I'll take my neoconservatism with a side order of fries, please
On the train ride back from Washington Tuesday night, I did some of the reading that Brad DeLong assigned me after my first attempt at writing about neoconservatism. The first thing I got out of Irving Kristol's Fall 1995 Public Interest article on "American conservatism 1945-1965" was that Brad was overdoing it when he said it was "false and stupid" for the Economist's Lexington columnist (a.k.a. Adrian Wooldridge) to claim that neoconservatism "began as a critique of the arrogance of power." Whether that's stupid is an opinion call, but it's definitely not false: Kristol makes pretty clear that neoconservatism began in reaction to what its founders saw as the overreaching of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. That's what the early Public Interest, the movement's founding journal, was all about.
Then again, Kristol begins his essay by stating that "The Public Interest was born well before the term 'neoconservative' was invented, and will--I trust--be alive and active when the term is of only historical interest." Not quite: the journal ceased publication in 2005, and here we are still jabbering about neoconservatives. So Brad is right that the movement left those early days behind and moved on to entirely different places.
Basically, you can take your pick of neoconservatisms, and the Economist chose the early version. But why would anybody want to do that? Brad asked in a post Tuesday (appropriately giving full props to a certain Curious Capitalist commenter):
I think Paul Lukasiak has the right analogy: You can tell a "revolution betrayed" story of neoconservatism and say that everything would have been peachy if not for the hijacking of the movement by Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and their progeny; just as you can tell a "revolution betrayed" story of Communist Russia. But complaining that William Kristol, John Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and the Kagan brothers today do not have the analytical modesty and dislike of poorly-thought-out radical leaps of Daniel Bell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan is like complaining that J.V. Stalin failed to properly implement Marx's vision of a free and wealthy society of associated producers. Such a story has more than a little lunacy in it.
The most interesting question to ask of the "revolution betrayed" stories is why people feel compelled to tell them. Stalin at least (mis)cited Marx at every occasion. It's been a long, long time since I've heard a neoconservative refer to Bell or Moynihan as any sort of authority.
I have a partial answer, and I like it because it also helps answer why Brad and Paul Krugman, who on economic beliefs alone would seem to be in the center or perhaps even slightly to the right of the American mainstream, get so "shrill," to use Brad's term, about the neocons and their intellectual fellow travelers in the Republican Party.
The mainstream academic economics of the 1950s and 1960s (as personified by, say, Paul Samuelson) was already more oriented toward free markets and the importance of incentives than the bulk of liberal intellectualizing in those days. It still had its excesses, mainly an overconfidence in the possibility of Keynesian "fine-tuning" of the economy. But those were confronted within the discipline, by Milton Friedman and then Robert Lucas. And Marty Feldstein, another figure very much of the economic establishment, got his peers to start paying more attention to the incentive effects of taxes and government programs. Graduate students at MIT (Krugman) and Harvard (DeLong) in the 1970s and 1980s were taught all this stuff in class; they certainly didn't need Irving Kristol or, god forbid, Jude Wanniski to tell them that some of the liberal dogmas that evolved out of the New Deal were flawed. (You can get a flavor of this in the fascinating recent debate on supply-side economics between Krugman, DeLong, Bruce Bartlett and others on Mark Thoma's blog.)
Those of us too benighted to study economics, however, had to take our critiques of liberal verities where we could find them (because at Princeton in the mid-1980s, you generally weren't going to hear them in undergraduate politics and history classes). For my part, I started doing crazy things like reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page and talking politics with a couple of budding neocon classmates. Later on, I even subscribed to the New Criterion for a couple of years. I was never a convert, but I appreciated hearing intelligently argued alternatives to the standard liberal narratives.
So for me at least it's not so much a "revolution betrayed" story as a sort of "cafeteria neoconservatism." I took what I found interesting, and ignored the rest. Which may be naive, but I don't think it's lunacy. I guess Brad would call most of the stuff I found to be interesting "neoliberalism." But I'm not really clear on what neoliberalism is supposed to mean (other than that in Europe it means free-market zealotry). All I know is that I've got some neo in me. No, not that Neo.
Update: In the comments to this post, and on his blog, Brad invokes The Dread Alterman, Sworn Enemy of All Time Bloggers, who took Sam Tanenhaus to task a few years ago for perceived sins similar to those that prompted Brad to dump on the Economist's Adrian Wooldridge (a.k.a. "Lexington"). Anyway, I'd love to pick an ugly fight with Alterman, news of which would then spatter Rashomon-style through the mediasphere, but I'm afraid I don't get invited to the same fancy parties that he and Ana and Joe do.
Update 2: I'd like to offer a big howdy to "Altercation" readers, sent here grudgingly by The Dread Alterman himself. Just so you know, the previous paragraph is meant humorously. Also, an occasional host of fancy parties attended by Ana and Joe has reminded me that I have in fact gone to a couple of them. Just not to the really good ones where fights break out.
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" Graduate students at MIT (Krugman) and Harvard (DeLong) in the 1970s and 1980s were taught all this stuff in class; they certainly didn't need Irving Kristol or, god forbid, Jude Wanniski to tell them that some of the liberal dogmas that evolved out of the New Deal were flawed. "
are we talking about economic policy dogma, or social policy dogma?
Because it seems to me that there was nothing wrong with (neo)-Keynesian theory. The problem with the economy in the 70s was an abandonment of Keynesian principles (deficit spending to pay for Vietnam AND The Great Society during an economic expansion) and then the malignant "deus ex machina" type interference in the US economy in the form of the oil embargo.
Supply-side has always been a crock -- an excuse for tax cuts for the rich in desperate search of an economic "theory" to support it.
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I'm talking economics. In the 1960s it was widely believed that there was a long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, and that it was possible to fine-tune the business cycle with well-timed cuts/hikes in taxes and spending. By the 1980s the consensus was that the inflation/unemployment tradeoff was a temporary thing and that Milton Friedman's "long and variable lags" made macroeconomic fine-tuning close to impossible. Things have crept back in the other direction a little bit since then, but only a little bit.
Also, while no economists that I know of subscribe to the nonsense that tax cuts always increase revenue, a whole lot of perfectly respectable ones believe that reduced capital taxation brings higher long-term growth and that you get diminishing returns when you raise the top marginal tax rate too high. Which are moderate versions of supply-side tenets.
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Let's assign more reading from Eric Alterman! Eric's point is that the neoconservatives are eager to assimilate and canonize intelligent but non-neoconservative thinkers--Lionel Trilling, George Orwell, Daniel Bell, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan--to try to burnish their intellectual reputation. Here Alterman calls an intellectual foul on Sam Tanenhaus :
"Neoconservatives are serial grave-robbers. Back in the early eighties, Norman Podhoretz tried to claim both Ronald Reagan and George Orwell.... Last seen in the neocons' trunk leaving the literary graveyard were the intellectual remains of the liberals' liberal, the critic Lionel Trilling. Trilling never uttered so much as a sympathetic syllable about the neocon/Reaganite worldview to which his would-be inheritors became so attached after his death in 1975. Yet there he was, sitting atop a pyramid of Reagan-worshipers--people whose politics he never endorsed and whose style of argument he abhorred--in a chart accompanying a Sam Tanenhaus-authored encomium to the neocons....
"Both [Trilling and Orwell] wrote witheringly of those intellectuals who gave their hearts and minds over to Stalinism, prescribing tough-minded scrutiny in the face of emotional appeals.... Nothing, however, could be further from the neoconservatives' creed... 'the anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals'....
>[Those] whose writings have held up best... are those who never gave themselves over to the neocon temptation--who never became apologists for Reagan and Bush, much less Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.... Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Michael Harrington, Alfred Kazin and Garry Wills led a relatively lonely intellectual life in the eighties, as Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Elliott Abrams and Jeane Kirkpatrick were all toasting themselves at the Reagan White House..."
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"Also, while no economists that I know of subscribe to the nonsense that tax cuts always increase revenue, a whole lot of perfectly respectable ones believe that reduced capital taxation brings higher long-term growth and that you get diminishing returns when you raise the top marginal tax rate too high. Which are moderate versions of supply-side tenets. "
Regarding "higher long term growth", doubtless you needed be reminded that Keynes himself once said "In the long term, we are all dead." The first four years of the Bush regime demonstrated pretty conclusively that neither lower tax rates nor lower interest rates (nor those factors combined) lead to real economic growth in the absence of sufficient demand because people with money aren't going to invest in job creating enterprises when there is insufficient demand for the goods/services that would be provided.
There are far too many other factors involved in economies for projections of "long-term growth" to have any usefulness other than as fodder for Economics Ph.d. candidate theses. In the real world, these theories have but one function--to provide a "intellectual" foundation for the development/maintenance/expansion of a plutocracy.
As for "respectable economists" endorsing the Laffer curve theory -- sure, when you have extremely high tax rates, its perfectly respectable to think that lower tax rates could increase revenues. But once you leave the extremes, lower taxes means less revenue.
/rant mode off.
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Take your pick. No matter which one, they are all more or less faith based, as in, if you sit around and talk about it enough with like minded people, it becomes real. Economics won't change until it becomes a real science, where you can make predictions that are true in most, if not all, circumstances, and politics is not a driving influence the way it always has been.
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This is some of the most pompous, solipsistic nonsense ever posted on a TIME blog. Next time, pull the corn-cob out of - well you know where - and try to find a point.
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You *would* eat McTrash with your bumbling theories, probably elucidated whilst waiting in the Mickey D's drive-thru.
I would term your style of intellectualizing 'sloppy conservatism', not to mention the sloppy 'journalism' in this blog.
You link to Gawker's contrived 'ugly fight', which, by the way, was unsourced and written out of sheer hearsay, if you had bothered to get Alterman's point of view.
http://mediamatters.org/altercation/#gawker
Enjoy your fries with that.
I'd also recommend watching 'Super Size Me' while you eat those fries, you MSM bloviator. -
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Ummm, I link to Alterman's versions above as well.
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