Charity Begins at Krugman's Corners

Dear Dr. Bones,

Aunt Nitsy’s least godawful surviving opeddist has distinguishes two classes of SSS -- "smashers of Social Security" --- gentry and neogentry as follows:

What’s really going on here? [SSS-A] Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution. But they receive crucial support from [SSS-B] Washington insiders, for whom a declared willingness to cut Social Security has long served as a badge of fiscal seriousness, never mind the arithmetic.

Any analyst who comes up with so grossly asymmetrical a Manichee system as ‘conservatives’ versus ‘insiders’ ought to know enough to go back and check her work without being told. Or at least she might try out the obvious flip-side a little, call it "L*b*r*ls versus Outsiders."

One need not try anything, actually, one need only formulate the thing to be tried, to put oneself in a position to suspect that Prof. Krugman may be a closet wingnut: (you bleedin’-heart) Lieberals v. (us wunnerful self-announcin’) Outsiders is, in itself, tiresome old bilge and Party cries comin’ across the oilslick waters from way off to starboard. The core Party of Grant and Hoover (and Goldwater ’n’ Atwater ’n’ ______) has never for a nanosecond consisted of "Washington outsiders." Long before the POG proper existed, Mr. Cash’s "tariff gang" had already put in decades lobbyin’ at Washington’ City for special favors and extraordinary self-servicin’s from their Uncle Sam.

Elephants and Bourbons really do seem pretty near incapable of learnin’ new tricks, though not of hirin’ themselves a few clever and smirkish young señoritos who can. Though to be sure, the Wreckin’ Crew callin’ themselves ‘outsiders’ chiefly because they have always left what America’s party would call ‘politics’ to third- and fourth-rate comrades an’ neocomrades, who presumably can’t cut it out there in Lord Mammon’s Market, was already an ancient Big Shtyk by the time Freelords Rockefeller Major and J. P. Morgan got around to playin’ it far back in the Ulyssean Epoch of kiddie selfservatism.

If Prof. Krugman truly permits the Party of militant extremists slip that "Barefoot Boy from Wall Street" song an’ dance about what "Washington outsiders" they all are past him, better he should confine himself to wonkery altogether and leave politics to decent political grown-ups.

However PK may have stuck in the word ‘Washington’ by inadvertence, and mostly mean that GOP Geniuses are outsiders at the Faculty Club of the best university in Mercer County NJ. That is, I daresay, true enough. [1]

But I set out to recommend Prof. Krugman’s chairity to you, sir, not meaning by that his taking Wingnut City and Hooverville at their own word about outsider status. More to my original-intented point is when he says that wingnutettes and wingnuts "hate Social Security for ideological reasons." Expressio unius est exclusio alterius: to specify that the selfservicers’ hatred is ‘ideological’ in character lets them off the hook about all their cruder pocketbook (and whight-supremacist) reasons for hatin’.

Unless he has just fallen victim to the vulgar habit of labeling other folks’ silly stances ‘ideological’ when all one really means is "sincerely held" or the like. I myself preach continually that one must almost always assume that political opinions are subjectively sincere, but that presumption has nothing to do with ideology, a product that America’s Otherparty can scarcely be accused of possessin’ since they had to stop callin’ themselves Federalists. Wingnuts love wingnuts; that is, we are Wunnerful US is a brain disease, not ‘ideology’ in any intelligible sense.




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[1] Note, though, that even if the patient ‘only’ meant that, he exhibits dangerous symptoms of omphaloscopy, nobody’s Faculty Club being the luminous orb about which the former Real World in fact revolves.