June 25, 2002
DeLong, a blogger who also happens to be an economics Ph.D, a tenured full professor, and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, tidily demolishes Greider’s notion that a depression could be counted on to have any such effect. What’s really striking, though, is Greider’s flirtation with one of the oldest and stupidest tropes of the left, the notion that things are about to get much worse and that this is a good thing because it will bring on the necessary preconditions for the revolution, or whatever fantasy of sudden and all-encompassing radical change is currently on offer.
Of course, meanwhile, actual people’s lives will be ruined by the things-getting-much-worse part, but that’ll be okay since it’s all part of mankind’s march to a triumphant future. And in fact reformist measures are to be sneered at and dismissed, since they merely delay the exposure of the contradictions inherent in the system. This is why, for a certain kind of so-called leftist, the real enemies aren’t the powerful and the privileged. The real enemies, to be fought tooth and nail, are reforming liberals.
I don’t think Greider is actually this variety of hard-left nincompoop, but it’s amazing how easy it is to slide into the kind of thinking in which the prospect of a severe depression becomes something happy and delicious. For my part, I want a button that says “Hard-Nosed Meliorist.” [02:23 PM]
When this becomes a technique (as opposed to a mere philosophy -- i.e. "lets make this happen" instead of "it would be a good thing if...") it has a name: terrorism.
I'm referring to classic Red Army terrorism. It goes something like this: if we bomb randomly and kill and maim, the government we oppose will be forced to take repressive measures to combat us. If the government takes repressive measures, the people will rise up and overthrow them, and we will have the society we want.
The number of logical flaws in this staggers the imagination. As we're seeing in the US right now, the repressive measures are just being swallowed, because the terrorist acts were horrific enough to make not only the government but the people believe they were necessary (supposing you believe the government really believes it). And if we rise up and overthrow our oppressors, we will put the terrorists up against the wall FIRST.
Of course, this isn't the kind of terrorism being practiced by Al Qaeda. They're just trying to...what? Show how weak we are? Cow us into accepting an Islamic state? I dunno. I don't even know what their goals are. I bet they're as stupid and illogical as the Red Army's, though.
All of which is beside the point, like my ears.
I'm all for deflating the smug unilateralism of blah blah. But even if throwing a depression would work, it's too high a price. And it wouldn't work. Taking action calculated to bring one about, which I haven't heard anyone advocate, would be the Red Army logic, and a dilute version of the Red Army morality.
As an Unemployed Guy, I'm pretty much counting on an economic recovery to save my personal economic bacon. If the recovery DOES materialize, I figure jobs will open up in my sector, and I'll view this little interlude of unemployment as a lovely, long vacation. If the economy DOESN'T recover ... well, I'm pretty old to get a job involving the wearing of paper hats and having my voice emitted from a giant clown head.
I might be missing something, but the relevent sentence in Greider's piece is this:
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The smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy could be abruptly deflated by economic events--which probably would be a good thing for world affairs, since Washington couldn't run roughshod over others, but terrible for US prosperity.
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While I think that the link between "US enters New Depression"--> "US plays better with other nations" is, indeed, dodgy, I don't see Greider exercising schadenfreude. "Terrible for US prosperity" is a bad thing, isn't it?
Greider wants to see the scandalous state of US business affairs cleaned up because, as he says, "this scandal stuff is bad for business". He spends most of the short essay hoping that something prevents the worst from happening; he says explicitly that doing nothing, taking no reformatory actions and letting the economy collapse would be terrible. He's no Naderite, hoping that a Bush administration will lead to the cleansing of the system; he's hoping, instead, that if the US economy does collapse, maybe there might be a small silver lining.
I also point out that Brad DeLong asserts that if the US economy does collapse, "An economic depression would not reduce the strength of the U.S. military". Here I was, thinking that armies needed money to operate.
DeLong removes an important piece of context from one of his Greider quotes, "but terrible for US prosperity," apparently because it weakens his slam at Greider. And both authors seem to forget that two of the Axis powers in World War II became fascist through the exploitation of depression by nationalist politics.
Where is the TheYoungKarlMarx when we need him?
By the way, this preview facility multiplies paragraph tags when used with Galeon and Mozilla 0.99.
In addition to the bit Kevin mentions that Greider's complete sentence affirms that depression would be bad for the US, I also want to add that if the US economy is destined to tank -- and recent events (e.g. Worldcom) make that increasingly likely -- I'd rather see that happen sooner than later, as the cure of propping the economy up as it now stands may well be worse than the disease. (Though of course, how did we ultimately get out of the Great Depression again?) I say this as someone imminently to be unemployed, BTW; if there's a depression, I want the worst to pass before I exhaust my unemployment benefits and savings, thank you.
Chris Q asks:
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(Though of course, how did we ultimately get out of the Great Depression again?)
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Massive governmental infrastructure projects and deficit spending. Sort of the way we got out of the early 1980s recession, except FDR was mopre honest about what he was doing.
Fine. But the conventional wisdom often is that "Nobody cares about that, because the economy is good".
Greider might just be realistically admitting the truth of that statement. Basically, even though things aren't really too good, nothing will change until they get worse.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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