TPM Cafe: Crank Politics

By Paul Krugman | bio

There’s only one word to describe Jon Chait’s book: shrill. I mean, how can Chait say that “American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists”? The cocktail-party circuit knows better. As Peter Beinart, the then editor of The New Republic, wrote in his review of my 2003 book The Great Unraveling, “guest lists that cross ideological lines can help liberals understand the conservatives they write about. And many Washington conservatives genuinely don't see the Bush administration as radical: they see it as having ratified a big-spending, culturally liberal status quo.”

OK, end snark. Obviously I agree with just about everything that’s in Jon’s book. I cover some of the same ground in my own forthcoming book, The Conscience of a Liberal, though in much less detail. I’d like to take this conversation in a slightly different direction by talking about the second part of the book, on the political environment that lets crackpot economics flourish; Jon’s description is correct, but, I think, somewhat incomplete.