Who’s the Boss?

Forget neocons and theocons. It’s the money-cons who really run Bush’s Republican Party.

By Kevin Drum

Missionary or mercenary? Put more plainly, what is George Bush at his core: a creature of the Christian right or a dutiful retainer of the millionaire’s boys club? Jon Chait, a senior editor at the New Republic, takes on this question in The Big Con, but only to dismiss it almost immediately. George Bush, he says, is an avatar of the modern Republican Party, and Chait has little doubt what today’s GOP really cares about:

American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane ... The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda.