The Great
Unraveling:
Losing Our Way in the New Century
By
Paul Krugman, W.W. Norton & Company, 2003
Reviewed
by Keith Wilde
Paul Krugman was once selected as “best American economist under 40.” What they couldn’t quite bring themselves to say, snorted a friendly colleague of mine, is that he is the best of the current crop, no matter what their age. (My friend is himself a well-trained and self-confident economist who retired early as a senior policy adviser in Ottawa – in disgust.) Acting on his advice several years ago, I began to pay attention when Krugman bylines caught my eye. Since spotting his column in The New York Times shortly after it started, I have rarely missed one of them. The just-released Great Unraveling was therefore a welcome stuffer in my Xmas stocking at the end of 2003, but I put it on the shelf in the belief that most of the content was still fairly fresh in my memory. It was a year later, after the re-election of the Bush team and Republican majorities in both House and Senate, that an urge to refresh one or more of those memories caused me to open the book and to then recognize that I had been denying myself the most important and electrifying part.
It is no longer news that G.W. Bush is making good on his triumphant post-election declaration that “I have political capital and I intend to spend it!” His high-profile attack on Social Security is the symbol and substance of those intentions. As you read the following excerpts and paraphrases from Krugman’s Preface and Introduction, keep in mind that he wrote them a full year before the election of 2004.
Krugman begins by explaining that as an economics professor, one of his main specialties has been international financial crises. He therefore did not expect that as a columnist he would be spending a lot of time on domestic politics, since everyone assumed that American policy would remain sensible and responsible. “But as events unfolded, politics inevitably intruded…. It gradually became clear that something deeper than mere bad economic ideology was at work. The bigger story was America’s political sea change…. More and more, I found myself speaking very uncomfortable truth to power…. If I have ended up more often than not writing pieces that attack the right wing, it’s because the right wing now rules – and rules badly. It’s not just that the policies are bad and irresponsible; our leaders lie about what they are up to. I began pointing out the outrageous dishonesty of the Bush administration long before most of the rest of the punditocracy.”
In explaining why he saw what others failed to see, Krugman points to his training as an economist in contrast to the political reporters whose style is to give equal credence to the opposing claims of politicians regardless of the facts. “I did my own arithmetic – or, where necessary, got hold of real economists who could educate me on the subjects I wrote about – and quickly realized that we were dealing with world-class mendacity, right here in the USA.” In pointing up this contrast, Krugman also recognized that business reporters know a bogus number when they see it and have often accused top officials of outrageous mendacity at the same time as political pundits are still dripping phrases about their sterling character. “But the writings of business reporters necessarily have a narrow focus, and rarely affect political commentary. With a wider brief, and a spot on the Op-Ed page, I attracted a lot more attention.”
What the Militant Right Throws Overboard with a Rock Attached
At least as important as his ability to see the lies is his willingness to call them that. This he explains in part as his distance from the groupthink that dominates the perception of Washington journalists who go to the same dinner parties. As a professor in New Jersey (Princeton) he never bought into the shared assumptions and story line (e.g., before 9/11 George W. Bush was dumb but honest; after September 11 the new story was “Texas Ranger to the world”). Furthermore, as Krugman acknowledges, he “couldn’t be bullied in the usual ways. The stock in trade of most journalists is inside information – leaks from highly placed sources, up-close-and-personal interviews with the powerful. This leaves them vulnerable: they can be seduced with offers of special access, threatened with the career-destroying prospect that they will be frozen out. But I rely almost entirely on numbers and analyses that are in the public domain; I don’t need to be in the good graces of top officials, so I also have no need to display the deference that characterizes many journalists….”
That explains why Krugman is able to spot the lies and the hidden agenda, and why he is fearless in exposing them. Most of that I could have figured out for myself, if challenged. The really electrifying part of his Introduction is his explanation of what it all means and why we should not have been surprised at events and statements that have dominated news out of Washington over the past few months. Krugman says he discovered it himself only just before completing The Great Unraveling. And he found it in the doctoral dissertation of the young Henry Kissinger, published in 1957. That book was about diplomatic efforts to reconstruct Europe after the battle of Waterloo. “But the first three pages...sent chills down my spine, because they seem all too relevant to current events. In those first few pages, Kissinger describes the problems confronting a heretofore stable diplomatic system when it is faced with a revolutionary power – a power that does not accept that system’s legitimacy…. It seems clear to me that one should regard America’s right-wing movement – which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media – as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.”
As of mid-spring in 2005, that information is no longer news, but keep in mind that Krugman wrote the lines in the summer or fall of 2003. He then felt it necessary to put a substantial quantity of evidence in front of his readers to persuade them that he was not overstating his case. In the light of what we have seen and heard since Bush’s second inaugural, we no longer need to rely on clues and inferences to be convinced that “...there’s ample evidence that key elements of the coalition that now runs the country believe that some long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist – and do not accept the rules that the rest of us have taken for granted.”
The important instances Krugman provides in support of this rule include:
“Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal famously praised the ‘bourgeois riot’ in which violent protestors shut down a vote recount in Miami. (The rioters, it was later revealed, weren’t angry citizens; they were paid political operatives.) Meanwhile, according to his close friend Don Evans, now the secretary of commerce, George W. Bush believes that he was called by God to lead the nation. Perhaps this explains why the disputed election of 2000 didn’t seem to inspire any caution or humility on the part of the victors. Consider Justice Antonin Scalia’s response to a student who asked how he felt making the Supreme Court decision that threw the election to Bush. Was it agonizing? Did Scalia worry about the consequences? No: ‘It was a wonderful feeling,’ he declared.” In several of hisNYT columns of 2004, Krugman worried about inadequate preparations to assure an honest vote in the elections of last year, and as we now know, there were widespread and bitter denunciations of interference with voters who were expected to favor nominees of the Democratic Party.
The Ensconced don’t Like “America as It Is”
In this 2003 book, Krugman challenges his readers to face the clear implication “that the people now in charge really don’t like America as it is. If you combine their apparent agendas, the goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no social safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don’t teach evolution but do teach religion and – possibly – in which elections are only a formality. Yet those who take the hard-line rightists now in power at their word, and suggest that they may really attempt to realize such a radical goal, are usually accused of being ‘shrill,’ of going over the top. Surely, says the conventional wisdom, we should discount the rhetoric: the goals of the right are more limited than this picture suggests. Or are they?”
Therein lies danger, Krugman argues, backed up the following passage that he quotes from Kissinger:
“Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. The defenders of the status quo there fore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy but overstated its case for bargaining purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane…. But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.”
That “sent chills down my spine”, says Krugman, “because it explains so well the otherwise baffling process by which the [Bush] administration has been able to push radical policies through, with remarkably little scrutiny or effective opposition...from the American political and media establishment...over the past two years.”
A year and a half later, these words sound almost stale as the Bush agenda unrolls before our eyes. And to the list of fundamental institutions that the revolutionary force intends to overthrow we can now add the system of checks and balances that is a central feature of the U.S. political system. For in the aftermath of the orgiastic Terry Schiavo feeding tube incident, Tom DeLay is campaigning to make the judiciary subject to the legislative branch.
The policy agenda that Krugman inferred from what he saw and heard in application has been explored and explained by political historians as a deliberate, well-orchestrated and abundantly funded campaign that got underway with the nomination of Barry Goldwater as Republican presidential candidate in 1964. Several analyses of this kind have appeared since the November 2004 election, but one of the best preceded it by a few weeks. It is an essay by Lewis Lapham in Harper’s Magazine of September 2004, titled “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history.”