Michael Tomasky reviews Paul Krugman's book. This is
a small part of a much longer review appearing in the New York Review of Books:
The Partisan, by Michael
Tomasky, NY Review of Books - Review of Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a
Liberal": ...Many liberals would name Paul Krugman of The New York Times
as perhaps the most consistent and courageous—and unapologetic—liberal partisan
in American journalism. He has made his perspective on the Bush administration
and the contemporary right, and on the need to see politics as a battle,
manifestly clear in column after incendiary column. ...
But the pre-Bush Krugman was a quite different person. He was in those days
far more prominently an economist than a polemicist... As such, he was not much
involved in partisan politics. He was always a liberal, to be sure, and highly
critical of supply-side economics. But he also disparaged economists to his
left, especially opponents of free trade... In his 1994 book, Peddling
Prosperity, Krugman had harsh words for liberal economists such as Robert
Reich and Lester Thurow, who advocated selective protection from foreign
competition, particularly from countries in which poor workers were harshly
exploited. ... If you were a radical economist in those days, or a labor
movement intellectual, or a left-leaning social scientist, chances are you
weren't a big fan of Paul Krugman. ...
Krugman started writing in the Times on January 2, 2000. He made a
point of challenging antiglobalization activists in his very first column. ...
During that election year, he regularly and strongly criticized George W. Bush's
tax-cut proposal and his opaque statements about Social Security. But he limited
his critiques to economic policy and, compared to his Op-Ed-page colleagues,
didn't write about politics all that often...
About Bush v. Gore, he had little to say. After Bush took
office, he savaged the administration's regressive tax cuts. But it wasn't
really until the fall of 2002, as the marketing of the Iraq war began in
earnest, that he began broadening his criticism beyond economics to the war and
the threats to civil liberties, extending his critique to the larger
conservative movement and its modus operandi, and discussing the mainstream
press's failure to report what was really going on right in front of their
noses. It was around then that Krugman began producing with regularity the kinds
of columns that whiz their way around the liberal blogosphere. ...
So Krugman came a bit late to the political trenches—and
perhaps a bit reluctantly. Just as Arnold Schoenberg said of himself, when asked
by a stranger if he was indeed the controversial composer, that "nobody wanted
to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me," so I suspect Krugman might say
that virtually no one on the leading Op-Ed pages was saying the things that so
obviously needed to be said as the Iraq war approached, so he let it be himself
who said them.
And now, after years of twice-weekly deadlines, he appears to have decided
that there's no turning back: The Conscience of a Liberal, with its title
so clearly aping and answering Barry Goldwater's from forty-seven years ago,
represents Krugman's fullest embrace of his polemicist identity. ...
[T]he intensity of his discussion ... suggests something about the ways he
has moved, in the last fifteen or so years, from being a center-left scholar to
being a liberal polemicist. Those may seem like different identities. But
perhaps also there is a consistency at work here. From what I have read of his
economic writings, they are not unlike his columns, or his attacks on Reagan and
the National Review in his book, in the sense that persuasion of people
with very different views is at best of secondary interest to him. What is of
interest to him is describing things as he believes they are.
In Washington, this earns one the epithet—as Washington prefers to think of
it—"partisan." But too many people who are also granted valuable journalistic
space spent the early Bush years in denial about the evidence that was
accumulating right before their eyes, whether about official lies, or executive
overreach, or rampant class warfare... Mildly deploring some of these excesses
while accepting others is what is meant by bipartisanship today, and Krugman is
right to have none of it. As a result he has left us a much more accurate record
of the Bush years than, say, The Washington Post's David S. Broder, or
some of his more celebrated New York Times colleagues...
And he has paid a price for "describing things as he believes they are" and not backing down. Here's
Brad DeLong:
I guess it started, I think, with that extremely strange and
not-very-analytical Svengali of the Bush Social Security reform plan, Peter
Ferrara, ... back in 2001 ... denounced
..the highly irascible Paul Krugman...
That was, I think, the start of a very peculiar meme: a piling-on of critics
of Bush--especially of Paul Krugman--whose sole criticism was that he was
"shrill." The critique was neither that he was a bad economist, nor that his
accusations that the Bush administration was lying about a whole bunch of stuff
were incorrect... So if you wanted to attack Krugman, but could not attack him
because his analytics were right, and could not attack him because his
accusations of Bush administration dishonesty were correct, what can you do?
Well, a bunch of right-wingers led, IIRC, by Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan
found a way.
Here's Kaus:
"Comparative Advantage" by Nicholas Confessore: "[Krugman] is obviously a
very smart guy, basically liberal, with complicated views, who once recognized
when his own side was wrong. And at some point he switched and became someone
who only sees what's wrong with the other side, in fairly crude terms," says
Mickey Kaus. "The Bush tax cut is based on lies. But it's not enough to
criticize a policy to say that it's based on lies. You have to say whether it's
good or bad for the country."
(Never mind, of course, that Paul always spent a lot of time, space,
wordcount, energy, and breath criticizing the substance of Bush's idiot
policies. Yes, they were bad for the country--and Paul said why.)
And here's Sullivan:
www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: I have long found Paul Krugman an
insufferably pompous, shrill, Bush-bashing pseudo-populist...
The accusation--the only line of critique--is that Paul "only sees what's
wrong with the other side, in fairly crude terms," or--in shorthand--is
"shrill."
God alone knows why they thought this line of attack would do anything other
than shred their own reputations. God knows why others took up this line of
attack. But take off it did, both as a narrowly-focused attempt to degrade the
reputation of Paul Krugman, and as a broader attempt to marginalize all who
pointed out that the policies of the Bush administration were (a) stupid, and
(b) justified by lies, and it took off both among the yahoos of the right and
also among the denizens of the center-left.
Why did it take off? I think the reasons were well laid out by Nick
Confessore:
"Comparative Advantage" by Nicholas Confessore: On balance, Krugman's record
stands up pretty well. On the topics he writes about most often and most
angrily--tax cuts, Social Security, and the budget--his record is nearly
perfect. "The reason he's gotten under the White House's skin so much," says
Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton
administration, "is that he's right. None of it is rocket science."
So if dismantling the facade of lies around, say, Bush's tax cut is so easy
to do--and makes you the most talked-about newspaper writer in the country--why
don't any other reporters or columnists do it themselves? Because ... Washington
journalists ... usually don't call a spade a spade, unless the lie is small or
something personal. When it comes to big policy disagreements, most reporters
prefer a he-said, she-said approach--and any policy with a white paper or press
release behind it is presumed to be plausible and sincere, no matter how
farfetched or deceptive it may be.
Similarly, among pundits of the broad center-left, it's considered gauche to
criticize the right too persistently, no matter the merits of one's argument.
...
This seemed to hit the nail on the head: it was (and is) considered impolite
to take what the Bush administration said about the rationales for its policies
seriously. Consider the Washington Post's Richard Cohen,
sneering on September 16, 2004 at those who took Bush's impact on the country
seriously:
I was only briefly enamored of George W. Bush... who went to war in Iraq for
stated reasons that turned out to be baseless... neoconservative foreign policy
agenda in which violence plays too prominent and casual a role.... chilled by
assertions of near-royal power... choice of judges, his energy policy, his
unilateralism or the manner in which he has intruded religion into politics....
I nevertheless cannot bring myself to hate Bush.... In fact, Bush haters go so
far they wind up adding a dash of red to my blue...[1]
In this context, given that criticisms of George W. Bush and the malevolence,
mendacity, incompetence and disconnection from reality of him and his
administration are--no matter how sound their analytics or how true their
factual claims--going to be dismissed by many as impolite and "shrill"...
Somebody needed to say the things Paul Krugman said. But I hear this so much - about the shrillness, about not doing economics anymore (which isn't true - e.g. for just one recent example, who do you think started the meme "non-bank bank run" in the recent financial crisis?), about how he needs more space to explain himself in more detail, how what he will say is predictable, he'll just bash Bush no matter the policy, etc., etc.
I don't have any substantive disagreements with Brad's take on this but I'm still not sure I fully understand it.
Maybe you can help me see this better. So here's the question. If you agree with Krugman's critics, even to a small degree, or even if you don't, how could he have been more effective? In his shoes, how would you have communicated the points he needed to make in a way that would have had more impact? I'm not convinced there is such an alternative path, but I'm curious to hear other thoughts.
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