The Coming Political War

Stanford historian David Kennedy has written for the New York Times what Paul Krugman [pictured]’s friends call a “scathing review" (see here) of Krugman’s latest book—Conscience of a Liberal. Krugman’s title means that without apparent irony, he sets out to be the liberal answer to Berry Goldwater, who wrote Conscience of a Conservative in 1960, then used the book to run for president in 1964 in a campaign that birthed the political Ronald Reagan.

Kennedy makes these points about Krugman’s creed:

 the nation suffered through a “Long Gilded Age” of let-’er-rip, dog-eat-dog capitalism until the New Deal created a new social order characterized by income-leveling taxes, job security, strong labor unions, a prosperous middle class, bipartisan solidarity and general social bliss: a post-World War II “paradise lost.”

 where the orthodox see market miracles, Krugman sees many a market failure. And where they detect the invisible hand, he finds manipulation by the richest Americans to rig the game in their favor.

 the malefactors of megawealth have triumphed. Chief executives who typically earned 30 times more than their average employee in the 1970s now take home more than 300 times as much, and “have become rich enough to buy themselves a party”.

 “radicals of the right” have spawned a toxic level of partisanship. [Goldwater, Reagan, and company] set out in the 1960s to exploit racial tensions, national security anxieties and volatile value-laden matters like abortion, school prayer and gay rights “to change the subject away from bread and butter issues.” By century’s end they had managed “a second Gilded Age” in which inequality is on the rise and the New Deal is in danger of being dismantled.

 The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key. “Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican.”

Kennedy adds that:

For this dismal state of affairs the Democratic Party is held . . . blameless. Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security.

As Krugman sees it, the modern Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. “There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship.” No two to tango for him. . .

Krugman astonishingly concludes by repudiating the chimera of “bipartisan compromise” and declaring that “to be a progressive, then, means being a partisan. . . Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy.”