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Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

 

Witness to the Great Unraveling of America
(Paul Krugman, BuzzFlash Interview, August 6, 2004)
BuzzFlash: In the preface to the hardcover edition of The Great Unraveling: Losing our Way in the New Century, you make ironic use of Henry Kissinger's Ph.D. thesis at Harvard as a way to understand the radicalism of the Bush Administration. Could you explain that a bit more? . . . Paul Krugman: Well, it's really good for explaining how reasonable people can’t bring themselves to see that they’re actually facing a threat from a radical movement. Kissinger talked about the time of the French Revolution, and pretty obviously he also was thinking about the 1930s. He argued that, when you have a revolutionary power, somebody who really wants to tear apart the system -- doesn't believe in any of the rules -- reasonable people who've been accustomed to stability just say, "Oh, you know, they may say that, but they don’t really mean it." And, "This is just tactical, and let’s not get too excited." Anyone who claims that these guys really are as radical as their own statements suggest is, you know, "shrill." Kissinger suggests they'd be considered alarmists. And those who say, "Don’t worry. It’s not a big deal," are considered sane and reasonable. . . . Well, that's exactly what's been happening. For four years now, some of us have been saying, whether or not you think they're bad guys, they're certainly radical. They don't play by the rules. You can't take anything that you’ve regarded as normal from previous U.S. political experience as applying to Bush and the people around him. They will say things and do things that would not previously have made any sense -- you know, would have been previously considered out of bounds. And for all of that period, the critics have been told: "Oh, you know, you’re overreacting, and there’s something wrong with you." . . . We just saw it with the increased level of terror alerts. Among those of us who had made a judgment about what kind of people we’re dealing with, the reaction was, this timing was awfully convenient. After all, they've done this sort of thing before. Of course, this was criticized as completely unreasonable to say -- after all, this time we've got "specifics." But here we are with this morning's headlines: Oh, it's all three-year-old information. . . . BuzzFlash: There was an article, as you know, in The New Republic, which said the Bush Administration had put pressure on the Pakistani government to come up with a "high-profile al Qaeda target" in the last two weeks of July, and preferably during the Democratic Convention. That article was met with a lot of skepticism, although it was quite detailed and written by three people for a prestigious publication. And indeed, what has happened is it has been announced that a high-target al Qaeda individual was arrested by the Pakistanis. He had actually been arrested the Saturday before the Democratic Convention, but it was only announced, I believe, on Wednesday or Thursday. . . . Paul Krugman: It was Thursday, a few hours before Kerry's speech. . . . BuzzFlash: So exactly what had been foretold, but dismissed by some as a conspiratorial theory, was proven to be true. On top of that,it was three-year-old information, the pre-9/11 information, that was the primary basis, even the Administration admits, for the so-called specific terror alerts. The information came from the computer of this high-target al Qaeda figure who was captured by the Pakistanis at the request of the Bush Administration, basically, to drown out the message of the Democratic Convention. . . . The stakes are very high for the Bushies, because we all know that there are terrible suppressed scandals. And that was before we even had any hint about Abu Ghraib. They will do anything to win. You have to expect that it’s going to be the dirtiest campaign in American history, and so it’s proving. We probably ain’t seen nothing yet. Over and over again, the people who made a judgment about the motives of the Administration, and assessed the facts on the basis of that judgment, have proved again and again to be getting it right in interpreting the latest story. People who keep on clinging to the belief that these are reasonable people who behave like a conventional government have been snookered. . . . Reporters and producers know very well that if they do anything that can be construed as an unfavorable misrepresentation of Republican positions, there will be hell to pay, while misrepresenting what Democrats say is cost-free. Historically, there has been no punishment. Specific examples are not all necessarily cases of deliberate slanting of the news, but they sometimes are. . . . We've got an alliance between the religious right and the accumulators of great wealth. Those are the people who are running things. And then the question would be, how is it that these things go together so well? What happened to the streak in Christianity that is reveling and populist? Why has that been completely eliminated? George Lakoff has written about a conservative world view that you can kind of make sense of. It doesn’t work by the numbers, but it does work, sort of, emotionally. There's a focus on self-reliance, and therefore letting the wealthy get wealthier, with this world view. . . . But I think a lot of it is a marriage of convenience. The corporate insiders and the figures of the religious right have found each other mutually useful. The thing about the religious right is that it's actually relatively centralized. There are people who can take their flock where they want to go. And they have, in effect, made a deal with the people with multi-million-dollar incomes. "I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine." If this coalition gets the kind of lock on power that it wants, the next phase is the struggle between those two sides. As for Tom DeLay, he is a fanatically religious person because that’s who he is, and he’s a fanatical supporter of the interests of the money, because that’s where the money is -- the money and the political support. . . . BuzzFlash: The neo-cons have the foreign policy radicalism, of which Dick Cheney is a part. And they seem impervious to facts. Facts come up to contradict their ideological assumptions, and they continue to proceed with the ideological assumptions, just adapting their excuses. But let’s say Bush were reelected. Doesn’t this have to hit the wall at some point? . . . Paul Krugman: Yes. You could say that we’ve hit a number of walls already. The thing is the United States is a huge, wealthy, extremely powerful country, which means that you can screw up very badly, and the consequences take awhile before they become obvious. . . . If we weren't America, those budget deficits would already have led to a financial crisis. But, you know, the markets say: Well, it's America. They'll get their act together. And so we, the people, are still lending money. If we weren't the world loan superpower, the ongoing disaster in Iraq would have been catastrophic already. The army is coming apart at the seams -- but slowly. This group of people have had the good luck, or maybe the bad luck in the longer run, to seize control of an institution that is capable of taking a lot of punishment before it really disintegrates. . . . If you think about how far down we've come in this short time, it's actually pretty amazing. But I don't know what happens if they manage to hold on, one way or another, in November. So far, every real-world thing they turned their hands to, every real-world issue, as opposed to politics, has turned to crud. Afghanistan's a mess. Iraq's a mess. The economy's a mess. The budget's a mess. Homeland Security is a mess. Four more years of this, and I don’t know. It’s going to be a pretty grim prospect. . . . You know, Nixon was a "bad guy," but, what he did was actually quite pragmatic in actual policies. . . . This is something completely new. We don't have a lot of experience with it. But it is amazing, if you look at some of the ways they are willing to change policy, not in fundamental ways, but in ways that help them politically. If you read closely the reporting from Iraq, what's pretty clear is that our army has been told to basically cede control of large swaths of the country to the insurgents in order to hold the casualty figures down until November. I guess you could call that pragmatic, although what happens afterwards, I don't know. It was pretty clear that Bush's initial decision was to send the troops in and level Fallujah. But after that didn't work out too well, the next reaction was, okay, let's just try and keep the troops on their bases, and see if we can taper this off until the election.

posted by LoZo 4:50 PM