In this 2012 post, Paul Krugman looks back on more than a decade of being dismissed as “shrill.” His offense was accuracy: he insisted early that George W. Bush was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, not the blunt honest conservative the commentariat described. He also refused the mandatory pretense of symmetry — the fiction that Democratic caution and Republican radicalism were morally equivalent. By 2012, with a primary field of “not-Romneys” he calls stark raving mad, Krugman argues the party’s condition was decades old. The only new thing was that the pretense of reasonableness had become impossible to sustain:
<https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/looking-back-with-shrillness/>
Brad DeLong notes that the GOP we now see in the primaries has been building for a couple of decades; I can’t help thinking of my own decade-plus in the journalistic trenches.
Early on in my tenure at the Times, I felt I had no choice but to point out the inconvenient truth that the official line of the commentariat was all wrong. George W. Bush was not a nice, blunt, honest guy who happened to be a conservative; he was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, who among other things deliberately misled America into war.
For this I was labeled “shrill”.
More than that: throughout these past ten-plus years, it has been considered ill-mannered and uncouth, not to mention unacceptably partisan, to suggest that the parties aren’t symmetric — that, for example, the reluctance of Democrats to cut Social Security and Medicare is not equivalent to the GOP’s consistent pursuit of huge unfunded tax cuts, that the occasional desire of Democrats to put evidence in a more favorable light is not equivalent to the constant, raw dishonesty emanating from the right. And pundits in good standing have been expected to make calls for bipartisanship that involve pretending that Republican politicians are actually the kind of statesmen the party used to contain, but no longer does.
So now we see a primary struggle in which the choice is between a series of not-Romneys whose political and policy views are stark raving mad, on one side, and the not-not-Romney who is, maybe, just pretending to share those views. How did that happen?
The answer, as Brad suggests, is that it happened a long time ago. The GOP isn’t just spectacularly unlucky in its menu of candidates; this is what the party has been for decades. Rick Santorum isn’t someone out of left field; he’s always been what you see now, and he was a central figure in his Senate days.
All that has happened now is that the mannerisms have finally gotten to the point that the pretense of a reasonable party is no longer sustainable.
But you weren’t supposed to notice until just about now.
<https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/looking-back-with-shrillness/>
- Brad DeLong here*: The thing to understand about Paul Krugman’s 2012 “Looking Back With Shrillness” is that it was not a complaint a much as a diagnosis — and, more than that, a vindication delivered in the flat, tired voice of a man who had been right for a decade, and had gotten little for it but the label “shrill”.
Go back and read what Krugman actually wrote in February 2012. The proximate occasion was a post of mine — “Where Were You in 1993, David Brooks?” — in which I had made the boring, documentable point that the Republican Party then staggering through its clown-car primary had not suddenly gone mad. It had been building toward exactly this for a couple of decades. Paul read that and did what Paul does: he generalized it, sharpened it, and turned it into an indictment not merely of the GOP but of the entire respectable commentariat that had spent ten years insisting the emperor was fully clothed.
His confession — and it reads like one — was that “early on in my tenure at the Times, I felt I had no choice but to point out the inconvenient truth that the official line of the commentariat was all wrong. George W. Bush was not a nice, blunt, honest guy who happened to be a conservative; he was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, who among other things deliberately misled America into war. For this I was labeled ‘shrill.’”
Now. I have some standing here, because I was a charter member of the order. The Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill was not, in its original conception, a club of the angry. It was a club of the accurate.
