-conservative apologists ignore this in favor of misty rhetoric, the most Reaganesque thing about it is its resemblence to early onset Alzheimer's disease. It is also no small thing - hard men and women doing hard things is part of politics. A polity that can't distinguish between the unfortunate, and bearers of ill fortune, is in great trouble. Every polity is going to need to make, and carry out, hard, cold decisions. It is going to have to consign people to death, it is going to have to condemn millions to less than they might have. It is going to have to make choices that will cause some people to be maimed or injured, so that more good might go to others. No government can save everyone, nor can any government make the right sacrificial choices all the time. The irreducible reality of government, however constituted, is that matters of life and death leave blood on the hands of those people that must weigh them.

That liberalism had cast out too many of its own hard men and women was the real source of the Republican Revolution - that it could not make the hard decisions soon enough in Carter's tenure, that it made too many of the wrong ones under LBJ's war in Vietnam.

Thus Bush represents, not a rejection of Reaganism, but an affirmation of it. Not an aberation, but a culmination. Not antithetical, but apotheosis. Reagan's hard men were replaced by others yet harder. The willingness to spill all costs down to the poor is beginning to threaten the very conservative inflationism that allowed Alan Greenspan to laddle out dollars far beyond what the ordinary cannons of monetarism would have allowed. Reagan and Thatcher used short sharp wars to warn other nations not to cross the great powers, it was inevitable that one of these wars would be a bear trap - just as the liberal idea of mobilization would, sooner or later, be a tide that hit rocks that would not yield.

The retreat of the conservatives to the happy haven of Reagan is also doomed as policy. Virtually every circumstance which allowed Thatcherism and Reaganomics to work is gone. Far from being over-taxes, holders of rent are under taxed dramatically, and the resulting lack of research has created a pervasive lack of investment supply. The United States is no longer a creditor nation that makes more from its investments than it pays out, but one that pays out more in investment service than it takes in. The Baby Boom is not about to enter its peak earning years, but its peak "burning years". The rest of the world is not half enslaved, but competing for a diminishing flow of the very same oil that Carter had no chance of weaning us from. Developing nations now know that allowing Western finance to come in too soon, is to be stripped bare of assets - and China and India are both taking steps to prevent this, as the oilarchies long ago did. They can buy our companies, but we cannot buy theirs on equal terms. Worker's wages are now not high relative to the size of the economy, but after a generation of standing still, are not even enough to pay the debt service they have taken on. There isn't a generation of pension funds to pillage, but instead a middle class with a negative savings rate.

In short, the Conservative Troll, not Soul, wants to go back to the idyllic moment when Liberalism was both rich in savings to loot, and poor of energy and ideas to prevent it. When the world was, indeed, ready for a generation long spending binge, when there was a fat bank account to tap. All of this is gone, as gone as the polluted rivers and monolithic network news broadcasts. It is a waning memory, like the sound of Walter Cronkite's sign off of "and that's the way it is." We look back on it through an increasingly smokey lense, as E.L. Doctrow looked back on the turn of the century in Ragtime.

They are also not facing a liberal movement unsure of itself, confused and a drift. They are facing a progressive movement that sees the moral and practical urgency of transforming the basis of the global economy, transforming the basis of social organization, and is increasingly impatient with the absurdities that the right wing spews. Things such as Sully's little book, which could be summarized as "Conservativism is great, except for everybody who votes for it." Darwin denial, anti-science insanity, borrow and squander budget policies, venomous and hypocritical anti-homosexual zealotry, corruption, waste, fraud, phantom WMD's, outright lies and war crimes. The list grows longer every day, and it grows faster than even opponents of the conservative movement can keep up with.

In the end the attempt to "go back to Reagan" is the final crowing mendacity, a pure, crass and naked dishonesty from a movement that has over and over again crowed that "ideas have consquences" - that is, one can judge a movement by its results. The attempt to throw Bush and Iraq beneath the train represents an attempt to run from the very first principle of the conservative counter-revolution against liberalism - judge ideas by their results.

In short, if there is any book that makes a fitting tombstone for the entire attempt to revive conservatism, it is Andrew Sullivan's. It proves that the movement stands, and always stood, for nothing but the greed and self-advancement of its members. That it was the ultimate post-modern movement, in that it is about nothing but itself.

And it is this quality which is leading to the string of disasters that the modern conservative movement has fallen prey to. Just as the hard men of Reagan didn't really mean what they said, so they were replaced by people who didn't even think they meant it. Earnest anti-liberals like Dole have been replaced by the likes of George Felix Allen, who don't just play at being racists, they have spent their whole lives becoming racists. People whose primary qualification for office is a tremendous knowledge of hair care products. As a result, people like James Webb, Wesley Clark, Mark Parkinson have left the Republican Party. These are not soft men, on the contrary, they are doers, risk takers and deciders. They are Democrats, because they are all addicts to getting things done. The same process is at work among conservative Democrats - people like John Edwards, once a conservative Democrat representing North Carolina in the Senate - now an outspoken advocate for ending poverty in America. He too has changed his views, because it was never the specifics of policy which he was attached to, but the results that those policies had.

The battle cry of the conservatives - that "ideas have consequences" is now turning against them. Having, for years, "lied by prediction" - that is told everyone to wait until the results were in before criticizing - now that the results are in, they are running as fast as they can, but physics doesn't allow you to run back 25 years, and even slowing the clock by much means approaching the speed of light.

Iraq was supposed to be the tabula rasa - the proof that unrestricted untrammelled plutocracy could rebuild a country faster and better than big government liberalism. The true believers went there to produce von Mises' eden on the Tigris. Instead, as with all unregulated wars of all against all, life there is now nasty, brutish and short. But then, if they had been busy reading the Western philosophical tradition rather than building scaffolds with it, they would have read enough Hobbes to know that.