Ezra Klein urges us to compare Kristol’s New York Times column today with Krugman’s.
Here is a passage from Krugman’s piece, “Poverty Is Poison”:
L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.
But progress stalled thereafter: American politics shifted to the right, attention shifted from the suffering of the poor to the alleged abuses of welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and the fight against poverty was largely abandoned.
In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably understates the true depth of many children’s misery.
Living in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.
And from Kristol’s, titled “Democrats Should Read Kipling”:
Having controlled the executive branch for 28 of the last 40 years, Republicans tend to think of themselves as the governing party — with some of the arrogance and narrowness that implies, but also with a sense of real-world responsibility. Many Democrats, on the other hand, no longer even try to imagine what action and responsibility are like. They do, however, enjoy the support of many refined people who snigger at the sometimes inept and ungraceful ways of the Republicans. (And, if I may say so, the quality of thought of the Democrats’ academic and media supporters — a permanent and, as it were, pensioned opposition — seems to me to have deteriorated as Orwell would have predicted.)
The Democrats won control of Congress in November 2006, thanks in large part to President Bush’s failures in Iraq. Then they spent the next year seeking to ensure that he couldn’t turn those failures around. Democrats were “against” the war and the surge. That was the sum and substance of their policy. They refused to acknowledge changing facts on the ground, or to debate the real consequences of withdrawal and defeat. It was, they apparently thought, the Bush administration, not America, that would lose. The 2007 Congressional Democrats showed what it means to be an opposition party that takes no responsibility for the consequences of the choices involved in governing.
“Get it?” Echidne asks.
The ruling power is the Republican party, and they are really good at running the government because they have spent so much time asking themselves: “If such and such were to happen then what?” For instance, lots of this self-examination took place right before the Iraq invasion, I’m sure, and also when deciding on how the government should respond to the disasters caused by hurricane Katrina, and also when the Republicans decided to make the Food and Drug Administration go on a starvation diet, just in time for all the dangerous foods and medications entering this country. All that careful thinking, all that responsibility! Though the responsibility tends to come with retroactive immunity these days.
Brad DeLong is “not surprised to find William Kristol unable to read either George Orwell or Rudyard Kipling…” and concludes that “Paying writers like William Kristol $5 a word for prime content holes, I don’t give the New York Times as we know it another decade.”
Maha has a nice round-up, and a video of Kristol on Comedy Central (aptly).
Jonathan Chait finds it a bit rich that Kristol is “lectur[ing] Democrats for lacking moral seriousness, putting politics ahead of the national interest, thinking of politics as just a game, and so on…” when “Kristol’s idea of high quality of thought is to assert that anybody who doesn’t support the Bush administration’s foreign policy does not ‘support the troops,’ to insist that war critics believe that the United States is winning but actually want their own country to lose, and to embrace the metaphor of the ‘stab in the back’ to illustrate this notion.”
Chait concludes:
It’s bad enough that the Times gave a weekly column to a partisan operator and thoroughly mediocre writer instead of the many competent conservative writers who would have jumped at the role. But does this hack also have to lecture the rest of us on our responsibilities as intellectuals? Were no members of the Gambino family available to write the ethics column?
Kathy
Liberty Street 