Following up on my post below (and the critical phase we’re entering in January 2009), here’s a question I’m going to be thinking about over the holidays: what are the factions?
We’re going to hear a lot of pablum about how we’re beyond left and right or how ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are outdated constructs. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I mean is that the critical public policy questions we face post-2008 are different enough from those from earlier in this decade and back into the 1990s that the ways we divided up the players in the public square isn’t really that helpful in figuring out what’s happening or even who we should be supporting.
Let’s start with everything from the mid-point of the political spectrum left, or rather the whole ‘center’ and go left.
What are the factions or groups and what are they pushing for?
And please note that the following is offered in the mod of thinking aloud, less an effort to say anything definitively than to jump start the conversation.
It’s seems almost impossible to find anyone who doesn’t support vast amounts of near-term (say, two year horizon) stimulus (let’s peg ‘vast’ at $500 billion and up) until you get very far to the right end of the ideological spectrum. You’ve got political opportunists like John Boehner and Eric Cantor posturing about spending. But I think this is largely a distraction from where even most political people are. (And Republicans are at least a bit wrong-footed in this effort by the massive amounts of government spending their prime business supporters are currently begging for.) You’ve also got a debate about whether to have stimulus in the form of spending or taxes. But again, at least in broad strokes, I don’t see a lot of people seriously arguing for making tax cuts a big part of the equation.
So in terms of the center and the left, the key points are that the usual forces you’d expect to stand against these sorts of policies (Blue Dog Dems, Rubinite economics types, deficit hawks, etc.) have withdrawn their objections and agree that deficit spending and expansion of government expenditure (to the extent it crowds out private sector investment) are not significant concerns over the one to two year time horizon, given the extremity of the financial crisis.
But let’s break it down from there. What comes next? What Krugman points to in his Tuesday column is that within that broad, apparent consensus you’ve got a lot of people who think you spend like crazy to nurse the economy through the storm and then you go back to the status quo ante. As he puts it …
Right now everyone is talking about, say, two years of economic stimulus — which makes sense as a planning horizon. Too much of the economic commentary I’ve been reading seems to assume, however, that that’s really all we’ll need — that once a burst of deficit spending turns the economy around we can quickly go back to business as usual.
In fact, however, things can’t just go back to the way they were before the current crisis. And I hope the Obama people understand that.
So that’s one potential division, considering the center and left. Let’s call that the division between those favoring a Keynesian Holiday followed by a return to the same broad economic principles we’ve been following for ten to thirty years and those who believe that a brief period of massive government spending will have to prepare the way for thoroughgoing changes in national economic policy. In the latter case, perhaps a scale of reform on par with the New Deal, if not the policy prescriptions or precise ideological flavor of the Roosevelt administration.
Next there’s a cross-cutting division, though perhaps it’s also a matter of emphasis.
There’s a general but pretty vague sentiment that a lot of this new spending needs to go into infrastructure and research and development to move toward a green energy economy. But is that really an essential part of the equation for economic and/or environmental reasons? Or is it just something that would be nice to do a bit of as long as you’re spending a trillion-plus dollars? That seems like another potential cleavage, though I think almost everyone is being so vague about particulars that it’s hard to know where to draw the key dividing lines.
And then a few couple more points. I was talking to David Kurtz a few moments ago and he points out that another potential division, though one that shadows the others, is the question of order and precedence. What comes first? Does mass transit come first? Roads for cars? Green R&D? etc.
And finally there do seem to be some Republicans left. How do they fit in? Or, more interestingly, how do they break down? In a climate of super-high energy prices, there seemed to be a decent-sized constituency on the right for alternative energy sources to cut our reliance on foreign oil. And not all of them thought you could do that by drilling in the US, notwithstanding how many ‘wingers seemed to get inappropriately jazzed by hearing a fetching Sarah Palin yelling “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
Those are some initial thoughts on how to think of the main political grouping 2009 and going forward. Let me know your thoughts. As a reporter and an editor and someone who cares a lot about this country, this is a question I’m eager to get my head around.
