The 1990s were the longest period of sustained economic growth in American history. The second longest was the 1950s under Dwight Eisenhower, and the third-longest was the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.

In all three eras, the poor got richer, the middle class got richer, and the rich got richer. Notice which group got poorer? If your answer was "none" you go to the head of the class. It's funny how stating this simple, empirically demonstrable fact irritates both the political Left and the political Right--and it irritates them both for reasons that are, ultimately, silly.

I'll get to right-wing silliness in a minute; it's only a little different from the left-wing silliness anyway. Much like the vapid (and provably false) notion that tax cuts in the 1980s caused deficits and increased poverty, one of the most persistent lies that the political Left still cannot shake itself of is the notion that...

..."the rich get richer but the poor get poorer."

As Andrew Sullivan notes in his excellent Sunday Times analysis, the Old Left that's desperately fighting to get back into power in America's Democratic Party and in Britain's Labour Party are simply all wet. For all of Clinton's rhetoric about "the failed ideas of the past" (a phrase Tom Daschle keeps repeating like a 2-year-old who's discovered a new word) Clinton's economic policies were virtually indistinguishable from Reagan's. He gave us moderate income tax increases, yes, but wound up coupling them with decreases in capital gains taxes and massive expansion of free trade, all of which helped to balance the budget. He also gave us reforms of the welfare state that were tougher and more sweeping than Reagan even proposed, let alone enacted, and helped millions of people out of poverty as a result.

Similarly, the sum of Tony Blair's "New Labour" contributions to Britain's economic policies have been to very lightly soften the rock-hard shell of Thatcherism, while doing even more to expand free trade, deregulate industry, and push down welfare dependency. Virtually everything Labour claimed to hate Thatcher for is now their government's standing policy.

The upshot of all this has been a swelling middle class, booming opportunity for immigrants and the poor, and more freedom for everyone in all areas of society. Furthermore, minorities, single mothers, and women in general have been among the biggest beneficiaries of these pro-growth free-market policies. The trendy socialism that's so beloved of the world's intellectual elites (and the dinosaurs over at the New York Times) has been an abject failure anywhere that it's been implemented beyond offering a basic safety net to the free market.

Indeed, while Sullivan doesn't say so openly, the truth is obvious: Reagan and Thatcher won all the big arguments. Communism is evil and does not work. Free markets are not evil and do work most of the time. Free trade is a healthy thing. Too much taxation and regulation aren't.

The devil may be in the details, but big successes cannot be overshadowed by small missteps. It's time that those of us who despised Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s (and yes, I was one of them) to grow up and admit that we were wrong and they were right. If you just say that out loud two or three times, it's really not all that painful. In fact, it's liberating.

I'll go further: failure to acknowledge this is a red flag for someone who is either too ignorant or too blindly partisan to take seriously. The only arguments left are how low taxes should be, how little regulation there should be, and how much freedom to allow--in the market or outside of it. Those are the arguments we'll probably be having for the rest of our lives. But, much like the notion that tax cuts in the 1980s caused massive deficits (which is, by the way, not even debateable: it simply did not happen), the "the rich get richer but the poor get poorer" mantra is, quite simply, bunk. In a free society, class warfare is a false idol, and an irrelevancy that just gets in the way of making the world a better place.

This gets to right-wing silliness, to which I have also occasionally fallen prey. For all of the Right's criticisms of him, Bill Clinton was, ideologically, a complete disaster for the old-line liberal Democrats who elected and re-elected him. Indeed, if he had been a Republican, he would have been hated by the Left more than Reagan and Gingrich combined. Beyond a couple of tiny achievements (a small bump in taxes on "the rich" offset by cutting the capital gains rate, a moderate increase in government scholarships, and a "don't ask don't tell" military), his entire list of domestic accomplishments reads like a Republican wet dream.

For all that Republicans slammed him, and for all that he tried (and failed) to nationalize the medical industry, the simple truth is that Bill Clinton spent almost his entire Presidency signing just about everything in the supposedly evil Contract With America, cutting taxes while increasing revenues, and generally giving conservative Republicans 80-90% of what they wanted, while giving the left wing of his own party nothing but table scraps.

The only question left is how long it will be before the dinnosaurs realize that things like low taxes, minimal regulations, and a welfare state with strings attached do not exclusively belong to one party. They will either wake up to this reality, or slowly die off.

What all this says about the power and stability of the American system is heartening. Despite all the bickering, the country remains stable. Not unlike a few marriages I know.

For those of us who are occasionally (or more than occasionally) bitter and disillusioned with politics because it seems like we squabble too much, or because there are so many things we wish would happen that don't: welcome to Democracy. It's a messy business. Anyone who thinks it was never this bad before needs to look to history. Angry name-calling and bitter accusations and recriminations are the norm. Furthermore, everyone has things they wish would get done that don't (I have quite a list I could share with you). If you hate that, then at some level what you really hate is Democracy itself.

We have had deeply principled, decent men as President who were failures: look at Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter for example. We have had other deeply principled, decent men who were roaring successes, like Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt. We have had fairly soulless scoundrels like Lyndon Johnson who were failures; we have had fairly soulless scoundrels like Bill Clinton who've been remarkably successful. Through it all, the country endures.

Would we be healthier if all politicians were truthful and highly principled people? Yes, we would. That is something you can take to the voting booth--I know I do. But even the scoundrels can get things done. Today, people who hated Richard Nixon 30 years ago often look back on him and say, "well, he did achieve some remarkable things, didn't he?" Yes, we would be better off if everyone was completely intellectually honest and decent in politics. As it happens, I believe most politicians are honest and decent most of the time. But they are human beings, and all human beings are bad sometimes, and some human beings are bad most of the time. It happens. That's why we call this "Earth" and not "Heaven."

If you long for a time of great national unity, where the overwhelming majority of the country loves its leaders, where there is little visible disagreement and everyone is united in one common cause, look to Germany under Hitler or Japan under Tojo. If you want the messy, petty, bickering, carping madness that leads to a free society, look to Democracy. And I suggest you look to the American system in particular, where our balance of power between state and federal, as well as between executive, legislative, and judicial, makes us tend to fight less bitterly than people do in most other Democracies. We have remained remarkably stable for well over 200 years now, even though numerous dark periods of civil unrest and war.

A Democracy like ours works because it forces people to compromise, to bend on principle, and find ways to get along. Yes, it's a chaotic mess, and every generation or so something has to shake up the system to help clean it out. But with that many people involved in an enterprise, wouldn't having everything always clean and neat and polite and agreeable seem just a little, you know, spooky?

Think about it.