Unleaded gasoline, PCPs, no-fault divorce, civil rights, common law marriage, gay marriage, national parks, the bikini, child labour laws, acid rain, trickle-down economics, privatization, women's pay equity, sexual harassment, women's voting rights, redlining, government pension plans, government debt, wheelchair ramps, the Iraq War, asbestos, plastic guns, condoms, recycling, rock n roll, and comic books.
This is just a partial list of what the Right has been wrong about in the last 75 years. In most of the above, such as civil rights, they opposed laws that would have made needed changes. In others, they opposed societal trends that the Right claimed were immoral or would lead to social breakdown - for example, the bikini was going to end the family as we know it (don't ask how). The positions they took weren't intellectually coherent or consistent, except that they were consistently on the wrong side of history. When it comes to getting things completely wrong, the modern Right is on par with communism.
The Right's record is so pathetic it veers into dark comedy. In the 1980s, the US Chamber of Commerce continually claimed that wheelchair ramps would be far too expensive. (It never occurred to these geniuses that allowing more people easy access to your business might be a good thing?) Of course, right-wing politicians unquestioningly backed the Chamber until the tide of public opinion was too great to ignore. In 1984, the FBI found that a new plastic Glock could easily evade airport security and be smuggled onto planes. Consistent with their eternal 'slippery slope' paranoia, the NRA opposed banning these guns and Republicans fell right in line with this position, public safety be damned. Government pensions were going to be the first step towards communism. But back here in reality, tens of millions of people have enjoyed long, happy retirements, while capitalism is still thriving.
You might argue that these things happened anyway, that laws were passed and that at least some on the Right ended up supporting them. True, they often came around and changed their minds, which is actually exactly like admitting you were wrong in the first place. But that's the rub - they never admit they were wrong in the first place. They just move on to the next mistake. Nor do they learn anything from the past, as shown by their continued 40 year support for thoroughly disproven supply-side economics.
It should be pointed out that none of these right-wing parties - not the UCP here in Alberta, not Boris Johnson's mimeographed 'Red Tories', and certainly not the morally and intellectually vacuous crazy train known as the Republican Party - are in fact conservative in any real sense of the word. True conservatives believe in tradition and in preserving the past and the lessons learned from it. They resist rapid change and they are realists in that they know that neither man nor society is at all perfectible. In short, conservatives have a coherent viewpoint based on certain bedrock principles.
But today's Right is far more reactionary than conservative, in that its only goal is retaining power and protecting vested interests, like big business for example. The Right portrays itself as the supreme defender of capitalism but it really is nothing of the sort. It reflexively defends only established business interests. It does not concern itself with ensuring competitive markets or with creating a level playing field, and it has rarely met a business subsidy or handout that it wouldn't get behind. A look at the legislative record of the various right-wing parties in the last 30 years shows reams of legislation that benefited big corporations at the expense of consumers, workers, the environment and even small businesses.
On the environment, the Right has an abysmal and shameful record. They have vehemently opposed every single initiative that sought to mitigate environmental damage, and have usually done so through misrepresentation, exaggeration and outright falsehoods. Their only goal has been to save big business money. So they furiously fought against laws that would get rid of acid rain and the hole in the ozone caused by PCPs. They even opposed what should have been a slam dunk, getting lead out of gasoline, an issue which perfectly illustrates how stupid, short-sighted and bankrupt the modern Right has become.
The deleterious effects of lead on human beings have been known since Roman times. Initially, the small amounts of lead in gasoline were deemed safe. But by the 1960s, there was considerable research that argued that the levels of lead in gasoline - caused as much by the sheer volume of vehicles now on our roads - were damaging to children and their cognitive development. The link couldn't definitively be established because the studies to prove this obviously had to be conducted over a very long period, i.e. decades. The possibility that we were damaging millions of children should have caused alarm in every politician, regardless of ideology. Instead, the Right cast doubt on the science and harped on the fact that refiners were loudly complaining that removing lead would cost them a fortune.
So when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, one of the first things his administration did was demand that the EPA reverse its regulations phasing out leaded gasoline. In what should now be a depressingly familiar scenario, they relied on misinformation to try to scare people. There is no lead in gasoline unless it is put there, but Reagan's mouthpieces acted as if it was naturally part of it and further claimed that gas prices would soar and that cars wouldn't run well with unleaded gas, neither of which was remotely true. They also tried another familiar ploy, arguing that consumers should be free to make up their own minds.
It was only after a tremendous public furor that Reagan grudgingly backed down. The research is now in and we have reams of studies that show that the average IQ of children has risen while behavioural issues have declined significantly since the elimination of leaded gasoline. Other lead-related illnesses have fallen off a cliff. There have also been studies further linking the improved level of child cognitive development to the dramatic decrease in crime that occurred in the 1990s. The human and financial costs of the damage lead caused are incalculable, (outrageously, leaded gasoline is still sold in poorer countries) and it was all in the name of saving refiners a few bucks.
Did they learn anything from this? Do you really have to ask? Today, the Right still employs these exact same tactics - the infantile arguments about freedom, the reliance on lies and fear mongering, the denial of science. So if you're having trouble accepting the reality of Covid or climate change, you can use this easy rule of thumb: If the Right claims something is false, you can pretty much bet your last dollar that its true.
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