In the universe of Soviet communism, "either/or" flourished. Murals depicted a perfect workers' world. If you were to criticize the quality of the paintwork, you might well wind up in stir or worse. In that kind of political world, we do not criticize Us; we are relentlessly critical of Them. There are Soviet-style Americans for whom Nixon-the-felon didn't have a single good quality or Roosevelt was a villain determined to destroy the Constitution. They have been educated by their culture to use the correct (partisan) terms or suffer social and political damnation. Either you're with us or you're against us.
There's something unusually petty and positively Soviet about Paul Krugman's choice of target today.
... How we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.
Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”
Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
Wait! Bill Clinton (in 1991) and Barack Obama were both right. Come to that, Krugman is right, too, about the Reagan legacy. Facing the truth about Ronald Reagan is long overdue. Greed, Central America, lies, more greed -- what more does anyone need to agree that he represents the worst of capitalism and imperialism in America? Reagan was (as Obama knows well) an energizing antidote to the embarrassing mess caused by that other Republican president, Richard Nixon.
Republicans with suffering egos seized upon Reagan. The failed actor with a huge fund of apparent affability and strong ties to a powerful and wealthy California Republican cabal gave the national party hope of redemption. He was a glass of neat, sweet whiskey handed to Republicans coming in from the cold. He offered Republicans the "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing" and then used that energy to fuel a thoroughly corrupt administration.
Krugman is right about how eager we are (we all are -- both sides) to alter history. What Krugman might take on are the anxieties that drive us to remake our past. He doesn't take advantage of his position to criticize the media who feed those anxieties. We'd be much stronger and, god knows, a lot less picky if we publicly accepted that our history is complicated and full of contradictions. We'd be a lot healthier if we recognized the extent of our own roles in creating the political culture that's giving us so much trouble. And Krugman is right about the Clintons.
I’d say that the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan.
Irony and contradictions don't scare you and me and Barack Obama. They do scare the hell out of people in power. Since 1991 Bill Clinton has become one of those people in power. Given his relationship with the family Bush, I very much doubt he'd be as explicit about Reagan as he was then.
Obama is still unafraid of ironies and contradictions. If there's any candidate out there who's likely to be a president who'd stand in stark contrast to the worst of Ronald Reagan's legacy, Obama's the one. Not, god knows, Hillary Clinton. That's why so many of us embrace his candidacy even as we find the Clintons' cynicism and embrace of power so daunting and unattractive.
