More from Open Left in the Culture Wars Series AKA How the HELL did our country get into this mess ?

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The Big Lie And The Rightwing's Neo-Feudal Vision (A Supplement To The Political Duality Series) by: Paul Rosenberg

One key to why movement conservatives are so successful is that they are playing a different game than everyone else-even most conservative voters, who really have no idea what they've signed on for. What they are after, at a minimum, is a return to the Gilded Age system, when big business owned Congress outright, and the country was run directly for their benefit, and little else.
I'm going to be talking about this in an upcoming diary, but to illustrate it a little more fully, I created this standalone diary.
Voodoo Economics: A Case Study
During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan was the focus of attention for competing advisors, including economists. The ones who won out were promoters of what came to known as "supply-side economics"-what George H.W. Bush so aptly called "Voodoo Economics," before he sold his soul to become Reagan's running mate. As Wikipedia explains:

Supply-side economics is a school of macroeconomic thought that argues that economic growth can be most effectively created using incentives for people to produce (supply) goods and services, such as adjusting income tax and capital gains tax rates. This can be contrasted with the classic Keynesian economics or demand side economics, which argues that growth can be most effectively managed by controlling total demand for goods and services, typically by adjusting the level of Government spending. Supply-side economics is often conflated with trickle-down economics. The term was coined by journalist Jude Wanniski in 1975, and popularised the ideas of economists Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer. The typical policy recommendation of supply-side economics is the reduction of marginal tax rates, beneficial because of the proponents' view that increased private investment generally brings higher productivity, which increases economic growth, and lowers costs for consumers. This is controversial because cutting marginal tax rates is perceived to offer benefits primarily to the wealthy, which commentators such as Paul Krugman see as politically rather than economically motivated.
Many early proponents argued that the size of the economic growth would be significant enough that the increased government revenue from a faster growing economy would be sufficient to completely compensate for the short-term costs of a tax cut, and that tax cuts could, in fact, cause overall revenue to increase....
Supply-side supporters disagreed with monetarist Milton Friedman and neoclassicist Robert Lucas Jr. by arguing that cutting tax rates alone would be sufficient to grow GDP, lift tax revenues and balance the budget.

Ronald Reagan tried this, and the results were disasterous-by the time he left office, he had almost tripled the federal deficit. Supply-side economics was a flat-out disaster in terms of what it promised. However, the Republicans were not really all that unhappy with what it delivered. In fact, the more conservative ones were downright gleeful.
The deficits continued growing under Bush I, and then when Clinton took over, and raised taxes to try and get a "reality-based" handle on the mess Reagan/Bush had made, his tax increase was one of the key factors that contributed the Democrats loss of Congress in 1994. After that, once in control of Congress, Republicans pushed hard for deep cuts in spending in order to cut the deficits that their superhero, Ronald Reagan, had created in the first place. Once Clinton actually managed to balance the budget-significantly sooner than originally expected-the surplus was then ripe for the plucking by Bush II, who then went well beyond that, quickly creating even larger defiticits than those that Clinton origianlly faced. In turn, these deficits are intended to be used to further decimate the welfare state, forcing the privatization of Social Security and Medicare.

What is worse, is that