Ross Douthat and the cocoon

Robert Waldmann

Douthat is worried about the Republican information cocoon. He thinks that conservatives should not rely so much on Fox News and should be open to media which they consider unfriendly (such as his employer the New York Times). He argues that Republicans achieved more back before Fox
In the age Before Fox News, on the other hand (B.F.N., to historians), the American Right managed to lower taxes, slow government’s growth to a crawl , whip inflation, and deregulate important swathes of the American economy, among other Reagan-era accomplishments.

After the jump, I click Douthat’s link and consult an obscure source called the Wikipedia.

Douthat shows how people who live in cocoons make fools of themselves. First click *his* link. You will find that the graph does not show a slowdown in the growth of government spending under Reagan. I assumed that he had defined government as not including the military and so had a misleading graph which supported his claim, but, in fact, he just showed a graph which shows slow growth of spending after the end of the cold war and during the Clinton Presidency including the 6 years of Republican control of congress. I think he is counting the Reagan years as starting at the trough of the Volker recession and he definitely doesn’t count Bush Sr as a pre-Fox Republican. He’s really definitely measuring trough to peak and timing presidencies by looking at recessions. And this is the conservative warning about living in a cacoon.

Oddly, I mean to post about another gross historical error in that brief quotation. It is the claim that under Reagan “important swathes of the American economy” were deregulated. I don’t know what Douthat has in mind. I certainly don’t recall any such important deregulation under Reagan (well there was deregulation of S&Ls and you know how that turned out). I think he is thinking of Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. I’m sure that all Republicans agree that Reagan deregulated the airlines and that Carter didn’t deregulate anything, but they are wrong. Note there was an even huger Democratic majority in the Senate in 1978 than there is now. Or maybe it was the deregulation of interstate trucking via the motor carrier act of 1980 . Or maybe it was the phased deregulation of oil prices which began on April 5 1979 . Sure seems like the deregulating conservative hero Ronald Reagan had a Southern accent and grew peanuts.

But Reagan must have deregulated. Everyone knows Reagan deregulated. What exactly ? I have used “refuted by 5 minutes of googling” as my standard for rejection of reality for years now. This time, I stuck to Wikipedia. Recall this is from a post arguing that Republicans ought to be reality based.