By Paul Krugman | The New York Times | Link to Original
Editor’s Note: I love reading Paul Krugman. He’s a great example of a well-informed columnist (read his bio here) who has both editorial independence and a real following. He never sounds like a ‘pundit’, only like someone with good sense explaining something obvious. In this column, he identifies the ideological culprit in American politics: being middle of the road. We all were fed some version of the ‘golden mean’ theory of Aristotle, who I think was a dork; Krugman explains the issue as it relates to American politics and economics. –efc
WATCHING OUR SYSTEM deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.
And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.
No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.
Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.
So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.