Tag: Paul Krugman

You’ve Changed, You’re Not the Angel I Once Knew: David Brooks on the GOP

David Brooks is fed up with the GOP. Today’s conservative, he says, is not yesterday’s conservative. What happened? Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own. I’ve been trying to combat this argument by amnesia for years. As he has done before, Paul Krugman valiantly takes up my critique today in his response to Brooks. Yet the argument keeps popping back up. So let’s take it apart, piece by piece. Brooks says the rot set in 30 years ago, in the wake of Reagan. Let’s see how today’s conservatism compares to those loamy vintages of more than three decades past. The bolded passages are all from […]

Doris, we’re in (with Paul Krugman)!

  When my sister Jessica and I were younger, we used to invoke this line from Fame—”Doris, we’re in!”—whenever we got some little piece of recognition for something (watch the first 45 seconds or so from this clip). Couldn’t help but think of it when I got a shout-out this morning from Paul Krugman: There’s a strand of thought — I identify it especially with Corey Robin, although he’s not alone — that says that conservatism isn’t really about the things it claims to be about. It isn’t really about free markets and moral values; it’s about authority — the authority of bosses over workers, of men over women, of whites over Those People. Score one on the morality front: […]

Matt Yglesias’s China Syndrome

Commenting on the recent labor unrest in China, Matt Yglesias makes a comparison with the past and present of the United States. Conditions in contemporary China have much more in common, structurally speaking, with conditions during the heyday of western labor activism than does anything about the Chicago teachers strike or the apparent American Airlines sickout. The rapid pace of Chinese industrialization means the average wage in a Chinese factories has managed to lag behind the average productivity of a Chinese factory worker (roughly speaking because it’s dragged down by the absymal wages and productivity of Chinese agriculture) which creates a dynamic ripe for windfall profits but also for labor activism. The repressive nature of the Chinese state is an […]

Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism

On Thursday next week, the CUNY Center for the Humanities, The Nation, and the Roosevelt Institute will be hosting a public conversation about The Reactionary Mind, featuring me and Chris Hayes, host of the excellent new program Up With Chris Hayes on MSNBC.  The details are here, but if you’re feeling link-fatigue, it’ll be on Thursday, October 6, at 7 pm, in the Martin Segal Theater of the CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Avenue, between 34th and 35th).  Make sure to get there early as seating may be limited. And if you do come, please make sure to say hello or, if we haven’t met personally, introduce yourself. And if you can, please share this information widely. In anticipation of […]

Doug Henwood: His Taste in Music is a Little Doctrinaire, but His Economics is Outta Sight

Those of you following this discussion between me, Matt Yglesias, and Mike Konczal, need to check out this post from Doug Henwood. It not only cuts through a lot of the fat, but it also takes us in a completely different, unexpected, and difficult direction, raising fascinating questions about the petit bourgeois origins and dimensions of the politics of inflation.  Doug is my rabbi in all things economic (though, sadly, we part ways on matters musical).  Check it out, comment there, here, everywhere. To my astonishment, this debate, or a spin-off of this debate, seems to have been kicked upstairs.  Way upstairs.  As in Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong upstairs. Update (July 18, 12:30 pm) And now the boys—and, seriously, […]