MOVEMENT DRIVEL….After listening to George Will this weekend, Brad DeLong is confused:
I have never been able to make any sense at all of the right-wing claim that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by creating a “crisis of confidence” that crippled private investment as American businessmen feared and hated “that Communist Roosevelt.” The crisis of confidence was created by the stock market crash, the deflation, and the bank failures of 1929-1933. Private investment recovered in a very healthy fashion as Roosevelt’s New Deal policies took effect.
There’s a good reason Brad has never been able to make sense of this claim: it was never made in good faith in the first place. Movement conservatives don’t like the New Deal, so they did what they always do when confronted with something they don’t like: they went searching for some content-free but semi-plausible argument against it that they could use to con the rubes. Then, once they found something glib enough to pass muster, they repeated it often enough that it took on the patina of conventional wisdom. Conventional enough even for the likes of George Will.
For the first time in a while, though, liberals have the luxury of mostly ignoring this nonsense. In this case — George Will spouting economic drivel on ABC’s This Week — Paul Krugman batted down the nonsense in the course of a few seconds and the conversation moved on. End of story. Very refreshing.
So today’s moral is: make an argument in good faith, and it will (or should, anyway) be engaged. Spew movement nonsense and you will be quickly corrected and then ignored. It’s a good system.
