I Don’t Understand Paul Krugman’s Understanding of the American System of Government

Look. As TGGP said, only 20 percent of Americans are self-identified liberals, compared to about 40% who consider themselves conservative.

This has implications for optimal policy choices: liberals have to solve a different problem than conservatives.

All a conservative politician has to do is to enact conservative policies; that will please his base. If you're a conservative citizen, you want to elect conservative politicians, and you can be reasonably certain that they'll do what you want.

But a liberal politician has to get the votes of non-liberals (mostly moderates) so he's torn between a liberal and a non-liberal agenda. If you're a liberal citizen, you essentially want your views to be overrepresented in Washington; you want Democrats, elected by non-liberals, to do liberal things, while still managing to get re-elected by non-liberals.

This means that the liberal strategy is much less straightforward than the conservative strategy; they need to get bills passed quickly and without debate; they need policies to be enacted by appointed officials (judges and the leaders of rulemaking bodies like the EPA); they need to be as non-majoritarian as possible in their strategy. Lest you think this is some kind of shady, unsavory dealing: this is how the Civil Rights Act was passed. It would have died if it had passed into committee. Waiting for a majority consensus, a straightforward "the people have spoken" signal would have meant many more years of Jim Crow.

Big liberal victories are made quickly, by bypassing the majority. Once they're done, the majority often cherishes them. (Medicare, Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the defeat of acid rain.) In a sense, the liberal project is not to do what people like now, but what their children will be glad you did. That is, if you are not a small-c conservative, then your aims are not yet current consensus.

Krugman is just trying (in an irritating style, I'll grant) to ask liberals to behave like liberals. Majoritarian politics will not be kind to them. A Democratic majority is by no means a liberal majority. Liberals need to act like a clever, embattled minority, which is what they are.

When will people learn that sermons don't change behavior? Look at the Christians -- 2,000 years of listening to sermons, and they still don't act like Christians.

Seems to me that you ken Paul Krugman very well.

What is especially cute is how he just got done telling us that talking about legislation and making big speeches doesn't change the outcome: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/tal...

The post rests on a false dichotomy - either Obama is the sole determinant of how Democratic representatives vote or he doesn't have any influence at all.

But, of course, the President has some influence, and other Presidents successfully used it in the past. Whether it is sufficient to flip enough votes in this bill is anybody's guess. But, in a House with 256 Democratic representatives, he probably has a good shot. In Krugman's view, he should try.

In sum, the post is well-written, but essentially shallow. Will is the one who shows a lack of understanding of the de facto functioning of the American system of government. Perhaps it's a consequence of having written mostly about inconsequential subject matters for a long time.

NYT writes about the supreme court decision: "(in Bush v. Gore) With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections."

Does anyone know why they think the campaign finance decision will benefit Republican candidates more than Democratic ones? If so, can you give me some evidence that this is true? Thanks

The Supreme Court decision did not actually change the outcome of the election. The recounts Gore requested would not have been sufficient to put him over the top. Other possible recounts could have though.

I think this is another case of projection. That is, liberals like Krugman thought that Bush 43 operated this way for most of his term, perhaps until he started running into problems with his proposals for reforming immigration and social security. So now, Krugman can't get why Obama doesn't operate the way that he assumed Bush did. This is sort of related to liberal reaction to Katrina - they had assumed Bush operated like a dictator, so when Katrina happened, they got pissed off that Bush didn't use his dictatorial powers to make the trains run on time with regard to Katrina relief.

Um, no. That whole "hecuva job Brownie" thing was unbelievable.

For once I agree with you Will. It is a silly conceit that the President can simply round up the votes if he tried. The Democrats clearly lack two things that the Republicans have in spades, rendering their superior ideas moot. One is consistent relentless messaging and the other is astonishing party discipline. I believe the Republicans have both because they really treat this thing like a game that doesn't really matter. In a game, it's easy to be a loyalist because the W is what matters, not the policy. And its easy to message, because the message need not be accurate, just useful. It's like watching your favorite football team commit an obvious late hit and yelling at the ref anyway for throwing the flag.

It's too bad it has come to this. It seems like it wasn't always a game to Repbulicans but perhaps I'm just being Pollyannish. Democrats will remain hopeless until they figure out how to play the game or at least start treating the Republicans like the children they are.

Remarkable how much easier it is to keep your troops in line when you're not sending them on a suicide mission.

A better explanation for the difference between the parties that I've heard (I think from Yglesias) is their constituencies. The base of the Republican party are people that call themselves "conservatives". Self-identified "liberals" make up a smaller share of the general population and of the Dem constituency. Democrats get the most highly educated and least educated voters, Republicans get the great middling mass with associates degrees. Republicans have been described as becoming "a southern party", they are strongly concentrated in that region. Dems are associated with New England but only a rather small portion of them live there. Republicans are invariably white and Christian, and more particularly from conservative strains of Protestantism. It's been estimated that over half of all Dem campaign contributions come from Jews, but there's no way they make up much of the vote. Dems have long been strong among Catholic immigrants & their "ethnic" descendants, and much stronger among the smaller but still significant black vote which is generally Protestant. Dems also get the assorted irreligious, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. Dems also appeal to various other minority groups with particular interests: gays, the disabled, union members. Republicans are just more homogenous, will tend to have similar interests and be easier to coordinate.

Fooled me. I expected the two things to be a pair

Ha ha. This literally made me giggle. But look, this is my little old take on this: the liberals are desperate. Just perusing the leftie blogosphere these past few days gives me the impression that many liberals think the Dems are a bunch of wimps. For instance, when some of them think back on '98 when the house repubs got crushed in mid-terms and then the next month, voted to impeach Clinton anyway, the impression is the Repubs had a spine and the dems didn't and they still don't (in fact, that little factoid was whipping around a bit on twitter today if you didn't already know).

Some of them want a Braveheart speech I think, a rally the troops thing going if you haven't already check this out from pandagon . Ezra Klein I think said something in this vein, but not as one-dimensionally as Krugman:
"At this juncture, perceptions and narratives are important, and one of the few people in the country who could impact the conversation over health-care reform is instead commenting smartly on what's driving it. But anybody can do that job. I can do that job. Obama has bigger fish to fry."

So, maybe Krugman is having fantasies of Obama turning into LBJ and "knocking heads" or some such thing. But the desire to at least appear like he is a strong voice in this, well, I don't think it's that off.

Some of them want a Braveheart speech I think, a rally the troops thing going if you haven't already check this out from pandagon.

This is the danger of letting fiction affect your worldview. The problem with the Braveheart speech is that if you're in a situation that calls for it and you go in, nine times out of ten you're not coming back out again.

Democratic senators and representatives will recoil from this attempt at reform because public office is better than having to go get honest work. It's easy for someone to call for a charge when they're not the one who has to go over the top.