Re: The Longitudinal Lesson Of Paul Krugman's "The Conscience Of A Liberal."

            Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s the kind of conservatism that had ruled in the Gilded Age was brought back and financed with a vengeance by those who wanted to turn the clock back to the days before Theodore Roosevelt.  The very rich financed think tanks, scholars, willing and acquiescent politicians like Reagan, and the like to create a regressive, now ascendant culture that again glorified enormous wealth, huge disparities in income and wealth, political inequality (and, one might add, foreign military adventures that made the rich ever richer). 

            I know enough American history, both from books and from having lived for about half the period under discussion, to know that Krugman’s basic outline is right.  Fundamentally, in what Krugman calls our long Gilded Age, the rich got richer and the poor were kept down for about sixty years.  Oh yes, there were the Progressives and Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but the basic story was of a vastly unequal country.  The New Deal began before I was born (a few days after Hitler invaded Poland), but not just books, but also living life and the history of my own nuclear and extended families tell me Krugman is right about the middle period.  We started out as a poor immigrant family and because of changes in this country were middle class by the mid to late ’50s.  Because of the sea change that, as Krugman says, occurred in a very short period because of the policies of FDR and Truman, some of my first cousins who were much older than I, an age disparity that often occurred in old country and/or poor families, went to college in their late ’20s while they held full time working class jobs (taxi drivers, photoengravers), and became professionals instead of working class.  (Though it is not widely known, in 1940 only about 40 or 45 percent of the population even had high school degrees.  Today about a quarter or a third, I believe, have college degrees.)  And, starting in the late ’60s and early ’70s, one has seen the transition from a society whose culture favored equality to a society whose culture favors truly vast inequality -- a country where it is regarded as appropriate for CEOs to make 300 and 400 times what the average workers in their companies make and for hedge fund managers to make 1.7 billion dollars a year and pay tax at only a 15 percent rate, a country where the salary of the average guy hasn’t improved much, if at all, in constant dollars for 30 years, a country where all our politicians are owned by the rich as in the first Gilded Age and where the mass media is in thrall to the rich and powerful.

            And seeing what has happened longitudinally, it is obvious to those of decent views -- a major qualification, unfortunately -- where we should want to go in the next longitudinal phase of the nation’s life.  We should want to go back to, we should want to improve upon and further, the fundamental idea that permeated the country from 1932 through the late 1960s:  greater equality economically, politically and legally.  That is the fundamental idea, and it is really that simple.

            Now, there are some things that can impinge on this goal that Krugman doesn’t mention, but which his opponents can have a field day with.  Krugman, I believe, thinks that government works, that government regulations and programs can accomplish what must be done and can do so efficiently.  I don’t necessarily think this because, in my experience, and in my reading, government is too often incompetent, slothful, slow and corrupt.  What we need is a sea change in culture, in animating ideas.  On the private side, people have to begin to believe in decent ideas instead of Gilded Age ideas.  And maybe government can establish goals ala those enforced by the SEC and the Antitrust Division when they were still effective bodies, as in the ’60s.  There are other advanced countries in Europe and Asia that do not share the devil take the hindmost, the poor be damned ideas that have animated this country for years - - there are countries where there is more of a culture of everyone is in it together, and that are doing at least as well as we are.  So our ideas are not ones ineluctably thrust upon corrupt human nature by a misnamed providence.  Other countries are different -- and we should look for and vote for politicians who understand and speak for  a culture that supports what is needed, rather than the self-glorifying, self-interested political hacks who fill our halls today. 

            In addition to Krugman’s longitudinal argument, he makes another point that moves me greatly, one I myself have previously made to some extent.  We should stop worshipping at the shrine of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.  These were not the avuncular, or wise, fellows that what Krugman calls “movement conservatism” wants us to think and that it has now become popular to think and say.  These were guys, as Krugman says, who would turn back the drive toward economic and political equality and a more just society, and who contributed extensively to exactly that result.  As well, Goldwater (an Air Force General) was a warmonger and anti civil rights.  (Reagan was not dumb enough to be a warmonger.)  Also, as Krugman points out, Reagan deliberately fanned the fires of racism in order to get elected.  He deliberately started his presidential campaign just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi -- who the hell ever heard of starting a presidential campaign just outside of a small redneck southern town in Mississippi?  But when you realize that Philadelphia, Mississippi is where Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were murdered, you know everything you need to know -- and you will not be surprised, either, that Reagan went to the cemetery in Bitburg, where SS men are buried.

            I do not know whether Goldwater and Reagan were bad human beings, although I have some antagonistic suspicions, but I do know they favored bad policies.  We should stop letting conservatives get away with worshipping and promoting worship of these characters, and with relying on them, with impunity.  If the right wishes to tar itself by relying on these guys, then it should flat out be said that that is precisely what it is doing:  it is tarring itself.

            Two final points.  One relates to the South.  It has been said here many times that the one party South is the root of our problems.  Krugman seems to agree and says that race is the cause.  The South, he says, was part of the New Deal so long as it was the sick man of the United States, because it had so much to gain from the New Deal’s redistribution of wealth, and so long as the North did not assail Jim Crow.  But once things got economically better for the South and civil rights became a Democratic Party policy, the South deserted en masse to the Republicans because of its hatred of racial equality.  That surely seems right, and its switch to the Republican Party after 1965 has enabled the right wing to take over much of the country and our institutions.  This will not improve much unless and until the power of the one party, right wing south to run our nation is broken.  There are ways to break it; some of them have been discussed here before.

            Finally, Krugman made a very disturbing point early on in his book (on p. 12).  I quote:

A few months after the 2004 election I was placed under some pressure by journalistic colleagues, who said I should stop spending so much time criticizing the Bush administration and conservatives more generally.  “The election settled some things,” I was told. 

            On its face it is hard to imagine sentences more confirmatory than these of the rightness of the widespread anger at the mass media for being incompetent, one sided shills for the Republican Party and George Bush.  This is only the more true because the corruption and incompetence of the Administration and its ideas began to become clear no later than early to mid 2004, long before the 2004 election, so that “journalistic colleagues” of any perception or integrity should have known something was wrong.  Yet, if Krugman truly means what his sentences say, some of these obviously unpercipient and/or venal colleagues were not only arguing against what he was doing, but were in some way pressuring him to stop it -- to stop it even though he has proven right.   So . . . . who were these “journalistic colleagues?”   Were they colleagues at or even editors or the publisher of the Times itself? -- who but editors or the publisher could truly place Krugman “under pressure,” the pressure, one supposes, of possibly losing his column.  If it were editors, or the publisher, this is another nail in the cross of enormous New York Times mistakes that contributed extensively to the fix this country is in, mistakes such as parroting Administration lies about WMDs and refusing to break the story of the NSA spying before the 2004 election, when the story could have changed the result of the election.

            But maybe the pressure Krugman speaks of was only the kind of social pressure that could flow from any colleague.  If that is what it was, were the colleagues who applied pressure some of the conservative imbeciles from the Times op ed page?  If so, did they do this because Krugman was making them look bad, or even stupid, as history now has, so they wanted him to stop his criticisms of positions and people they supported?  Were the colleagues people on other media and, if so, were they trying to stop a dissenting voice, one which opposed them, made them look bad, and has now proven right?

            Whoever and whatever the colleagues and their reasons, it is hard to imagine a more anti-free speech, more dangerous attitude -- and one now proven wrong -- than the one sought to be imposed on Krugman.  The people who did it should figuratively be shot as traitors to their profession and to the freedom of the press that journalists so often, and apparently hypocritically, vaunt.  No doubt Krugman does not want to and will not voluntarily disclose who they were.  That conforms to tenets of confidentiality, and to the American ethos of don’t rat on somebody.  Yet it is nonetheless a shame.  If there really was pressure, and Krugman says there was, those who applied it should be treated as traitors to their profession and to free speech who should be drummed out of respectable journalism -- of which, sad to say, there already is too little left, and of which there would have been even less had their pressure succeeded.*

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