Jumping To Conclusions

I happened to be reviewing an old piece in the American Prospect about Paul Krugman, and his reply, and perhaps have a little bit more insight into Krugman's shrill partisan rhetoric. It might seem as if what separates Republicans from Democrats is the policies they prefer. But Krugman explicitly rejects that:

But the important point is that this objection presumes that we are agreed on what must be done--which brings me to the question of what it means to be a liberal.

To Bob Kuttner, liberalism means supporting more government intervention in the marketplace. Above all, it means supporting managed international trade and deficit-financed public investment. In fact, not only does Kuttner know what needs to be done: He knows, in advance, what the conclusions of future cutting-edge economic theory will be. He knows that I must have stopped being an innovator after the mid-1980s, because my work no longer seemed to provide a rationale for neo-mercantilist trade policies; and he knows that the remarkable revival of Keynesianism is a rarefied academic affair of no real importance, because the new Keynesians still think that we ought to reduce the budget deficit. (Why is it illiberal to think that monetary rather than fiscal policy can be used to increase aggregate demand?)

Somehow, though, I always thought that liberalism was about compassion and justice, and have never understood what import quotas and budget deficits have to do with it.

Now, it's hardly a surprise to hear that some (many?) liberals think this way. But one might think that Krugman, a highly educated, supposedly worldly, academic, would be a little more sophisticated than that. One would, apparently, be wrong. Krugman's philosophy is that liberalism is defined by compassion. Which explains why Krugman is the second most partisan pundit out there.