Earlier this week, I cheered Paul Krugman for a trio of direct and confrontational posts. As we're watching Republicans and Democrats lining up to gut Social Security, and the gelling of elite opinion to repeat the mistakes of the Great Depression, I want to quote a few pieces from one of the Depression's best economic histories, J.K. Galbraith's recounting of the period, The Great Crash 1929. As the elites seem determined to create a third depression, it is instructive how familiar Galbraith's recountings are (all added emphasis mine).
Then as now, there was the crushing weight of an orthodoxy of inaction: (pp185-6)
The rejection of both fiscal (tax and expenditure) and monetary policy amounted precisely to a rejection of all affirmative government economic policy. The economic advisers of the day had both the unanimity and the authority to force the leaders of both parties to disavow all the available steps to check deflation and depression. In its own way this was a marked achievement -- a triumph of dogma over thought. The consequences were profound.
Last weekend, I did a couple of diaries about how Democrats could challenge the customary rules of the game without becoming "just like them." This was part of the longer series constrasting the policy ineptitude and political prowess of conservatives with the policy prowess and political ineptitude of liberals. I did this under the rubris of "'Breaking The Rules' To Fix The System." The first one used the example of Thoreau's civil disobedience (going to jail rather than helping to finance the Mexican-American War) as a touchstone, and considered how it might have been applied in response to the lawlessness of Bush v. Gore. The second one, looked at how impeachment could have been used to delegitimize Bush-and conservatism more generally-if removing Bush from office had been set aside from the beginning.
This weekend, I'm taking a doubly-related tack-talking about conventional wisdom. First, this is directly related to what I was suggesting should have been the primary purpose of impeachment proceeding, to delegitimate Bush and conservative rule. Second, I want to discuss how conventional wisdom functions as part of the Level 3 infrastructure that liberals and Democrats allow themselves to be trapped and defined by. The irony here is particularly deep, since the term "conventional wisdom" was originally coined by John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the great liberal public intellectuals of the last half of the 20th Century. He first recognized and articulated the concept, but over time it increasingly became a tool of conservative power. So we'll start with a brief look at some of Galbraith's ideas, and how they've been messed with, then we'll take a look at what it means today.
STATE BLOGS
