Prosperity-Sucks Conservatism

We don't see it very often, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave us a glimpse this week.

Scott Bessent’s conceit of the prosperity bequeathed by Joe Biden.

Republicans have this problem. The economy consistently does better under Democratic presidencies than under Republican ones. Nobody wants to believe it, but it’s true. Republicans usually get away with pretending it isn’t so, but occasionally they get cornered, and in those moments they spout a novel and very left-wing-sounding doctrine that I like to call Prosperity-Sucks Conservatism.

We had a Prosperity-Sucks moment before the 2000 election, when Republicans and their conservative allies had to explain away the economy’s phenomenal growth under President Bill Clinton. At the Republican convention Candidate George W. Bush confronted the Tech-Boom-elephant in the room by babbling that prosperity “can be a drug in our system—dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty.” Similarly, Dinesh D’Souza, at that point still considered a vaguely serious person, published a book titled The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in An Age of Techno-Affluence. Bush and D’Souza were both trying desperately to sell the idea that, while prosperity certainly had its attractions, Democrat prosperity was cheap and dirty.

I wrote about D’Souza and Bush’s Prosperity Sucksism in this Slate piece, which, like most of my Slate pieces, no longer bears my byline because of a technical glitch Slate never got around to fixing. If you want to find an old Slate piece of mine and you can’t get it by Googling my name, try Googling “Chatterbox.” I didn’t write every Chatterbox column—the earliest ones were by Jack Shafer, then Mickey Kaus, then Walter Shapiro, and after that I occasionally ran guest columns by others—but the overwhelming majority were by me.

But I digress.

Both Bush and D’Souza were drawing on a legitimate strain of conservatism that frets about capitalism corrupting traditional values, religious and otherwise. But that strain hadn’t previously been partisan, and we’ve not seen it revived very often since conservatism went all-in on the money culture starting in the early 1980s.

Now Prosperity-Sucks Conservatism is back, thanks to Scott Bessent, who gave a speech this week claiming that economic indicators that show President Joe Biden created prosperity are terribly misleading, and that in fact we have for the past year been in a “private-sector recession” (which, for the record, isn’t true either). Bessent wants you to believe that the robust health in which Biden left the economy is a gum-cracking gangster’s moll of an economy, straight out of a 1930s movie, that says things like “Pleased to meet you I’m shoo-ah.” The downturn that forecasters blame on Trump’s policies is actually the fault of this tarty spangled chorine, which is to say it’s Biden’s fault. Bessent’s oration was turd-polishing of a very high order, and I write about it in my latest New Republic piece, which you’ll find here.