I only skimmed the first few chapters of this book - it was just more detail and more analysis than I wanted. The main take-away for me was that right-wing policies have consistently failed because they are fundamentally flawed policies. Some on the right would have you believe that Bush's presidency has been a failure because of the simple incompetence and corruption of this administration. But the fact is that Bush's policies have failed in the same way that Bush I's, Reagan's, and Nixon's policies failed, and for mostly the same reasons.
Anrig points out that the right-wing has a consistent strategy: 1) if there is an actual problem that government can solve, divert attention from that problem onto a pseudo-problem from which political hay can be made; 2) implement some sort of privatization scheme to 'solve' the pseudo-problem; 3) leave it to the Democrats to clean up the resulting mess. Think, for example, of the problem of underfunded and chaotic inner-city public schools. Right-wingers turned that specific (and solvable) problem into the notion that public schools generally are failures (because of unionization and bureaucracy, of course!). Then they pushed through private-school measures (vouchers, tax credits, etc.) in a successful attempt to further weaken public schools. The private schools (including and especially home-schooling) are deeply religious-based for the most part, so supporting them with public money is unconstitutional and just plain wrong. More tellingly, private schools have done no better than public schools once results are adjusted for income and ethnicity. So the right-wing has managed to gut the public schools and reduce our overall educational base; spend more money than it would have cost to fix the original, actual, problem; and divert billions of dollars into private education corporations that then funnel part of their profit back to the right-wing of the Republican party.
This pattern repeats itself again and again. And it is a strategy that was and remains an explicit recommendation of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. This is not incompetence, it is deliberate malfeasance, and is part of a decades-long strategy to gain permanent political control of the country.
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