Clever, (Economically) Ignorant Liberals
One of my pet peeves is the reflexive self-flagellation that we see so often among US liberals, with all of their "to be fair" overcompensation for daring to be not-conservative. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is one of the poster boys for this, which makes sense given his vintage. Schumer, after all, came up through the ranks of Democratic Party politics in the 1980's and especially the 1990's, when Bill Clinton's despicable "triangulation" strategy was all the rage for people who were deathly afraid of what George H.W. Bush irritatingly labeled "the L word" (long before the Showtime TV series used that letter for a quite different meaning).
Negative shout-out to 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who ran away from the liberal label when the elder Bush started to treat it like a slur. But in any event, Democrats of Schumer's cohort were all convinced that "this is a conservative country," even though it absolutely was not and never has been on the major issues of any given day. And as I noted in a recent Dorf on Law column, John Oliver in August brilliantly skewered Schumer for inventing a fictional every-American family called The Baileys, who just happen to hold the conservative positions that Clintonites imagined Americans to hold. Again, even though Schumer has been talking for decades about how he consults with the Baileys to get a Real American perspective, they are a figment of his imagination.
Even though I do hate it when Democrats apologize for being Democrats, and even though I worry when anyone on my side of the political divide starts a sentence with, "Well, to be fair to Republicans," there are of course times when it is important to call out liberals for being wrong. And that is most common when they start to talk about economics. There, however, the problem is not merely people who are either apologetic liberals or not really liberals at all, because too many genuine liberals are almost willfully ignorant about economic issues as well.
And this is not even limited to the United States. As a very recent example of a not-really-liberal thinker saying something ridiculous about economics, the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash had an op-ed in The Guardian that caught my attention with this:
The job numbers are weakening. Trump’s 'big beautiful bill' will further increase an already gobsmacking national debt of $37tn (£27tn). Already in the 2024 fiscal year, servicing that debt cost more than the entire $850bn defence budget. But until a debt crisis actually hits, such macro-risks remain remote and abstract to most voters, rather as predictions of diminished GDP growth made little impact in the Brexit referendum debate.
He later added this:
The single most important thing for the Democrats in the next 400 days is therefore to bring those economic costs irresistibly home to voters. Democrats won’t win just by talking about the defence of democracy, important though that is, let alone by engaging in culture wars. They need to follow the advice of former Clinton adviser James Carville and focus relentlessly on kitchen-table issues. In doing so, they will also show that they do actually care about the ordinary working- and middle-class Americans whose support they have lost over the last 30 years.
To be clear, Garton Ash is mostly known as a Cold Warrior, and he is affiliated with the very right-leaning Hoover Institution. It is probably most accurate to describe him as the kind of conservative who stayed conservative while his cohorts accommodated themselves to Trumpist/Brexit insanity. In any case, his op-ed was notable for being so drearily predictable, even as it was welcome in the sense of being a voice against the current Republican wrecking crew.
In any case, there is no mystery about someone who still invokes Carville as a political analyst, given that Carville has had nothing new or interesting to say for more than thirty years. But my point is that the "already gobsmacking national debt of $37tn" line is the kind of thing that even true liberals hide behind. As in, "to be fair, the debt is a huge problem, and Democrats have added to it as well." That is just lazy stuff, and people like Garton Ash can say it knowing that they will not be called out for their ignorance. Very Serious People know what they can get away with.
Speaking of which, Paul Krugman popularized (although I am fairly sure he did not coin) the term Very Seroius People, or VSP's. Krugman is not an economic ignoramus, to say the least, and it is thus important to note that he can make the political point that Garton Ash wants to make without saying lazy or stupid things about public debt. For example, Krugman's substack recently included this political advice for Democrats:
And it's time for Democrats as a party to do the following: (1) acknowledge that American men are having real problems; (2) state clearly that MAGA has no solutions and is exploiting their distress for political ends; and (3) advocate for effective policies to help them, as well as promising responsible stewardship of the economy.
I should say that I am not at all convinced that Krugman (or Garton Ash) are right that Democrats can win by emphasizing economic issues. It has been clear all along that Republicans' economic policy preferences are elitist and damaging to workers -- very much including White men -- and Trump's additions and changes to the Republican canon are even more anti-worker. Democrats have been pointing that out all along, but White men have moved overwhelmingly to the right, starting with the Reagan Democrats in 1980's and culminating with the red hat-wearers of today.
One could argue, I suppose, that Democrats have no real choice but to try for the umpteenth time to get those voters to open their eyes and see that they have been voting against their own self-interest for decades. On the other hand, that does start to seem very much like the overused line about the definition of insanity. But I digress. The point is that it is possible to tell Democrats to emphasize kitchen-table issues without reinforcing the inane conventional wisdom about government borrowing.
Even so, Krugman is clearly an exception. It is simply a fact that many if not most genuine liberals would readily say something very much like Garton Ash's line about "gobsmacking national debt" without a second thought -- or a first thought, which is the point here! The Schumers of the world are simply too far gone to do otherwise, it seems.
How far back does this go? It was kicked off by Reagan's relatively large budget deficits, which then allowed Democrats -- who had spent decades chafing at being called profligate New Dealers -- to turn the tables and say that it is the Republicans who are the irresponsible ones. Again, that meant that Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly agreed about something that simply is not true (that debt is per se bad), merely disagreeing about who is to blame.
The instinct to be snarky about government spending and debt had, by the mid-1980's, moved even the truly liberal political analyst Lewis Lapham at Harper's to sound like a VSP debt scold. I recently happened upon a Lapham piece from 1985 that (being rather short, not even six full columns on the magazine's printed pages) is worth reading in full. Even reading a bit of it, however, makes it clear that Lapham offered absolutely no argument about the economics of the debt -- he did not try -- but simply treated it as obviously bad.
After opening with a lengthy, odd analogy to his great-aunt Evelyn (I kid you not), Lapham gets to his point, which is to inadvertently prove that he was an economic ignoramus. After a swipe at Reagan's press conferences, Lapham recalls "reading accounts of the congressional effort to impose order on the chaos of the federal budget" and says that "[t]he more unintelligible their remarks, the more likely their good faith will be accepted at par value." OK, so both Reagan and Congress were silly, and a good curmudgeon could not help saying so.
But why, exactly, is Lapham upset? On the substance, I mean. The remainder of the column is divided into eleven points, with a bit of verbiage added after blunt assertions, although this is the entirety of his first point: "1. The United States is bankrupt. The national debt exceeds $1 trillion, and unless the government debases the currency, it has as little hope of repaying its loans as do the governments of Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru."
Wow. That is truly stupid. And it only gets worse. It is not worth going through the piece point by point, so I will simply quote a handful of his howlers.
2. Nobody can afford to say that the United States is bankrupt.
4. The pox of the national debt reflects the inability of a democracy to make choices. Like the deficit, now running to approximately $200 billion a year, the debt stands as bleak testimony to the fraudulence of the nation's politics.
5. Under the rules of political economy prevailing in a state that insists on the higher fiction of egalitarianism, everybody is entitled to everything.
7. The apparent prosperity associated with the President's economic policies has been paid for with other people's money. Foreign investment in the United States finances the American deficit, and the federal government last year paid the alien holders of its notes $19.6 billion in interest.
11. The United States was conceived in bankruptcy, and the country never has managed to cure its financial illness except by means of depression or war. There is no reason to believe that over the span of 200 years the Americans have discovered any other remedy.
Interestingly, Lapham's eighth point is actually quite important, amounting to an argument in favor of "capital budgeting," which is simply good accounting practice (and is thus required for businesses around the world). In the middle of a rant that begins with the obviously silly claim that the US was bankrupt in 1985 because of its debt, Lapham almost admits that debt can be good. Kind of.
I have focused on this example simply because it is so (to borrow Garton Ash's word) gobsmacking. Here was a man who was truly of the left, able to write insightful things about American politics on a monthly basis for decades, but saying pompous and uninformed things about the national debt was simply too tempting for him.
So, to be fair, I have to admit that liberals are often just as wrong as Republicans, especially when they reveal their ignorance by talking about economic issues. I like being fair.
- Neil H. Buchanan