| So why did Yglesias fabricate the storyline that I pushed the concept "that government intervention was unnecessary?" I guess it's possible it has something to do with the recent flap whereby his bosses at CAP knee-capped him over his light criticism of the corporate front-group Third Way. Perhaps he's just trying to do the Beltway's old Punch a Hippie act, whereby he proves his Beltway credentials by attacking to his left.
My guess, however, is that it's not that, and that it's something deeper and that it wasn't calculated. My guess is that it's a carelessly reflexive statement that reflects a broader trend whereby pundits and commentators have inaccurately caricatured bailout opponents. The conventional wisdom in D.C. has been that if you were for the bailout, you were supposedly a Very Serious Pragmatist, but if you were one of the majority of Americans who was against it, you were a Luddite Reactionary who wanted the government to do nothing at all and let the economy die.
Now, I agree - there were right-wing reactionaries like Pence who opposed the bailout because of an ideological antipathy to government intervention in the market.
But the progressive opposition had to do with the structure of the bailout being proposed, not the concept of government intervention. In fact, many of us said the government should intervene, only on very different terms than it did (for instance, on terms that bought voting shares of stock, included oversight measures, seriously limited executive pay, etc.).
When the final bill came to the floor of the House and Senate, progressive opponents believed it should have been voted down, because, as Matt Stoller and Dean Baker show now (and showed at the time), that would have amost certainly forced a different kind of government intervention - one likely on much better terms (not hard to do, considering the terms of the current bailout are so absurdly bad that banks are using our taxpayer cash to subsidize lavish executive bonuses, while simultaneously refusing to tell reporters or regulators how they are spending the money).
Now, of course, we know the results. Various studies have shown that those of us who raised progressive objections to the bailout have been proven right, and those who advocated it have been proven wrong. The fact that the same pre-bailout caricatures of proponents as Very Serious and opponents as Luddites now continue (and worse, continue to be pushed by progressive voices like Yglesias*) is merely a commentary on the staying power of D.C.'s fact-free memes - nothing more, nothing less.
It's the same thing with so many issues, really - the highest profile being the war. Those who opposed the Iraq War are still seen as Unserious Ideologues and those who promoted it are looked at as Serious Pragmatists.
How to end this? It's hard to say. The vast majority of the public is both intensely against the current bailout and the Iraq War, and so D.C. has effectively said that the vast majority of the public in whose name it governs is Unserious and worthy of scorn.
That's an extremist and authoritarian theme if there ever was one, and my guess is it will take years of movement work to change that dynamic, whether on the bailout, the war or any other issue where Washington has sneered at the public. Getting our government to even take We the People seriously - much less do what we want - is the challenge of our time.
* I'm not really sure whether Yglesias was for or against the bailout. It's hard to tell by his aggregate pre-vote posts, though this one suggests he was for it. If that's true and he was for it, it would shed further light on why he's now trying to dishonestly caricature bailout opponents. This is what D.C. folk tend to do - when they are wrong, rather than admit fault, they dig in and intensify their efforts to marginalize those who were right (see: war, Iraq). |
