Great Unravelling: Awful Truth

The good opinion of his colleagues does not seem to concern Krugman. His indifference toward journalism's conventional etiquette may even contribute to his success. By speaking rudely about the President and his policies he gave loud voice to what many of his readers had been wishing somebody important would say ever since Bush was created president by Supreme Court fiat. In some measure Krugman helped satisfy a hunger for political opposition, a longing which, not surprisingly, became acute after the election of 2000 turned out to be a nonelection.

Krugman says the alarm went off for him while reading Henry Kissinger's reflections on the French Revolution in his 1957 doctoral dissertation on the age of Metternich and Castlereagh. Reading Kissinger's first three pages "sent chills down my spine," he writes. In them Kissinger "describes the problems confronting a heretofore stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a 'revolutionary power'?-a power that does not accept that system's legitimacy."

...The revolutionary power he had in mind was the France of Robespierre and Napoleon, though he clearly if implicitly drew parallels with the failure of diplomacy to effectively confront totalitarian regimes in the 1930s.... It seems clear to me that one should regard America's right-wing movement ?-which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media?-as a revolutionary power in Kissinger's sense. That is, it is a movement that does not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.

Krugman sees Bush as a stealth revolutionary, a Robespierre in George Bush clothing, relentlessly pushing a revolutionary right-wing agenda, a true radical bent on dismantling America's ancien regime and replacing it with one that is even more ancien?- perhaps the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover model which was scrapped by the New Deal, possibly even the Mark Hanna model. Many a Republican alive today has still not forgiven Teddy Roosevelt for trading in McKinley's good old Hanna for the twentieth century's "progressive" styling. In Kissinger's formulation the revolutionaries confounded the incredulous defenders of the status quo by the force of their determination to "smash the existing framework" and carry their principles to "their ultimate conclusion." The established powers, lulled by a long age of stability and old habits of political thought, were baffled when the revolutionaries turned out to be revolutionary.

Among the privileges enjoyed by rich, fat, superpower America is the power to invent public reality. Politicians and the mass media do much of the inventing for us by telling us stories which purport to unfold a relatively simple reality. As our tribal storytellers, they shape our knowledge and ignorance of the world, not only producing ideas and emotions which influence the way we lead our lives, but also leaving us dangerously unaware of the difference between stories and reality. Walter Cronkite used to sign off his nightly CBS television news show by saying, "And that's the way it is...." I once heard Senator Eugene McCarthy say he always wanted to reply, "No, Walter, that's not the way it is at all."

As for the tax-cut plan which Bush the campaigner presented as a boon to the middle class and one which would easily fit into a sound budget, "It took only a bit of homework to show that both claims were just plain untrue?- but for some reason almost nobody in the media was willing to do that homework."
Krugman was flabbergasted:

I had trouble believing what was happening. Was the presidential candidate of a major political party really lying, blatantly, about the content of his own program? Were the media really letting him get away with it? He was, and they were.

The Bush plan for Social Security reform "was a fraud from the start," he writes. "The mendacity in the administration's Medicare plans was subtler, but equally stark." Few in the media seemed to notice.

In the higher levels of journalism there is a curious uneasiness about dealing candidly with the quite natural relationship between various money interests and government. All politics is to a great extent about who gets the lion's share of the money at a government's disposal, and a public that realized this might be less insouciant about elections than today's American nonvoter.
Journalism is reluctant, however, to make much of an effort to find out who will benefit if a given candidate wins, and who will lose out. Instead of providing this valuable information, the media tend to explain politics in terms of high-sounding ideological piffle about a "conservatism" and a "liberalism" which have very little pertinence to anything of consequence to the voter. The result is to deaden public interest in politics by diverting the mind from the fact that there is real money at stake.
It seems slightly scandalous that Krugman has persisted in noting that the present administration has been moving the lion's share of the money to an array of corporate interests distinguished by the greed of their CEOs, an indifference toward their workers, and boardroom conviction that it is the welfare state that is ruining the country. Krugman has been strident. He has been shrill. He has lowered the dignity of the commentariat. How refreshing.