How Can There Be Bipartisanship When GOP ‘Take Their Marching Orders From Rush Limbaugh?’

How Can There Be Bipartisanship When GOP ‘Take Their Marching Orders From Rush Limbaugh?’
Today on MSNBC, the Morning Joe team — many of whom have been having a tough time with the facts of the economic recovery plan — hosted Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman to discuss the bill. Krugman began by emphasizing the severity of the current economic crisis. “This is not your father’s recession,” Krugman said. “This is your grandfather’s recession. This is something that is closer to what we went through in the 30s.”

Krugman criticized opposition to the “pork” in the recovery plan, calling the obstruction “irresponsible” and “ludicrous. He noted that it’s “a few billion dollars in a $900 billion plan. …They’re picking out small punctuation errors and saying ‘oh this whole thing is wrong.’” Krugman added, “This is the kind of situation where you try to build a bridge across an economic chasm and if you build half a bridge it doesn’t work.”

Yesterday, the Senate defeated (but most Republicans voted in favor of) an alternative plan offered by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) that centered mainly on massive tax cuts. Krugman called the plan “completely crazy” and an indication of a failure of bipartisanship:

KRUGMAN: Look at what just happened, we had a proposal I think it was McCain’s proposal for an economic recover package, his version of it which was all tax cuts, a complete, let’s do exactly what Bush did, have another round of Bush-style policies. After eight years which that didn’t work and we got 36 out of 41 Republican senators voting for that which is completely crazy. So how much bipartisan outreach can you have when 36 out of 41 republican senators take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh?

Conservatives and New Deal Revisionism

The right-wing New Deal conniption fit
How can one make this claim? Unemployment reached 25 percent in the Great Depression, and fell steadily until World War II (although there were some bumps up along the way). Ah, but the revisionist position is that unemployment did not fall as much as it should have. And this argument is based on an interesting interpretation of the available data. As Amity Shlaes, currently the premier anti-New Deal historical revisionist writing for a popular audience, explained proudly in her own Wall Street Journal opinion piece in November, "The Krugman Recipe for Depression," a necessary step is to not count as employed those people in "temporary jobs in emergency programs."

That means, everyone who got a job during the Great Depression via the Works Progress Administration (WPA) or Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), or any other of Roosevelt's popular New Deal workfare programs, doesn't get counted as employed in the statistics used by Cole, Ohanian and Shlaes.

Let us reflect, for a moment, on what the men and women employed by those programs achieved (aside from earning cash to buy food and pay for shelter, of course). In his paper, "Time for a New, New Deal," Marshall Auerback (pointed to by economist James Galbraith) summarizes:

The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown.

It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

In other words, millions of men and women earned a living wage and self-respect and contributed mightily to the national infrastructure. But, according to the statistics as interpreted on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, they were unemployed.

Way back in 1976, economist Michael Darby exposed the absurdity of not counting WPA workers as "employed" in his paper "Three-and-a-Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934-1941." More than 30 years ago, Darby observed that correctly counting those 3 and a half million people as employed workers effectively debunked "the 'un-fact' that recovery was extremely slow from 1934 through 1941. From 1933 to 1936, the corrected unemployment rate fell by nearly 5 percentage points per year..."

Shlaes dismisses Darby's reappraisal of Great Depression unemployment statistics by arguing that "to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects."

Of course, some would argue that "masking the anxiety" of workers who did not know how they were going to feed their children or put a roof over their heads is precisely the job of government in times of great economic turmoil. And that, really, is where the whole project of New Deal revisionism breaks down.

The Soul-Crushing Malaise of the 1950s

The Soul-Crushing Malaise of the 1950s
My parents have been dead for years, but Hollywood has recently resurrected them. Last week I saw the new film "Revolutionary Road" and then came home and watched reruns of the television show "Mad Men." I confess that I was a little freaked out finally to see an accurate portrayal of my 1950s baby boomer childhood, one that was neither "Father Knows Best" nor "The Twilight Zone". Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Frank Wheeler, and Jon Hamm's Don Draper are so much like my father that it hurts to watch them. Like my father, each live lives of quiet desperation as upwardly mobile white-collar executives commuting to unsatisfying jobs in which they've traded passion for privilege. And, like my father, each left behind wives vainly struggling to find meaning in domesticity. Although Mrs. Wheeler (Kate Winslett) self-destructs and Mrs. Draper (January Jones) files for divorce, while my mother merely became bitter and depressed, all three struggled with the combination of emptiness and isolation that Betty Friedan called "the problem with no name." Seeing it depicted so perfectly was unsettling.

Behind the exuberance of post-WWII consumption, suburban expansion, upward mobility, and a Good Housekeeping vision of family life lay a psychic misery that couldn't be articulated but that damaged everyone involved. Whatever one thinks of the excesses and distortions of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s, they did manage to express the healthy determination of boys like me to avoid the lot of Don Draper and of girls to escape the fate of April Wheeler. The reason these productions are so disturbing to many people my age is that they depict with brutal and tragic clarity how our parents made a bad deal when they traded their higher aspirations for economic security. And perhaps they make us wonder if we're in danger of doing the same thing.

Long after they divorced and shortly before each of them died, my parents told me a story about their courtship that captured the essence of this "bad deal." My mother was a popular girl growing up and, immediately following the war, got a series of office jobs that she enjoyed immensely. She fell in love with my father just as WWII was ending because he was "different" from other boys. He had dreams. He was smart. In fact, when they first met, my father aspired to be a radio announcer or actor. The son of German immigrants, he rebelled against his strict and dour family and saw in my mother the type of sexy vitality and buoyancy missing at home. In the midst of post-war American exuberance, my parents entered a life together full of possibility.

The week before their wedding my mother told my father that she was quitting her job because it was now his job to support her, and that her mother had told her that "women don't work." This was, in fact, true. The concept of the "family wage" in the 1950s meant that men would be paid enough to support their families. So my mother quit her job, my father gave up his dreams of radio and went to work in the corporate world, and together they started a family in a new suburb. Unfortunately, both my parents privately enjoyed the independence that working had given my mother and were disappointed when she gave it up. While my father accepted my mother's pronouncement readily, he was secretly resentful. The weight on his shoulders began to grow. He started drinking more and began to see other women on the side. My mother became a martyr, burdened and frustrated in domesticity. And yet neither could have possibly chosen otherwise. Like the Drapers and the Wheelers, they gave up their dreams for the American Dream.

When I look at family pictures from those years, I see barren suburban yards dotted with recently planted saplings, fathers with a drink in their hands and the beginnings of a paunch, dowdy mothers with cats eye glasses, everyone smoking, boys with crew cuts and girls with pig tails -- but most of all, I see the strained frivolity and veneer of success barely concealing the strangled anxieties of people who are supposed to be happy but aren't, who are supposed to be making it but privately feel they're losing it. These scenes remind me that when the public and private self are so radically in conflict, the result is a special type of suffering all the more corrosive because it can't be expressed.

What’s depressing to me is that, in today's climate, the 1950s start to look pretty good. I find myself wondering: did the hypocrisy we challenged and the changes we championed in the 60s never happen? Nowadays, merely having a secure, decent-paying job seems more important than having one that provides genuine fulfillment. The question now is how to get any leisure time, not how to spend it engaged in something meaningful. That women should work is no longer a liberating choice, but a bread-and-butter necessity. And given the high number of single-parent households and a 50% divorce rate, nuclear families -- even the oppressive kind in which my parents, the Drapers, and the Wheelers were trapped -- start to seem like islands of safety.