Krugman Confesses He Didn't Get It

There's a refreshing moment of candor down at the bottom of Paul Krugman's Sunday New York Times entry, when he confesses he didn't see the Tea Party coming:

Right-wing extremism may be the same as it ever was, but it clearly has more adherents now than it did a couple of years ago. Why? It may have a lot to do with a troubled economy.

True, that’s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.

Hoo boy. Not the way it's supposed to work? Paul, have you forgotten the Mussolini Fascists, the Nazis, the Peronistas and all the other instances where economic dislocation has curdled into political poison?

I guess the short answer is that yes, he has forgotten. Which is forgivable--hey, everybody makes mistakes. But I think there may be larger lesson here: it's a bracing reminder that even someone so supple and clever as the Krugster is so bathed in the professional Kool-Aid that he fails (or at least failed) to recognize any scenario beyond the narrow range of Benthamite maximization.

In his column, Krugman goes on to say that there's a recent paper by a couple of economists that confirms his revised vision. Fine, but there is also a library full of literature that his been making the same point for a long time. He might want to start with some of the classics of state-formation, perhaps the work of the late Charles Tilly, summarized and collected in Coercion, Capital and European States (1990). He could certainly learn from studies of modern politics like Robert Paxton''s Anatomy of Fascism (2005). There are some brilliant insights (along with a fair amount of BS) in Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War (2006)--he might want to start with Chapter 5, "The Myth of Self-Interest" ans the Science of Cooperation)"--whose title more or less explains himself. Even closer to home, he could have pulled down his copy of Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and read (at page 9):

I believe that the rising intolerance and incivility and the erodihng gnerosity and openness that have marked important aspects of American society in the recent past have been, in significant part, a consequence of the stagnation of American middle-class living standards during much of the last quarter of the twentieth century. ... If our growth falters, however, or if we merely continue with slower growth that benefits only a minority of our citizens, the deterioration of American society will, I fear, worse once more.

Kudos for your candor, Paul, and congratulations on your new and broader vision. Hang on to what you've taken hold of, and try to make it richer, more nuanced, more meaningful. You'll do yourself a favor and you'll help economics to catch up with the rest of the world.

How Could It Be Otherwise?

So they’re selling their stories, and the Brits are peeved, although perhaps not as peeved as yesterday (link—Kevin Drum offers a wry spin here). Let me offer two “on the one hands, one "ironic footnote," one “on the other hand” and an afterthought--

First: these are volunteers, not so? And isn’t this a core problem with a volunteer army? For at least the last couple of hundred years, we have tried to build our armies on models of national pride and some sort of communal loyalty. A volunteer army says (no matter how hard it tries to say otherwise)—at the end of the day it is all about money. We’ll pay you more than you’re getting at home (and if you are lucky, maybe you get out and go to Blackwater). Meanwhile at home, we make much of the fact that there’s no “shared sense of sacrifice” in this war, aside from “support the troops” tee-shirts. But given the framework, how can we expect “sacrifice” on either side?

[Ironic Footnote: It is interesting that while the military moves towards a cash nexus, some of the most successful “private” corporations are those that can build a team spirit, a sense of group loyalty—“balance sheet patriotism,”you might say.]

Second: But it is not just state v. market—states in their own right are in absolute decline. There is hardly a corner of the world where national identity is as strong now as it was 50 years ago. We meet dual nationals, transnational domestic alliances, Chinese restaurants in Manitoba, Black African priests in Ireland. State v. market is one framing narrative. We could just as well speak of state v. warlord, state v. patriarch or state v. (though oddly, this one has more sinister overtones)—state v. “cosmopolitanism.”

But, But, But, But, But: I risk letting myself be misunderstood here. The casual reader could be forgiven for inferring that this is just one more lament for a lost sense of community (“Young folks nowadays…”). It is and it isn’t. Go back 50 years or so to the apogee of the nation-state, and you will recall that it wasn’t such a pretty picture. For bullying arrogance and mind-numbing conformity, there is nothing like national unity. This sense of community may be hard to do without, but it wasn’t much to live with, either.

And an Afterthought: In the end, I wonder how many of the critics are just annoyed that the kids aren’t sharing the wealth.