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.
The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.
What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.
You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.
And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.
It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-22/default-now-or-suffer-a-more-expensive-crisis-later-ron-paul.html#more-9964
We’ve already defaulted 3 times. This is an interesting read. Might as well stop worrying.
God Love Him, Mr. Krugman holds his beliefs firmly and keeps on fighting the good fight. I agree with you GG, and would add one thought to all of the above. Nobody knows anymore (no matter what they say) for sure what is exactly right and what is exactly wrong or for what reasons, and we are all crazy or getting pretty close to it. Including the media. . pundits, newspapers and maybe even Fox. It seems, from all I’ve read about it, a chaotic time and place, where ideas are birthed and given form. It is best to hang a little loosely, stay as flexible as possible, look for a way through the swirling stuff of chaos until you see a little clearing, or get a little seed of an idea, or your heart tells you to act on a little situation you feel qualified for. For me, these are the baby steps I keep hearing about. Maybe it’s different for you but this is how it is for me at this time and in this place. Not centrist but hopefully, fairly balanced.
Thanks for publishing his article.
be
I think the Golden Mean is about compromise, which is not the same thing as centrism.
Krugman is talking about the way the press tends to always suggest that “everybody is partly right, and partly wrong.”
Newspapers and traditional news outlets really do that a lot. It shores up their approach to reporting, which is to “get both sides” and lay them out for the reader to analyze.
But that’s different from the idea of compromise, which is what I associate with that Golden Mean idea. That’s where two parties who are opposed to each other sit down and agree that each one will give up something in order that each one can get something that he wants.
That’s a ncessary, civilized process. But I agree that the centrism that Krugman is talking about is noxious. Most of the time the press is just too cowardly to tell the truth.