Here comes that peculiar political blindness again. Conservatives idolize Ronald Reagan, the greatest political disaster of my lifetime, to the point that they can’t even read criticisms of his policies without stupidly translating them into praise. Here’s Liz Truss failing to comprehend a book that she thinks was wonderful.
As I reported this summer, Liz Truss’s favourite historian is Rick Perlstein, the great chronicler of the rise of the new right in its Nixonian and Reaganite forms between 1960 and 1980.
She told journalists that she read ‘anything’ he wrote. Interviewers noticed Perlstein’s books on her shelves. In a strange compliment to the American historian, Truss or sources close to her briefed The Spectator’s Katy Balls with precise (if unacknowledged) quotes from his account of the rise of Ronald Reagan.
I sent Perlstein my piece and asked for his thoughts. Let me put it like this: he may be her favourite historian, but she is not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000.
‘Liz. Can’t. Read.’ he replied, and began a long – and for British readers frightening – account of how and why our new government of wannabe Reaganites have crashed the economy.
Perlstein said that, if she read his books with the attentiveness she claimed, she would not have risked our pensions and mortgages with a naïve belief that tax cuts would stimulate economic growth and raise revenue for the Treasury. Far from paying for themselves, Reagan’s income and capital gains taxes in the early 1980s sent public debt from 26 per cent GDP in 1980 to 41 per cent GDP by 1988.
I wonder if Truss will continue to cite Perstein as “her favourite historian” after that comment.
No, because she can’t read that comment any more than she can read Perstein’s book.
Good point.
By the time the next UK general election rolls around, the Tories may have no choice but to bring back BoJo. And he’d probably “lead” them to another victory, unless Labour can seriously get their act together by then, which I don’t yet see happening.
She doesn’t care.
She just automatically says whatever she thinks her audience wants to hear, and it’s not like she’s used to suffer the consequences of her actions.
She was put in power by other people who likewise don’t care and are not used (and will not) suffer the consequences of their decisions, I wouldn’t be surprised if, despite all the economic blunders, they were actually getting richer.
Perhaps I can offer my view of Ms. Truss from my own personal angle.
For quite some time TERFs and other opponents of transgender people have been billing transgenderism as an ideology. Transgenderism is a set of beliefs, and in order to be transgender I have to hold these beliefs myself. I’m not entirely clear as to what they are, but it appears that I hold them nonetheless.
Just recently we’ve been upgraded to a full-blown religion. One of Truss’ comments about us was to the effect that she was going to oppose this new religion with its official priesthood, something along those lines. This is Donald Trump-like idiocy.
When the would-be prime minister repeats this sort of drivel that she finds on the net, when this is her level of intellectual achievement, it doesn’t augur well for the country as a whole.
@4 Oh, so she’s EXACTLY like Reagan. Voodoo economics from a guy who thought that psychics were real & consulted them regularly, along with other charlatans like card readers, etc. as did Nancy. This is what happens when you let a second-rate B movie actor and his adulterous wife (you know, the “just say no” lady, who in fact, DIDN’T say no and uh, got knocked up outside of Jesus-y matrimony, which, as everybody knows, is the only real kind. Shotgun wedding! Perhaps they used the prop rifles from one of Ronnie’s B movie westerns.)
Reagan went on a credit card binge with the US’s credit card and largely bought magic beans with it. Remember Star Wars/SDI? The stupid thing never worked, and they finally had to slow the target drone down to a crawl to “prove” that SDI “worked”, at least on doctored/heavily edited video. And it cost a fucking fortune.
But they paid for it in other ways, like cutting school lunches for hungry poor kids! Because all life is precious, so aborting the reborn (otherwise known as fetuses to rational people) is wrong, but it’s okay to let the actually-born kids starve to death or go hungry. Because Jesus! Also, ketchup is a now a vegetable instead of a condiment. So kids can get a full day’s nutrition, at least on paper. Which might taste better and be more nutritious than a Reagan school lunch.
And now the UK has their very own Reagan. With a bleach job and boobs.
Good luck with that.
Not that I like or respect Reagan, but I suggest this is no longer true.
*should have been “preborn”. Stupid autocorrect.
@8 Sadly, I think that’s true.
We all thought Quayle was The Worst… until we got dopey (and coke-y) Dubya. Who looks like a genius standing next to shitbrindle orange turd 45.
Sorry, @ 6.
What is with autocorrect today.
Republicans want desperately to credit Reagan’s tax cuts for the economic boom that came around mid 1980s. But they ignore that Carter appointed Volcker to the Fed who’s goal was to tighten the money supply to kill inflation. Something both Nixon and Ford were too chicken to do. But Volcker did it and he put the lending rate upwards of 22% to do that. This killed the economy and killed Carter’s presidency. But by 1980, inflation was controlled and the lending rate started dropping. This made money more available for all those businesses in the 1970s who could not afford to expand and thus we started to see all the pent up demand for expansion start to come to fruition. It was a double barreled boost to economic growth.
By 1985, the lending rate had been cut in half and the economy was booming because of it. And our media made sure Reagan’s tax cuts got the credit when it was more than likely the lending rates.
But there was another phenomenon back then. OPEC created a boycott on oil for the US but also cut production for the entire world. This resulted in a barrel of oil, when controlled for inflation, upwards of $140 a barrel by the mid to late 70s. This also put a massive damper on the economy. But Carter badly damaged OPEC and by 1980, the price of oil was plummeting and my 1984 or so, that inflation controlled barrel of oil was down to $40. This also was extremely stimulatory for the economy.
Thus, the 2 biggest factors in the economic boom of the 1980s were way way way more due to the actions of Carter than to the actions of Reagan. And we know now from the tax cuts that came from Bush and Trump that if the tax cuts are the wrong type, they DO NOT lead to an economic boom. Let’s not forget, that the Fed dropped the lending rate during the Bush years all the way to zero. And we also know from the economic stimulus packages from Obama and from Biden, when you add money to the economy CORRECTLY, you in fact do get an economic boom — for ALL Americans and not just the rich.
So we have the data but we refuse to bring it up. Reagan’s tax cuts were NOT likely the reason for the boom in the 80s because they were the wrong kinds of way for government to add money to the economy. We have the data on that now.
But we also have the data on the RIGHT way for the government to add $$ to the economy. Both Biden and Obama showed us. (I’d also suggest LBJ showed us, and Eisenhower with the interstate highway system showed us, and the Marshall plan showed us on an international scale, and FDR showed us.)
But we’ve been lied to for so long about the genius of supply side economics (LOL) that some right wing idiots seem to have actually believed it.
Reagan has been sanctified. People do not actually read about him any more than they read the Bible. It’s irrelevant that she’s illiterate, and is probably a plus to the people that she needs to please.
@9- markmckee
Didn’t Volker implement the monetarist money supply theory of Milton Friedman?
Sure it started under Carter by appointing Volker but smells strongly of Friedman, a Mont Pelerin type libertarian. If memory serves the monetarists and supply siders under Reagan were either at loggerheads or talking past each other, though I’m going on memory that may have come from bad sources to begin with.
Reagan would also expand on Zbig’s covert intervention into Afghanistan which started under Carter.
Truss learned what she wanted to learn from Reaganomics. The richest get richer and fuck everybody else.
From OP… I had heard of Rick Perlstein from this Know Your Enemy podcast where he is a guest:
https://know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/reaganland-w-rick-perlstein-and-leon-neyfakh
Sounds knowledgable on this stuff. Probably won’t get around to reading his book. I’m binge listening the podcast though.
Did you hear that the Truss government internally called the disastrous mini-budget/tax cuts “Operation Rolling Thunder”? They really don’t pay attention to history.
The entire modern conservative platform is based on pandering to the wilfully uninformed. Truss is the apotheosis of that process and the logical successor to BoJo (who is a narcissistic sociopath but actually intelligent and educated). She is the inevitable step after pandering: the embodiment of that wilful ignorance.
@#6, silvrhalide:
The UK already had their very own Reagan. She was named “Margaret Thatcher”.
They missed out on having their own GWB (an idiot who was explicitly right-wing but being mostly a puppet was only really interested in wars and tax cuts, and committed outright crimes which the opposition helped normalize despite campaigning against) — instead, their version of Bill Clinton (somebody who subverted the supposedly left-leaning party into a machine for assisting the very rich out of admiration for the Reagan-oid who came earlier), Tony Blair, lasted through those years and helped invade Iraq, and got kicked out as Clinton should have been if Democrats actually had the integrity they like to pretend they do. They also had their own Trump (a right-winger whose many attempts at structural damage against the nation were downplayed by his opposition because they secretly agree with them, while they publicly frothed with rage against his personal behavior which was very obnoxious but not actually all that harmful) in Boris Johnson. Truss is something new, apparently — she might of course suddenly reverse course, but so far she’s beyond even Trump or Johnson; a right-winger who is so totally oblivious to (and unwilling to admit the existence of) reality, that she will not hesitate to smash the country she is supposed to lead in order to try to make an ideological point. Even Trump was occasionally rebuffed when the world did not react the way he expected and backed off — Truss, so far, refuses to take note and back away when her actions backfire. We can only hope that it’s only because she has been on the job for such a short time, and will eventually admit that there is a reality beyond right-wing economic theory. Her mere existence is worrisome, because the politics of the UK and the US tend, with a few years of wiggle room, to mirror each other, and that suggests we’re due for a Truss-oid figure next here in the US.
I’d just like to pay my respects to the Tory Party members who used their best judgement to vote for Liz Truss after previously voting for Boris Johnson, the characters and beliefs of both candidates having been known for many years. I hope you all recognise that the responsibility for the resultant sharp increase in deaths and immiseration falls directly on you, and that you’ll all bear that in mind when you vote for a new leader in the next few months.
If you had told us ten years ago that Liz Truss would be leading the country, with a cabinet including such luminaries as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Kwasi Kwarteng and Therese Coffey, we’d genuinely have laughed. They were (and remain) the absolute scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. The comic relief weirdos it was impossible to take seriously. “How could this happen?”, we’d have said. “The Tories have five or six strata of more respected, more competent, more serious people above that lot”. And it was true, ten years ago.
But now, it seems, they’ve run through everyone with even the most passing common sense, moral scruples or even nascent competence, and hit the lowest layers of ineptitude. And, what’s worse, none of the barrel scrapings has got any better in the last ten years. You would expect that a decade of just being in the same room as grown-up politiicians and watching what they do might have given the current rogues’ gallery some idea of how to govern… but no, apparently they’re still just their old incompetent, comic relief selves after all this time.
I was going to say “so who’s next then, after this lot’s inevitable fuck up and replacement?” But then I realised that there aren’t actually any levels of incompetence, stupidity and unfitness to govern below the current lot in the Tory party. We’ve hit rock bottom. The comic relief of ten years ago is the main cast now, but it is, at one and the same time, also the comic relief of today.
It’s not exactly been a good decade to be alive, has it?
Trussonomics:
The transfer of capital from poor to the reich.
Oops! I meant “the rich”.
Or did I?
Louis
@ moonslicer #5
dang at this rate i must already be a middle priestess or something. today i learned
Ah, the Vicar, the Vicar, reliably wrong! No, Blair did not get “kicked out”. There was some pressure within the Labour Party for him to resign due to his fall in popularity, but he went voluntarily and was succeeded as Labour leader and PM by Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor was the second most powerful person in the party and government throughout Blair’s premiership, was fully implicated in the illegal invasion of Iraq, and followed very similar economic policies after Blair resigned, until the 2008 financial crash, after which he bailed out the British banks, and failed to impose any serious constraints on them.
Actually, I think we’d have started with “Liz Who?”! At that point she was parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Education, which is about as prominent a position as it sounds. She and four other swivel-eyed loons (including Kwarteng) had just published Britannia Unchained, the swivel-eyed loon manifesto, but you’d have needed to be either a swivel-eyed loon, or a serious student of swivel-eyed lunacy, to be familiar with that. Kwarteng, Rees-Mogg and Coffey had no government positions, although they were MPs. We might have heard of Rees-Mogg, as the bumptious son of the former editor of the London Times, William Rees-Mogg.
LOL.
Re: Comment #14, Hemidactylus-Thank you for the podcast recommend and link!
I recently finished Perlstein’s quadrilogy. His work is fantastic. It is thorough, insightful and engaging. I highly recommend it.
@20. Louis : Reich, rich, same diff?
Ie same.
Perlstein’s histories of modern American conservatism are terrific, btw. The audiobooks – esp. the very first one – are also excellent.
When you read them, you can also have the weird experience of “history” morphing into your remembered personal experience.
They’re also enraging, because it becomes clear that the Right never changes – the same evil bs generation after generation.
Suggested fix.
hillaryrettig1–
Not only does the right never change, they don’t even change when reality has smashed them in the face repeatedly.
She can read but she can’t think, so she doesn’t understand what she reads, so–with the right semantic jiggering–she can’t read.