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From Negotiation.Biz Political
Paul Krugman – The Great Unravelling, From Boom to Bust in Three Scandalous Years, pub. Allen Lane, London 2003
Paul Krugman is an academic economist who also writes a regular column for the New York Times. This book is essentially a collection of his articles, which are particularly interesting to non-American readers who will not have read the originals. However the main reason for reading this book is Krugman’s analysis of the Bush Administration and his reporting on its behaviour.
His thesis is that Bush Administration is actually a revolutionary power and he quotes extensively from Henry Kissinger’s early work “A World Restored” [1957] which deals with the impact of Revolutionary France on European politics. In Kissinger’s definition a revolutionary power does not accept the system’s legitimacy. Krugman says that, “It seems clear to me that one should regard America’s right-wing movement – which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media – as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.”
He says, “Am I overstating the case? In fact, there’s ample evidence that key elements of the coalition that now runs the country believe that some long-established American political and social institutions should not, in principle, exist – and do not accept the rules that the rest of us have taken for granted.”
He says that the Heritage Foundation, which he says drives the Bush Administration’s economic ideology, ha a very radical agenda – it wishes to remove programmes like Medicare, social security and unemployment insurance. In the same way the neo-conservatives are not hesitant about the use of force, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, declared that “we are a warlike people and we love war.”
Krugman writes: “The idea that war in Iraq is just a pilot project for a series of splendid little wars seemed, at first, a leftist fantasy – but many people close to the administration have made it clear that they regard this war as only a beginning, and a senior State Department official, John Bolton, told Israeli officials that after Iraq the United States would ‘deal with’ Syria, Iran and North Korea.”
Summing up the agenda of the neo-conservatives Krugman concludes that, “the goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no social safety net at home, which relies on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don’t just teach evolution but do teach religion and – possibly – in which elections are only a formality.”
Krugman quotes Kissinger: “Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane …. But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.”
He gives his rules for reporting in the current circumstances: 1. Don’t assume that policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated goals 2. Do some homework to discover the real goals 3. Don’t assume that the usual rules of politics apply 4. Expect a revolutionary power to respond to criticism by attacking 5. Don’t think that there’s a limit to a revolutionary power’s objectives.
An excellent book well worth reading, I strongly recommend it.
Footnote: I also have just read an interview that Bryan Appleyard had with Francis Fukuyana in the Sunday Times [London] of June 27th 2004, this article refers to the ideas of Leo Strauss who argued that the West was threatened by moral enfeeblement and said that the true philosopher would not necessarily tell the truth. Strauss wrote that for the benefit of the people the true philosopher would support their false, buyt beneficial beliefs in the name of defending liberal democracy. Appleyard says that this concept of systematic deception has returned to haunt the neocons.
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