Neocon Blues

Question: When the Nobel Committee decided to give Krugman the award, did they think he would write an op-ed endorsing Nixon-era politics? Don’t answer that.

A friend e-mailed me this article:

But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.

Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.

So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

So, because Nixon was more liberal than Obama, and more inclined towards big government regulations and ambitious projects, he is nonideological? Perhaps that statement would make sense if we were all liberal and we all agreed with Mr. Krugman. Of course such views would be nonideological - they’d be the default opinions of everybody.

And does Krugman really think he can get away with the revisionist history? politics in the 1970s were less partisan because ideology was diffused evenly between the parties. For the Democrats, you had both northeastern liberal elites and southern conservative Dixiecrats. For the Republicans, you had your genteel Rockefeller liberals and your budding Reagan revolutionaries. This may have made for more bi-partisanship, but there were no less intra-party battles. Moreover, it made the party divisions themselves superficial. They mattered a whole lot less compared to the ideas and movements you identified with. After the Reagan insurgency, we saw a political re-alignment. The conservatives didn’t “hijack” the GOP - they just switched over to one side, while the liberals switched to the other.

Now, Krugman laments the lack of bi-partisan negotiations, but bi-partisanship itself is a red herring. What Krugman wants is for both parties to already agree with each other on the large ideas, and then hack out the small details. It would be two-party cooperation, but it would be largely meaningless. At that point, if we all agree with each other on everything, why not have one party instead? The real work - and the real prize - comes when you can get two parties that disagree on the ideas to find common ground. That is the political landscape we occupy today, and we are the better for it. Democracy is enriched when different viewpoints and ideas are aired. The Republicans have done their best to convey their beliefs and principles on health care reform. If the Democrats can’t see eye to eye with them, that means there’s more work to be done in debating and persuading. They can’t browbeat or brand their ideological opponents into submission, no matter enthused that would make Krugman.