The Benefactor Explanation: Matt Stoller says the right is more interested in entrenching inequality than worrying about the economy.
The Illiterate Explanation: Maybe they're just dumb.
The Strategic Explanation: TPM Reader JF observes that a long depression serves the GOP's political interests.
The obvious thing to say about this is that these explanations are mutually re-enforcing. In particular, the fact that a prolonged economic downturn serves the GOP's political interests massively increases the grasp of the other factors.
But DeLong argues that (4) is simply wrong:
A long depression does not serve the GOP's political interests because this recession is so easy to blame on Bush: deregulation and then the failure to agree to a timely and sufficient fiscal policy program.
Moreover, the elderly are not well-positioned to weather a deflationary storm: their 401(k)s and other assets have fallen in value by at least a third in the past year.
No. (1), (2), and (3) are sufficient.
And both DeLong and Yglesias are ignoring #5:
* The Machurian Explanation: A slightly more callous version of the Strategic Explanation, it's possible that GOP officials secretly hate the United States and are actively trying to destroy us from within.
On the flip, I'll try my hand on my own theory of everything (TOE) Neo-Hooverite. (Hint: Like it says above, It's the conservatism, stupid!)
I'm hoping to weigh in later on the general outlines of neo-Hooverism, picking up on Matt's post "Why the Right Will Oppose Getting Us Out of Recession" along with a few others coalescing into a general theory. But here I just want to slice and dice a truly hallucinatory neo-Hooverite fantasy piece from a few weeks back by Amity Shlaes. It shows just how utterly divorced from reality these people are.
"Obama Will Take Us Backward By Channeling Keynes" was a Bloomberg commentary piece that ran on Nov. 19. Not only does Shlaes slam Keynes, that's the easy part. She actually attacks the interstate highway system, and equates it to the "Bridge To Nowhere"!
Well, on second thought, that's not really that strange. I mean, if every foreign leader who looks cross-eyed at us is Adolph Hitler, then the interstate highways system really is the "Bridge To Nowhere." You see, it's a demonstrable fact that any false statement can be deduced from any other false statement.
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