A bunch of correspondents have said that I should read Andrew Sullivan's denunciation of Bush Republicanism:
www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: BUSH REPUBLICANS: Kate O'Beirne has an interesting follow-up to her previous complaint about the lack of "Bush Republicans" in the New York Convention line-up. But what is a "Bush Republican"? I think it has to be a combination of the social policy of the religious right (the FMA, bans on embryo research, government support for religious charities, etc), the fiscal policy of the Keynesian left (massive new domestic spending combined with "deficits don't matter"), and the foreign policy of liberal moralism (democratization as a policy in the Middle East). So it's not surprising, is it, that there aren't many principled "Bush Republicans." Again, the GOP crib sheet on Edwards is interesting in this respect. He gets zinged, for example, for opposing the new Medicare entitlement. So how many Republicans positively believe in creating a new and fantastically expensive entitlement for the wealthiest segment in American society? I don't mean defensively explain it as unavoidable. I mean positively endorse it as an element in their conservative philosophy. The sad truth is that if Bush Republicanism exists, it's one of the most ramshackle distillations of political expediency ever tarted up as an "ism". The only compelling conservative message that Bush can use to appeal to the country as a whole is that he stands between us and a new wave of terror. So his campaign will have to be based in fear. I'm not sure that, in America, that works very well. But we'll see.
First, I am *tired* of people who denounce John Maynard Keynes without knowing anything about him or his theories: whether its Whittaker Chambers saying that he sees no difference between Keynes and Marx, or Andrew Sullivan attributing the see-no-evil permanent-deficit policies of Reagan and Bush to a guy who knew better than anyone just why it was important for the government to balance its books in the long run--that just makes me annoyed. (I see that Matthew Yglesias is already on the case.)
Second, isn't it time for a big fat apology from Andrew Sullivan to Paul Krugman. The first mention of George W. Bush I find Paul Krugman making in the New York TImes comes on February 2, 2000:
The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page: [M]y subject is a numbers issue: how big a tax cut can a presidential candidate responsibly offer?... If you have been reading the headlines, you probably think that the answer is, quite a lot... that the budget can easily accommodate even the $1.3 trillion in tax cuts being proposed by George W. Bush.... Alas, that $1.9 trillion [ten-year surplus] estimate was... based on the assumption... [of] a large reduction in [discretionary] real spending... [and] an even bigger cut in real spending per person. In other words, that big surplus number is based on the assumption of a drastic, even draconian reduction in government services....
How much is really on the table [for tax cuts]? I've done my own back-of-the-spreadsheet calculation of how the C.B.O.'s surplus projection would change if real spending grew with population; the adjustment brings the total down to around $400 billion... they must have in mind a sharp scaling back of government programs. But that, of course, is not at all what the candidate's rhetoric suggests. He seems to be saying that he only wants to stop those Washington politicians from initiating grandiose new spending schemes. There is little hint that his "compassionate conservatism" can be financed only if the government sharply cuts back on what it is doing now.
If you ask me, it's time he had a little chat with his numbers guys.
Wasn't Paul 200% right? And isn't Andrew Sullivan, with his "one of the most ramshackle distillations of political expediency" as shrill as Paul ever was? Does Sullivan have a beef with Krugman other than the unforgivable fact that Paul was right all along?
Posted by DeLong at July 8, 2004 02:23 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postAndrew long ago wrote off consistency as a hobgoblin of small minds; this once interesting and iconoclastic thinker and writer now spends all his time writing showy sentences without caring whether he contradicts himself, or knows what he's talking about, or makes any sense at all....
Posted by: howard on July 8, 2004 02:41 PMGo Brad!
PS, loved the bagel story.
I'd rather have Sullivan come to his senses and admit these things than to have him be a shameless apologist for all things Bush,the way that most of the combat sophists at NRO are. It is better to be "inconsistent" than persistently ignorant.
Anyone read his indictment of Bush after the Russert interview? It was particularly vicious, and raised him a few ranks in my opinion. I wish I had the link, as it is definitely worth the read.
Posted by: Abhishiktananda on July 8, 2004 02:56 PMabhishiktananda, because andrew writes a swell sentence, i'm happy when he says something i agree with, but the fact is, it's random chance. The noise-to-signal ratio remains much too high with him, regardless of the power of his moments of accurate insight....
Posted by: howard on July 8, 2004 03:44 PMHoward, I'm not saying that I like the guy, just that he has at least said some things to make me think he is not a complete shill, that's all.
I just figure we ought to at least give these fellas credit when they show some backbone (a la Bruce Bartlett the other day.)
Posted by: Abhishiktananda on July 8, 2004 04:05 PMabhishiktananda, i agree with your premise in general; it's just that andrew has said so many hateful things in his guise as a right-winger that i'm not loaded with sympathy for him.
now bruce bartlett, on the other hand, is my idea of an honest conservative, and he's welcome any time....
Posted by: howard on July 8, 2004 04:36 PMBeing a Bush Republican means having "the social policy of the religious right...the fiscal policy of the Keynesian left...and the foreign policy of liberal moralism"? If that's true, then isn't Bush Republicanism strikingly similar to--oh, I don't know, maybe...JIMMY CARTER LIBERALISM?
No wonder you won't see many of them at the GOP convention...
Posted by: Adam on July 8, 2004 05:01 PMBrad, of course you're right about what Keynes was and wasn't, but what is commonly called Keynesianism these days shows about as much resemblance to the real thing as supply-side does to 1970s freshwater macro or Coke II to the original. At least Friedman and Lucas's names haven't been dragged through the mud this way. We really do need a new name for the vulgar Keynesianism that has become Republican orthodoxy.
Posted by: Chris on July 8, 2004 05:05 PMEven this seeming denunciation of Bush is filled with complete idiocy. Bush has a "foreign policy of liberal moralism? Republicans may not be in favor of entitlements for the wealthy? Bush --may-- use fear, and it --may-- be effective?
Sullivan is a shallow, naive, ignorant hack.
Posted by: EH on July 8, 2004 05:13 PMWe appear to be observing a political movement in necrosis.
The individual fallout happens continuously to everybody, so you have to be on guard. It's the failure of not constantly renewing your own critical thinking. If you don't adopt a continuously-investigative strategy, particularly towards your own premises, you will build up an attitude where you cannot admit you are wrong.
Thus, you always get blinded.
An attitude is an intellectual thing, buttressing a mood or emotion. Your little intellectual successes aggrandize themselves. The fillips accrete like shells, into a crust. The Barnacle Theory of Personality.
Marry this mechanism to a political movement, and we will always see the likes of the present example... People in opposition to you must be mere partisans, trying to defeat your way of seeing! Failures on your own side must not be truehearts: “there aren’t many principled Bush Republicans”!!
In recent decades the Right resurged, in opposition to the Left before it. They forged a partly-phony intellectual framework (supply-side economics, the triumph of self-interest, the primacy of privatization--among a few other half-truths) to justify their policies, and confound the bedazzled. As always, reality is messier, and it always catches up.
For the cheerleaders, the quick dissolution has left them gasping, without a safe harbor. Their intellectual framework is full of holes. Proper health will mean hard intellectual study, which takes real time and effort. And all in the same moment that the underlying emotion, gladness in righteousness--now in flight on its own!--will be betrayed.
We all go through it.
Posted by: Lee A. on July 8, 2004 05:30 PMCome now, Prof, you know as well as we do that Mr. Sullivan doesn't do The Maths so good.
Posted by: asdf on July 8, 2004 06:59 PM
I think that Sullivan and Hitchens are both bright, fluent, self-promoting opportunists, and thus can never be trusted. I think that they're both trying to bail on Dubya. Hitchens has always kept his left option open.
Maybe I'm prejudiced against Brits.
Posted by: zizka / John Emerson on July 8, 2004 07:40 PMNot to mention the whole rhetorical device of "now that I think Bush republicanism is bad, anything about it that I can't blame on the religious right, I'll blame on liberalism". Hence Bush's massive deficits are a "left-wing" policy (despite the inconvenient facts of the past five administrations where the Republicans created the deficits and the Democrats got rid of them), and neoconservative peace-through-imperialism is a "liberal" policy despite the neocons having had to attach themselves to the Republican party precisely because actual liberals overwhelmingly supported the Clinton-era "peace-through-multilaterialism" policy.
You don't have to do something intellectually "demanding", like actually getting an introductory macroeconomics knowledge of Keynsian policy, to see the ridiculousness of this position.
Sullivan: "the fiscal policy of the Keynesian left...."
BDL: "I am *tired* of people who denounce John Maynard Keynes without knowing anything about him or his theories...."
Sullivan is, at least in this instance, trying to argue that Bush's policies are not consistent with conservative principles, perhaps as much or more than he is trying to attack them. And his reference to a "Keynesian left" surely is meant to support the idea those who favor expansionary fiscal policy for its own sake (for its benefit to Labor, perhaps?) are better described as "liberal" and not "conservative." I find it hard to believe that a single idea of JMK's was anywhere near his mind when he wrote that.
Posted by: Joe Mealyus on July 8, 2004 11:24 PMJoe Mealyus: How would a long-term fiscal stimulus (which is what Bush43 policy is) benefit labor? Less investment means lower capital to labor ratios and therefore less real wage growth? Certainly Keynes understood this as does economists both 'conservative' and 'liberal'. Alas, Sullivan does not comprehend what Keynes and 'liberal' economists are saying.
Posted by: Harold McClure on July 9, 2004 06:28 AMTo be fair, many Bushies in 2000 believed that the Compassionate Conservative was going to be used as a rhetorical device to position conservative solutions in opposition to the more oft heard "I'll take any amount of money from that guy over there, and give it to YOU, voter!" heard from the left. The 'going off the deep end' you see these days has much to do with the realization that OMG, he actually signed off on a titanic new entitlement program and he is throwing federal money at education like nobody's business. He isn't positioning conservative ideas, he is acting like a liberal.
If you are a liberal, you should really be impressed with what he has done for you. The discussion is now about the amount, not the existence, of prescription drug coverage. The only thing you don't like is the tax cut. Bear in mind that to fund all the goodies you want, you WOULD be creating disincenctives on the supply side through high taxes on investment, and one thing we do know about Keynesian demand stimulus is that it hasn't done crap for Japan. At the end of the day, I don't know that anything would look better with high taxes and high spending as opposed to large deficits and high spending.
If I could find someone, ANYONE would would stop spending, which is the real problem, I'd vote for them. As it is, I plan on sitting home and crying on election day ...
BTW:
Your pal Krugman today argues that Kerry will revoke the tax cuts, but spend more. Will you still be as upset if Krugman is right?
Link from Tyler Cowen: http://marginalrevolution.blogs.com/
Posted by: Jason Ligon on July 9, 2004 07:33 AM
Harold McClure: "Joe Mealyus: How would a long-term fiscal stimulus (which is what Bush43 policy is) benefit labor? Less investment means lower capital to labor ratios and therefore less real wage growth?"
I'm not saying it benefits labor. I'm saying (okay, guessing) Sullivan is assigning the term "Keynesian left" to precisely those (maybe they are not economists, maybe they are just "folks") who disbelieve your formulation: when they learn from basic Macro that rising wages are a bad (i.e. inflationary) thing that must be nipped in the bud, they see in this (and perhaps in many other policy formulations) a preference for the interests of Capital over those of Labor.
HM: "Alas, Sullivan does not comprehend what Keynes and 'liberal' economists are saying."
But Sullivan probably has an excellent grasp of Washington policy debates/natterings over the last 20 years, which is a completely different thing.
Whether or not Sullivan understands Keynes or any other liberal economist, his main purpose in using the term "Keynesian left" was to (tersely)differentiate Bush's policies from conservative or Republican ones. "Keynesian left" is pretty vague, and maybe it could be argued that a better formulation might have been "Keynesian crank left," but it's hard to describe a preference for "long-term fiscal stimulus" as reflecting any right-wing philosophy, isn't it?
Keynesian Left = "strawman"
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Posted by: Paul G. Brown on July 9, 2004 01:19 PMAlas, that $1.9 trillion [ten-year surplus] estimate was... based on the assumption... [of] a large reduction in [discretionary] real spending... [and] an even bigger cut in real spending per person. In other words, that big surplus number is based on the assumption of a drastic, even draconian reduction in government services....
In other words, any Clinton era 'balanced budget' was an illusion based on a deliberately falsified projection.
Too bad Krugman seem to have forgotten what he wrote...
Posted by: Svott on July 9, 2004 06:29 PM4901 You can buy viagra from this site :http://www.ed.greatnow.com
Posted by: Viagra on August 7, 2004 11:59 PM7907 Why is Texas holdem so darn popular all the sudden?
http://www.texas-holdem.greatnow.com
360 ok you can play online poker at this address : http://www.play-online-poker.greatnow.com
Posted by: online poker on August 10, 2004 12:31 PM7659 Get your online poker fix at http://www.onlinepoker-dot.com
Posted by: poker on August 15, 2004 04:59 PM2005 black jack is hot hot hot! get your blackjack at http://www.blackjack-dot.com
Posted by: blackjack on August 16, 2004 08:21 PM