While he does not come right out and state it, Krugman fairly convincingly shows that Adam Smith’s mythic Invisible Hand is just that- mythic and invisible, but invisible because it’s nonexistent. In this, he is clearly a Keynesian. But, even the current Bush Administration embraces its own interventionism in matters economic. The question of Keynesian triumph is settled- only the details of when, why, and where to apply it is left to battle over by Left and Right. With that as a given, Krugman then details that Liberals, when they get power, can best keep it by finishing what the New Deal started, for Krugman also blames the failed promise of the New Deal as its ultimate undoing. The cornerstone to this plan is to make national heath insurance the centerpiece of the Newer Deal.
Krugman’s only misstep, philosophically, is when he tries to argue that Ralph Nader was wrong, in 2000, when he said there was little difference between the two parties. Krugman denies this, stating, ‘There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship,’ and uses his whole thesis over decades as proof.
Unfortunately, this is one of the occasions where a long view is the wrong view, because Nader was talking specifically about recent events, and the two major candidates, as well as a broad slate, not just a narrow domestic agenda. In fact, the whole capitulation of the Democratic Party to fall in lockstep behind President Bush on the march to war with Iraq, as well as that of the oft-demonized Liberal Media (including, most infamously, Krugman’s newspaper employer), showed just how right Nader was- at least pre-Barack Obama, as well as convincingly showing the claim of a Liberal Media to be bogus.
The modern Democratic Party is not the ‘party of ideas’ that Krugman claims, but the party of the idealess and spineless. And while Krugman is correct about the lack of radicalization of the Democratic Party, he overlooks their lobotomization. Well, not quite. While he never details it and names it as such, he does give a number of examples of it, including quoting FDR’s famed speech, in 1936, just before the election, where he rails against the malefactors of wealth who hate him, and that he welcomes their hatred. Krugman, in effect, notes the tree, but not the forest, when he acknowledges that no Democratic politician today would ever state such so boldly, for they would not want to be even accused of the class warfare the Right Wing relishes in undertaking.
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