December 30, 2017
Paul Krugman: Evangelist of Political Salvation
By Gary North
GaryNorth.com
Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics. He is also the resident economist for The New York Times.
In his latest article, he laments the power of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. He tries to offer eschatological hope. He assures his readers that there is hope politically because the Democrats may eventually come back into power. But this is only hope, he says. The United States of America is on the path to becoming a Third World tyranny. He actually believes this.
I want to stress this fact: he is as sound a political analyst as he is a sound economist.
The obvious silliness of all this should be apparent to anybody who knows about bipartisan American politics since approximately 1953. There has been a bipartisan American foreign policy. There has certainly been a bipartisan policy with respect to Social Security and Medicare. There has been a bipartisan policy with respect to the federal deficit. On anything that has mattered, bipartisan politics has been dominant. On peripheral issues, such as ObamaCare, Congress has voted along party lines, but even that division was short-lived. There were sufficient numbers of Republicans in the Senate who voted with the Democrats this year to save ObamaCare. The Republicans’ 100% opposition was political posturing in 2010.
Any liberal who looks at what Obama accomplished ought to abandon his faith in politics. Obama had a majority in both houses of Congress, early 2009 to early 2011, yet all he had to show for it was ObamaCare. I predicted this from the day he was elected. I said that Nancy Pelosi would be the ramrod for his policies. On the day he was elected, I predicted that he would be cautious, and would do his best to avoid political confrontation. This is exactly what he did for eight years. He did not create a national health plan. ObamaCare is a gigantic boondoggle for the health-insurance industry. Yet even that has backfired, as critics predicted. Healthcare insurers are bailing out every year. In 2019, when the new tax law goes into effect, individuals will not be forced to pay a fine to the federal government for failing to purchase healthcare insurance. With respect to individual purchases, this is going to undermine the whole program. But there wasn’t much of a program to undermine.
Krugman ignores all of this. He really thinks that national politics will make a big difference. He really thinks that America’s future is on the line. He really thinks that there is a serious possibility that America will become a tyranny along the lines of Turkey. He writes:
Many of us came into 2017 expecting the worst. And in many ways, the worst is what we got.
Donald Trump has been every bit as horrible as one might have expected; he continues, day after day, to prove himself utterly unfit for office, morally and intellectually. And the Republican Party — including so-called moderates — turns out, if anything, to be even worse than one might have expected. At this point it’s evidently composed entirely of cynical apparatchiks, willing to sell out every principle — and every shred of their own dignity — as long as their donors get big tax cuts.
Meanwhile, conservative media have given up even the pretense of doing real reporting, and become blatant organs of ruling-party propaganda.
Yet all is not lost. As his headline declares: America Is Not Yet Lost.
Yet I’m ending this year with a feeling of hope, because tens of millions of Americans have risen to the occasion. The U.S. may yet become another Turkey or Hungary — a state that preserves the forms of democracy but has become an authoritarian regime in practice. But it won’t happen as easily or as quickly as many of us had feared.
Early this year the commentator David Frum warned that the slide into authoritarianism would be unstoppable “if people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic.” But so far that hasn’t happened.
David Frum is a Canadian who used to be a conservative, or so neoconservatives tried to persuade us. He coined the phrase, “the axis of evil,” which George W. Bush put into a speech. After this, Frum switched sides. That was a tremendous benefit for conservatives, and a tremendous liability for liberals. If David Frum says anything, I recommend that you ignore it.
What we’ve seen instead is the emergence of a highly energized resistance. That resistance made itself visible literally the day after Trump took office, with the huge women’s marches that took place on Jan. 21, dwarfing the thin crowds at the inauguration. If American democracy survives this terrible episode, I vote that we make pink pussy hats the symbol of our delivery from evil.
The resistance continued with the town hall crowds that confronted Republican legislators as they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And in case anyone wondered whether the vocal anti-Trump crowds and Trump’s hugely negative polling would translate into political action, a string of special elections — capped by a giant Democratic wave in Virginia and a stunning upset in Alabama — has put such doubts to rest.
It wasn’t protesters who stopped the repeal of ObamaCare. It was RINOs in the Senate.
Let’s be clear: America as we know it is still in mortal danger. Republicans still control all the levers of federal power, and never in the course of our nation’s history have we been ruled by people less trustworthy.
Talk about overheated rhetoric! This man is so out of touch with political reality that The New York Times automatically publishes his columns.
This obviously goes for Trump himself, who is clearly a dictator wannabe, with no respect whatsoever for democratic norms. But it also goes for Republicans in Congress, who have demonstrated again and again that they will do nothing to limit his actions. They have backed him up as he uses his office to enrich himself and his cronies, as he foments racial hatred, as he attempts a slow-motion purge of the Justice Department and the F.B.I.
This man has been oblivious to the reality of American politics that extends back to 1861.
So we can’t count on the consciences of Republicans to protect us. In particular, we need to be realistic about the likely results of Robert Mueller’s investigation. The best bet is that no matter what Mueller finds, no matter how damning and no matter what Trump does — even if it involves blatant obstruction of justice — Republican majorities in Congress will back up their president and continue to sing his praises.
In other words, as long as Republicans control Congress, constitutional checks and balances are effectively a dead letter.
Then what can be done? This: voters can elect Democrats to Congress and then the White House.
So it’s going to be up to the American people. They may once again have to make themselves heard in the streets. They’ll certainly have to make their weight felt at the ballot box.
It’s going to be hard, because the game is definitely rigged. Remember, Trump lost the popular vote but ended up in the White House anyway, and the midterm elections will be anything but fair. Gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic-leaning voters in urban districts have created a situation in which Democrats could win a large majority of votes yet still fail to take the House of Representatives.
Gerrymandering began when Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts invented it in 1812. It involved redistricting Congressional districts so that one party was more likely to elect representatives to Congress. He signed the bill into law in 1812. This did not do him any good. He was thrown out of office later that year. In that year, he was elected Vice President of the United States. He had attended the Constitutional Convention, although he refused to sign the document because there was no Bill of Rights. Gerrymandering is not a recent development, but you would not know this by reading Krugman's article.
And even if voters rise up effectively against the awful people currently in power, we’ll be a long way from restoring basic American values. Our democracy needs two decent parties, and at this point the G.O.P. seems to be irretrievably corrupt.
Even at best, in other words, it’s going to take a long struggle to turn ourselves back into the nation we were supposed to be. Yet I am, as I said, far more hopeful than I was a year ago. America is not yet lost.
Krugman, as a defender of political salvation, does not consider the possibility that American national politics since at least 1953 has been a Punch and Judy show. As a Keynesian, he believes in economic salvation by increased federal spending. As a political analyst, he believes in salvation by Democrat majorities. He never mentions the unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security, which are clearly the products of bipartisanship in Washington. He also doesn't mention American foreign policy, which is also the product of bipartisanship. Two-thirds of the American government's budget -- Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and the Pentagon -- is bipartisan.
CONCLUSION
Bill Clinton had majorities in both houses of Congress in the first half of his first term. Nothing radical came of this. Obama had the same thing in the first half of his first term. Only ObamaCare came out of this. That anybody on the Left could still believe in political salvation by the Democratic Party is mind-boggling. But Krugman does.
Bipartisanship is why I don't worry much about the looming triumph of the Democrats in the election of 2020. They will no doubt raise taxes marginally in 2021. They will unquestionably run massive deficits. But the government already runs massive deficits. Congress will extend unemployment insurance to millions of unemployed Americans who lose their jobs in the recession. But there will be no fundamental economic changes. The unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security will increase, just as they will this year. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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