One popular explanation for the triumph of right-wing economics, familiar to readers of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, is that cultural issues have obscured pocketbook ones. Conservatives have tricked the masses into voting on the basis of social issues, thus ignoring their economic self-interest. It is certainly true that tens of millions of potential Democratic voters support the Republican Party on the basis of its opposition to abortion, gays, and the like. But the phenomenon of conservative elites using culture and patriotism to win support from the masses is an old one. Left-wing populism of the kind that Frank and others favor may have failed to take root because of working-class social conservatism. This does not, however, explain a slightly different question: how and why the economic right has gained so much strength over the last three decades. After all, by nearly any measure, the American public has grown more socially liberal over this span. Since 1977, the proportion of Americans believing gays should be allowed to teach in elementary school has doubled, from 27 to 54 percent. Those favoring gay adoption has risen from 14 to 49 percent. Since 1976, the proportion of Americans who believe women deserve an equal role in business and political life has nearly doubled, from 30 to 57 percent. The proportion who believe that a woman's place is in the home has collapsed from 10 to 2 percent.

If the public is not moving right on economics, and if it is not even moving right on social issues, then we cannot explain the rise of right-wing economics by looking at the voters. We can only understand it by examining Washington.

This book has two parts. The first half explains how the Republican Party my father admired, the party of social and fiscal responsibility, was transformed into the party of class warfare. It is an astonishing tale, and it begins in the mid-1970s with the rise of a sect of pseudo-economists known as the supply-siders. This small cult of fanatical tax-cutters managed, despite having been proven decisively wrong time after time, to get an iron grip on the ideological machinery of the conservative movement. The supply-siders were not maverick conservative economists, as you might assume; they were amateurs and cranks, convinced that their outsider status enabled them to reach conclusions that had escaped the scrutiny of professional economists. The most prominent among them spent their lives advocating a number of patently ludicrous ideas. (One supply-side guru compared Slobodan Milosevic to Abraham Lincoln. Another said that American upper-class women "are averse to science and technology and baffled by it.") While their other preposterous ideas went nowhere, the equally preposterous notion of supply-side economics took the political system by storm. Why? Because it attracted a powerful constituency: the rich.

An almost theological opposition to taxation quickly took hold within the GOP, opening up the opportunity for business lobbyists to hijack the party's agenda. And so they did, as described in chapter 2. Far from being ideological fanatics, these were the most coolly calculating men. Their distinguishing quality was cynicism. Some of them were flamboyant crooks, like the gangster wannabe Jack Abramoff. But most were crooks of a more respectable variety- the kind with seven-figure salaries and offices at prestigious law firms. All of them understood that the destruction of the old Republican ethos of restraint opened up the public coffers to them, and they have availed themselves and their clients of a massive looting of the Treasury.

Their takeover of the Republican Party took years to complete. The supply-siders and the business lobbyists had two internal obstacles to overcome before they could take full control: the Republican rank-and-file voting base, and the old Republican Washington establishment, both of which still clung to the old ethos of fiscal responsibility and public-mindedness. To deal with them there arose a new breed of ideological enforcer-propagandists, party organizers, lobbyists, or often (as in the case of prototypes like Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) all of these things at once. They drove out the old party establishment and created a new party line that fused in a seamless web supply-side ideology with their own financial interests.

There is something distinctly cultlike about their thinking. Their canon is presumptively infallible, and any apparent failure must instead be seen as an impetus to recommit themselves to doctrinal purity. Last spring, in an example typical of this thinking, the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel diagnosed the Republican Party's ailments thusly: "The base is in the dumps, disenchanted with a party that has lost sight of its economic moorings." The solution? Tax cuts, and lots of them. Strassel ran through how all the leading Republican presidential candidates had pledged their fealty to the governing supply-side faith. Each of them promised to make permanent all of Bush's tax cuts, but of course this was a given. The competition was between which candidate would promise even deeper cuts in upper-bracket rates.

As a diagnosis of what ails the Republicans today, this was, of course, insane. Bush signed a major tax cut each of the first six years of his presidency. Whatever the GOP's political liabilities may be, an insufficient commitment to tax-cutting is obviously not among them. To propose that the road to victory lies in recommitting the party to even more upper-bracket tax cuts requires a detachment from reality that would have been the envy of the Manson gang. But this is the sort of thinking that now predominates in conservative and Republican circles, and the obeisance of all the leading GOP presidential hopefuls shows just how deeply it has sunk in.

Excerpted from The Big Con by Jonathan Chait Copyright © 2007 by Jonathan Chait. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.