Paul Krugman's Friday column, from which the title of this post is taken, spoke to President Obama's call for a more civilized discourse in his well-received remarks at the memorial for the victims of the Tucson shootings Wednesday evening. Krugman's column can be found at:
the New York Times online under the Opinion section for Friday, Jan 14th. The gist of Professor Krugman's remarks was to take issue with those who, like Morris Fiorina in his widely read volume Culture War?, argue that the popular view that we are a nation deeply divided and that the sharp partisan polarization is a reflection of those deep difference is, on close scrutiny, wrong-headed. Instead, says Fiorina, we are a "closely divided, not deeply divided" nation: the differences between red and blue states are such that we will have closely contested elections into the near future, but the partisan differences between members of the "political class" do not extend deeply into the population. Data supporting this skeptical view of the political divide and its depth are taken from surveys on issues running the gamut from guns, gays, and abortion to a host of other policy issues. As it happens, there are no aggregate differences in the opinions of voters from red and blue states on these matters. Consequently, the "culture war" argument that Krugman and others embrace is a mythical product of a public-affairs media that pays many of its "commentators" to rip apart partisan opponents.
For Krugman, the polarized political rhetoric has far deeper roots. After all, Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck would not pull in big salaries without harvesting large audiences that allow their shows' sponsors to sell advertisements at a premium. In the Krugman analysis, the deepest root for the climate of polarization is the recent history of the Republican Party. Prior to the Reagan Presidency, Republicans accepted the realities of the "mixed economy" that produced in the wake of the New Deal and Great Society an American version of the welfare state. Though quite different than the welfare states of Western Europe, it provided a safety net and entitlement programs that were funded, without major attacks on their legitimacy, by a tax system that was progressive in principle and practice. Now, says Krugman, a Republican Party has arisen that challenges the legitimacy of the welfare state on moral grounds, claiming in effect that it is based on theft: those who are winners in the capitalist game are expected to pay for the welfare benefits of those who are losers. Hence the ugliness of the so-called health care reform debate of last year where Republicans unanimously opposed a reform measure that, less than twenty years earlier, they embraced when Bill Clinton's effort at reform crashed.
Beneath the surface manifestation of the new Republican Party is an altogether different kind of morality than the one that persisted through Democratic and Republican Administrations alike following FDR and going through the 1970s. According to Krugman, this morality is essentially one of "I've gone mine and I deserve it; it's immoral to punish me for my hard-won success by taxing me more heavily than the lazy, the losers, the irresponsible and subsidizing their very slothfulness in the process." Needless to say, this is a deeply-felt belief--witness the inability of Obama to budge Republican leaders on allowing the "Bush tax cuts" to elapse on the upper 2% of incomes in the US. For Krugman, the depth of this belief is such that anyone who sees things differently -- e.g., our life chances in terms of income are affected more than by ability and effort alone -- are not only wrong, they are immoral. Hence the prospects of civil conversation, let alone policy compromise, are nil--notwithstanding the elegance of Obama's call to reconciliation so as to honor young Christina-Taylor Green's pride in her democracy, avidly expressed before her life was taken by a madman in Tucson.
For 460-ites, I draw attention to this issue -- along with the aforementioned question, Why do Democrats compromise when Republicans won't? -- as a personal puzzle that I seek your wisdom on -- if not answers, suggestions for how one would push the envelope research-wise to provide evidence on these matters. In short, how can we possibly pursue such questions in the yet to be defined portion of this semester's class?
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I think Democrats compromise because they tend to represent new ideas that are not either proven or just have not been put in to place which leads to skepticism surrounding their initiatives (healthcare). Republicans usually strive to maintain institutions that have long been established, and although their ideas may not be correct, the fact that they have been around for some time aids in their legitimacy (gun rights).
ReplyDeleteAlso, Democrats tend to represent the have nots of society, whereas society's haves are in the Republicans corner. I think it is easier for the Democrats to compromise when they are representing those with less because they have less to lose than those on the other side of the argument. This leads to Republicans generating a more passionate and essentially louder coalition because they are defending themselves against what they see as an offensive attack on their well-being (higher taxes).
It seems a lot easier to pack it in when one is on the offensive and settle for something less (war: compromise, football: field goal instead of touchdown) because the thought is "at least something came out of it."
Right now politics is a zero-sum game where one wins and one loses with no middle ground. Democrats will continue to compromise in this sort of competition until they can demonstrate that their agenda has something to offer everyone involved.
World War II demonstrated the effectiveness the US could experience with everyone working together (women, minorities, not just white men) and it will take a similar event for Democrats to bust the compromise monkey off their back.
I believe a Democrat-led movement to improve the education system in this country would be a step in the right direction. It is something everyone can agree on to a certain extent (at least more than war, healthcare, and unfortunately even poverty) and provide an opponent to compete against (China, Europe, the rest of the developed world at this point). This would create an environment of competition, one where compromises are not acceptable because doing so only endangers falling behind the opponent. Republicans have a common opponent when it comes to their agenda (lazy, hippie liberals). Democrats do not, but by creating a universal opponent, compromising won't be an option for the Democrats anymore.
Welcome back to Obamadogs, Mr. Muldoon!
ReplyDeleteYour comments make a lot of sense on why Dems compromise but Reps won't, though I'd quibble with the point about tradition's import with the Reagan/Bush43 tax policy. And as the Krugman column argues forcefully, the "I've got mine" folks who see the welfare state as theft are a relatively recent development in the Republican party. In some ways, in fact, it really didn't gather force until Obama's 2008 victory (and the near total collapse of the economy that coincided with that election). The GOP didn't demonstrate a unified opposition to big deficits in the post-9/11 world. They had big majorities in both houses and didn't complain about fighting two wars while cutting taxes -- making it necessary to borrow from China and Saudi Arabia to run those wars and fund those tax cuts. The "traditional" Republicans were deficit hawks. Eisenhower sought to balance the budget not by tax cuts on the high end (the top marginal rate was 91%), but by slashing defense spending and warning of the Military-Industrial Complex. Those kinds of Republicans, so-called "moderate Republicans", basically disapppeared from the face of the earth in 2008. The few who survived the Obama tsunami were defeated by Tea Party types in primaries prior to 2010 or they pulled a McCain/Grassley and morphed to the right for their survival.
Otherwise, you make some good points. As ostensible patrons of the poor, Democrats may have less to defend -- or fewer resources to stiffen their resolve -- than do Republicans. But isn't it important to note that Obama and many Democrats have a donor base that is not exactly made up of middle-class or poor people. Until 2009, the financial industry -- especially the Big Banks that nearly totalled our economy -- favored Democrats over Republicans. That only changed when Congress went forward with the (very weak) financial regulation bill. Your point is well-taken though in a post-Citizens United world.
At the same time, it seems to me that we have plenty of evidence from recent history that the Republican view -- as expressed in the fiscal policies of Reagan and both Bushes -- of how the economy best functions is flat wrong. The last time the wealthy had tax rates that were not even half the marginal top rates under Eisenhower, i.e., when Clinton barely scaped together enough votes to push the top rate to 39.6%, the GDP exploded, producing 22 million jobs, and three consecutive years of federal budget surpluses. In addition, the absolute growth in income of the top 2% meant that more money was made by the rich with the higher than the lower rates. In short, Democrats needn't capitulate or compromise before negotiating when the weight of evidence seems to favor their ideas over the "I've got mine" crowd.
Isn't it a bit of an insult to the general public that the President appears not to want to wage a good-faith argument based on the marketplace of ideas and their performance in the realm of public policy?
It seems clear that much of the present day distaste with political operations comes from the media. It seems that many politicians lavish in the arguments and the quarreling in order to build up their base of voters in order to get reelected. It is possibly the case currently that Republicans in Congress refuse to compromise because they have a large base of supporters, indoctrinated by Conservative media, who will stand behind them in their opposition to Democrats in Congress.
ReplyDeleteIt is also confusing that there are not more policies that all members in Congress have a common duty to support. Things including the healthcare reform bill, and environmental reform (including in the automotive industry to reduce our dependence on foreign oil). It is also hard for me to understand why members of Congress who grew up in poor working class families, such as Speaker Boehner, are not as willing to support Americans in the same situation that they rose out of.
It seems that as long as corporations and big money are involved in the election process of politicians, the views of the people will not be heard over the wants and needs of the money-holders.
Trevor's sense of strangeness toward people like Boehner is one I share. You'd likely think, in that situation -- or so it seems to me -- that Mr. Boehner would realize that the environment he grew up in was one where government intervened often and openly to enhance educational opportunites for the less-well-off children in the country. But Mr. Boehner's view, like many if not most Americans who come from modest roots to positions of power and wealth is to credit himself with the full responsibility for his success. Greasing the flagpole for those who come later seems, unfortunately, more likely than the reaction Trevor and I would seem as natural. How and why is that? It's without question at the root of the "I've got mine" crowd's morality that Krugman sees as the core of the "new" Republican party. To a degree, it's necessary in a capitalist economy to foster the idea that we as individuals have the greatest influence on our life chances, that viewing the world as a crapshoot and not working one's hardest -- is a problem. If it's widely accepted, and some degree of inequality isn't taken as inevitable and appropriate, then we'd not have "fair play" in which the just rewards of hardworking and lazy folks are deservedly very different. But Krugman's claim is that this has gone way past the point of commonsense: now, bond traders who make millions are taxed at 15% while teachers pay more than twice that amount for the bulk of their income taxes from a far smaller total. How and why is this so extreme at a point in time when we have so many victims of an economic system that has made a mockery of both "fair play" and "fair shares"?
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