Demosophia

What America Does Paul Krugman Know?

Alas, I'm not a person who could have written this article by Bret Stephens. Excerpt:

Of course, the hard fact upon which all these accusations are based is that so far weapons of mass destruction have not been found in Iraq. From that the conclusion is drawn that "Bush lied." It might bear pointing out that it took the US Army five months to discover an ordnance cache in the open desert weighing about 650,000 tons, so maybe it'll take a bit longer to find the elusive WMD. It might also bear pointing out (I'm hardly the first to do so) that Bush's "lies" were pretty much identical to Clinton's statements on the matter.

But never mind. The issue is not WMD, or what the president or prime minister knew, and when, or whether the peace process is advancing or retreating, or whether Iraq is better or worse off than before. The issue is, how is the president to be defeated at the next election? By miring the White House in scandal.

By creating the perception that things aren't going well in Iraq. By creating momentum to bring the boys home. This is guerrilla warfare, and it is the task to which the media jihadis have dedicated themselves.

THE BEST that can be said about these people is that they believe, honestly, that George Bush is the world's greatest menace, against which the Saddam's of the world pale. Hence the Guardian can editorialize (as it did September 16) that "Iran's Fears Are Real," that the ayatollahs' intentions are peaceful and that the only nations engaged in a "dastardly plot" are "located in the West." Hence development guru Jeff Sachs can allege that the $20 billion Bush wants to earmark for Iraqi reconstruction is a racist plot because Africans are worthier recipients of US largesse. Hence Paul Krugman can opine, in our post-September 11 world, that "The real threat isn't some terrorists who can kill a few people now... but the internal challenge from very powerful domestic political forces who want to do away with America as I know it."

I couldn't have written that because I'm too fascinated by why the Paul Krugmans and Maureen Dowds and Jonathan Schells are so rabidly anti-American. Because there was a time when I thought Schell was the pinnacle of courageous and intelligent insight, and I was foolishly convinced that he was genuinely motivated by liberal values. So it's difficult for me to speculate about what has gotten into them. But I think the crux of the matter may have to do with the America that Krugman knows, because if it's the same America that Louis Hartz knew it will break Krugman's heart, as it broke Hartz's. And I suspect it is the same America.

Louis Hartz proposed a theory about why the US has never had a viable socialist movement, which was part of a broader theory about "settler societies" in general. It was called the "theory of the cultural fragment," and the basic idea was that during the era of colonialism an established non-democratic culture creates a group of discontents who seek the freedom to live life according to their own values by breaking away to establish their own society in a colony of the mother country. In other words the "chip off the old block" tended to me more like the chip than the block, in important respects. And for the US this "fragment" of England was composed of a remnant of Oliver Protector's middle class revolutionaries, imbued with Scottish/Calvinist values. And absent the baggage they had had to put up with in England, they developed a society whose foundational values were revolutionary and liberal. And so Hartz's surprising conclusion was that the US had no socialist movement, because it had no conservatist dead weight that it had to fight against. Anyone with an itch for economic success had no established elite holding a lid on their advancement. And to put it in the simplest terms, the US had no socialist movement because it already embodied the crux of socialism: equal opportunity for individual success. Friederich Engels came to much the same conclusion.

So, in light of that, it isn't surprising that Krugman might be pining for an America that was a bit more "troubled" by class angst, and that had a proper Beast against which to mount a struggle. And, well, there was a time when America had such a Beast. Because there was always a group that had conspicuously been omitted from the promise, and who knew the Beast that Europeans knew with great familiarity. This was the same group that had been the intelligent property of the founders themselves.

So the America that animates Krugman and Dowd and Schell is the America of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. It is the America where one could be "liberal" and collectivist at the same time, without ambivalence. It was the America inspired by the realization of a discontinuity between its ideals and its practice; the America seen by the Swede, Gunnar Myrdal, in his classic work: An American Dilemma. So Krugman is simply nostalgic for that convergence between his youthful collectivist impulses and the moral certitude of being on the "right side" of history. And if George Bush is successful, it means that any lingering doubts about whether that era is over must be dispelled. It means that only half of the aspirations of that era can be realized. The collectivist dream was not really convergent with the dream of racial equality after all. Essentially it means that the black population of America will inevitably join the white population in being more equal than the socialist promise could ever hope to make them. And more importantly, perhaps, it means that all those other nations that were the refuge of the Beast, and that could therefore potentially serve as the new launchpad for the Revolution, will see the Beast harried and slain by the same creature that blocked the advance of socialism in America. It is therefore somewhat natural for Krugman to side with the Beast. It isn't that he loves it. In truth, he doesn't even know it. Not even in his dreams. It's that he simply can't tolerate the notion of the world becoming like America.

Posted by Demosophist at October 7, 2003 01:29 PM | TrackBack