 | | Being Republican seems to be synonymous with never admitting to being wrong, says columnist Paul Krugman.Patrick Semansky/Associated Press |
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If you’re a member of the chattering classes, you hear a lot about the Never Trumpers — lifelong Republicans like William Kristol and Max Boot who, unlike the rest of their former party, have refused to make peace with the awfulness of the G.O.P.’s leader. Whatever you think of their former role, right now they’re showing impressive moral courage not just in standing up against pressure to conform, but in admitting that they misjudged the nature of the party they served. |
But that willingness to face up to past errors in itself marks their defection from the modern Republican way of being. |
Today’s column was largely devoted to the carnage wrought by Donald Trump’s inability to admit error. What I didn’t have space to point out is that while Trump’s insistence on his own infallibility is especially lurid, his party in general is now composed of never-wrongers, people who never concede awkward facts. And it has been that way for a while. |
While I’m sure there were earlier examples, the inability of many on the right to admit error was really driven home to me in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. |
For several years following the crisis, the U.S. government ran large budget deficits, mainly because the depressed state of the economy caused revenues to plunge and certain kinds of spending, especially unemployment benefits, to soar. At the same time, the Federal Reserve intervened heavily in financial markets, “printing money” — actually crediting banks with deposits created out of thin air, but close enough — at a rapid pace. |
Many economists, including yours truly, considered these fiscal and monetary developments reasonable under the circumstances. It was, we argued, a good thing to run deficits in a slump, with little risk that these deficits would create any kind of crisis. It was also a good idea to print money, with little risk that doing so would lead to inflation. |
But many on the right had a different view. In May 2009, with unemployment at 9.4 percent and still rising, The Wall Street Journal declared that deficits would provoke an attack by the bond vigilantes. Commentators on Fox warned about imminent hyperinflation. A who’s who of conservatives sent an open letter to Ben Bernanke, the then Fed chairman, warning that he was debasing the dollar. |
Well, events proved one side of this debate right and the other wrong. There was no debt crisis, and interest rates stayed low. So did inflation. So you might have expected those who got it wrong to engage in some self-reflection about why they were so mistaken. |
But they didn’t. Almost without exception, those who predicted disaster from deficits and monetary expansion continued thundering the same warnings year after year, never conceding that they had been wrong. Bloomberg News actually contacted many of the signatories of that open letter to Bernanke four years later; every single signatory who replied insisted that the letter was right, even though the promised inflation never came. |
And now we have an administration that, as far as I can tell, is entirely staffed by never-wrongers. For example, not only did administration economists push a really stupid “cubic model” that seemed to suggest an end to the pandemic around a week ago, they insisted (and continue to insist) that they did no such thing. |
So in this, as in many other things, Trump is just a cruder, exaggerated version of what his whole party has become. Being a Republican, it seems, means never having to admit that you were wrong, about anything. |
Alan Greenspan (remember him?) warned vociferously about deficits, then declared it “regrettable” that inflation and soaring interest rates kept not happening. |
Stephen Moore, who warned about hyperinflation in 2009, is now a leading advocate of reopening the economy now now now. |
Yesterday marked three months since Larry Kudlow, the administration’s chief economist (and a longtime never-wronger) declared that the coronavirus was “contained” and that the economy was “holding up nicely.” |
We won’t have official statistics until next month, but independent estimates suggest that the unemployment rate is close to 25 percent. |
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at krugman-newsletter@nytimes.com. |
 | | Getting to Yes in quarantine.YouTube |
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