The Apotheosis of Princess Neoterica

Thus we still live in an era in which you have to have been wrong to be respectable. You’re not considered serious about national security unless you were for invading Iraq; you’re not considered a serious political analyst unless you spent the last three years of the Bush administration predicting a Republican comeback; you’re not considered a serious economic analyst unless you dismissed the idea that the Bush Boom, such as it was, rested on a housing bubble.

Thus we still live in an era in which Professor Krugman's principal column for the New York Times Company is very weak whenever it lifts its nose from Lord Mammon’ grindstone. The scribble that quotation comes from is admirable, and admirable as political analysis, but its is squirreled away in mere blogghiatura where not many Homelanders™ will see it, even amongst NYTC customers.

Notice that PK is effectively accusing his dimwit respectables of agreeing to solemnly pretend that they dwell in some holy Homeland™ of militant extremism rather than in the humdrum United States of America. His account of HOW the dimwits behave is excellent, but when it comes to WHY they behave that way, he disappoints:

[M]any people in the news media, especially at the managerial level, decided a long time ago that movement conservatism was The Future — and that the sensible thing, whether or not you yourself were a conservative, was to go with the wave. That meant treating right-wing politicians and media figures with great respect, while ridiculing the opposition as the Incredible Shrinking Democrats or the Incredibly Shrinking Democrats, or whatever. And anyone who didn’t treat the right with great respect, who didn’t get with the program, was a flake, a moonbat.

"The sensible thing [is] to go with the wave" is an impeccably polite way of describing selfish ambition and crude lust for Ehre, Macht, Reichtum, Ruhm und die Liebe der Frauen[1], but if Prof. Krugman does not intend us to make that equation that I just made, then what he did intend is hidden in obscurity. Doubtless he did not care to say very much about motivations when it comes to people he has to live with and market his scribbles to.

More worrisome for me is that one cannot make out Dr. Krugman’s estimate of his dimwits’ sincerity. Can the accused really have believed "that movement conservatism was The Future"? I am not sure what the ‘right’ answer to that question would be, whether the dimwits look dimmer as (1) incompetent, but honest, prognosticators, or as (2) shameless cynics and liars. To the extent, though, that PK has them behaving the same dimwit way even after 4 November 2008, one must suppose that notions like shamelessness and mendacity and cynicism have probably occurred to the private Paul Krugman, whether he writes such fugitive thoughts up for publication or not.


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[1] Perhaps it is crude of me to say ‘crude’, though, for Dr. Freud of Vienna attributed these objects of ambition to der Kunstler, not to every Tom, Dick and Harriet that comes down the pike.