The Arc of History Bends Towards Justice

Andrew Leonard has a review up on Salong about Paul Krugman's new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

Leonard says Krugman's book takes on the notion that American politics simply swings back and forth, and doesn't respond to situations, or movements, or political action.

... the most meta-level of all political economy arguments is the one that says that transient shifts in political direction don't really make that much of a difference to fundamental long-range changes in things like inequality. To this school, the rise and fall of inequality in the United States is like plate tectonics -- you can observe it, and try to understand it, but you can't actually do much about it.

To which Krugman convincingly says: Hogwash. The gross inequality of the Gilded Age that led up to the Great Depression morphed into a stunningly middle-class economy because of concrete initiatives forced through via Roosevelt's New Deal. The growing inequality of the past 30 years is directly attributable to policies enacted by the conservatives who first broke through with Ronald Reagan and reached their apogee with George W. Bush.

Middle-class societies don't emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be created through political action.

The corollary is that they can also be destroyed.

Krugman concludes: "Republicans increase economic inequality, Democrats decrease it, and so, politics matter."

He ties the long running disputes between the parties of race and civil rights to specific policy disagreements today, like health insurance. (He says Republicans originally opposed national health insurance, in the 1960s, because they feared it would lead to desegregated hospitals.) Leonard sums up 100 years of GOP history: "The transformation of the party of Lincoln to the party of Willie Horton is one of the abiding tragedies of American political history."

But Krugman believes this is a good time to be a progressive. And one signal trend on which he pins his hopes is increasing diversity among Americans, and a general tolerance toward each other.

Beyond the blunt, crude fact that America is getting less white, there's a more uplifting reason to believe that the political exploitation of race may be losing its force: As a nation we've become much less racist. The most dramatic evidence of diminishing racism is the way people respond to questions about a subject that once struck terror into white hearts: miscegenation. In 1978, as the ascent of movement conservatism to power was just beginning, only 36 percent of Americans polled by Gallup approved of marriages between whites and blacks, while 54 percent disapproved. As late as 1991 only a plurality of 48 percent approved. By 2002, however, 65 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriages; by June 2007, that was up to 77 percent.

We could certainly be in better hands than the current Democratic Party to seize this moment. But, if Krugman is correct, history seems to be on our side.