January 28, 2007
Paul Krugman and Partisanship Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:25 PM EST Paul Krugman had a column in Friday’s New York Times, “On Being Partisan,” commenting on Barack Obama’s lamentation that “politics has become so bitter and partisan, and that’s what we have to change first.” Krugman confidently demurs: “Um, no. If history is any guide, what we need are political leaders willing to tackle the big problems despite bitter partisan opposition.” Krugman goes on to claim that the main source of partisanship is the growing polarization of the American economy. On this account, American politics were bitterly partisan in the past because income distribution was then harshly unequal, and “the Republican Party, in effect, represented the interests of the economic elite, and the Democratic Party, in an often confused way, represented the populist alternative.” Krugman thinks that once Franklin Roosevelt evened out income distribution with the New Deal, Republicans became more civil, until Republicans began to undo the New Deal, and as a result American politics is again bitterly partisan, as a result of attempts by Democrats to defend what remains, with Republicans trying to entomb that residue: “The signature domestic policy initiatives of the Bush administration have been attempts to undo F.D.R.’s legacy, from slashing taxes on the rich to privatizing Social Security. And a bitter partisan gap has opened up between the G.O.P. and Democrats, who have tried to defend that legacy.” Krugman seems to think the newly-victorious Democrats should in effect struggle to provoke partisanship: “Politicians who try to push forward the elements of a new New Deal, especially universal health care, are sure to face the hatred of a large bloc on the right—and they should welcome that hatred, not fear it.” One problem with Krugman’s argument is his implied and very partial definition of “partisanship,” which in the context of Obama’s remarks may have meant not only the incivility and hatred to which Krugman adverts but also the tendency to rank the defeat of political opponents over the interests of the country. Obama explicitly distinguished partisanship from mere bitterness. To give two examples: When President Clinton attempted to reform health care, Senator Dole sought a compromise—he conceded that was a real problem, and wanted to do something about it—whereas William Kristol is said to have thought that wholly defeating Clinton’s initiative would produce the greatest gain for the Republican party. Kristol’s views prevailed, and the Republican Party probably did gain from that outcome, but the country lost. A comparable case may be some Democrats who long and wisely insisted that the administration had refused to send enough troops to Iraq but now seek to block any increase in the number of American troops in Iraq, possibly on the theory that a complete defeat for the President is preferable to trying to avert the worst outcomes in Iraq. This simplifies the situation, for people can have sincere motives for opposing both national health care and any protracted military involvement in Iraq, and they can also delude themselves about their true motives for opposing either measure. In either case, partisanship means consciously or unconsciously putting the defeat of a political adversary ahead of any other consideration. So the same total opposition to a President can be either partisan or principled, and my guess is that Obama was talking about the first sort of motive. An additional example: If Krugman, for many years a pretty committed free-trader, were to attack free trade when it was endorsed by his political opponents, and do so in an attempt to seek political advantage for his party, he would become, in the pejorative sense of the word, partisan. Partisanship in this sense means cynical calculation, and all parties can be guilty of it. Another problem with Krugman’s tight focus on partisanship in quarrels over distributive justice is that partisanship in current American politics has sadly little to do with the defense of what remains of the New Deal. It has had a lot to do with the war in Iraq, with some of the war’s defenders aspersing the patriotism of the war’s opponents, and some of the opponents calling the war’s defenders at best apologists for a fascist administration. Venomous political language also infests discussions of religion in America, with people accusing their enemies of being either the Devil’s friends or the American Taliban. Our political contests over many truly economic questions have been by comparison relatively decorous. The Democrats were much less outraged by bankruptcy “reform,” for my money a shocking piece of class legislation, than they are about the proposed surge. Yet another problem with Krugman’s account of partisanship is that it assumes that bitter political divisions in American history were always “really” about economic issues, especially questions of distributive justice. But bitter political divisions could occur over non-economic questions, and did: inter alia, about race, ethnicity, abortion, religion, and war. Sometimes racial politics was inflected by clear economic interest, but not always, and the same is true of foreign policy and war. Even if you truly believe that the Iraq War is really about oil and Halliburton’s profits, what about the Vietnam war? That war produced some venomous political divisions in this country, but it seems peculiarly absurd to say that the political struggles over Vietnam were “about” economic advantage for one section of the population. Similarly, slavery was not, for many abolitionists, a question of economic interest. There is something irredeemably vulgar about assuming that “real” political questions are always about the same thing. The worst problem with Krugman’s account of partisanship is that it misdirects our attention from the psychology and mechanics of politics, and from other places worth looking. Krugman, by training an economist, may here simply be exhibiting what the French call professional deformation; he assumes that politics, about which he may know very little, is always concerned with something about which he knows a great deal. It is also possible that Krugman, himself sometimes an aggressive partisan in several senses of that word, cannot understand a disease from which he occasionally suffers. It is the nature of injustice that when we practice it ourselves, and are careful to cloak it in the passion of indignation, our motives become wonderfully elevated in our own eyes.
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