POLITICS: The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America from the Right, By Paul Krugman, Penguin/Allen Lane, 296pp. £20ACCLAIMED ECONOMIST and Princeton professor Paul Krugman has emerged in recent years as a trenchant critic of the Bush administration and its war on Iraq, via his bi-weekly column in the New York Times, writes Anthony Glavin.
His new book, however, a study of US political economy, takes a wider aim at the hard right, or "movement conservatism", which took control of the Republican Party in the 1970s, and has endeavoured ever since to roll back the economic equality underwritten by FDR's New Deal, which in turn paved the way for the largely middle-class America that existed from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Believing, unlike many economists, that political and social forces play a greater role than "the hidden hand" of market forces in the distribution of income, Krugman details in straightforward, non-academic prose how the sharp rise in economic inequality which began in the early 1980s was preceded by the takeover of the Republican Party by the aforementioned radical conservatives. Supported by think tanks, media organisations, and publishing houses, and bankrolled by wealthy individuals and anti-union business interests, these neo-conservatives have since sought to abolish the progressive taxation, Social Security, and other equality measures delivered by FDR's New Deal.
Krugman spares his readers a surfeit of statistics and charts, but those figures he provides speak volumes - whether the $23 million the CEO of Wal-Mart, America's largest corporation, earned in 2005, compared to the average $18,000 salary of a Wal-Mart employee, or the collapse of US union membership from 35 per cent in 1945 to roughly 10 per cent today, a decline unmatched in any other Western nation, all of which face the same global pressures.
According to Krugman, the Republican Party was essentially committed to bi-partisan support of the New Deal welfare state from 1952 to 1972, even though ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater's unsuccessful presidential candidacy in 1964 was a harbinger of things to come.
Recalling how Republican president Eisenhower famously labelled as "stupid" the small number of what he described as "Texan oil millionaires and an occasional politician or businessman" who advocated the abolition of social security, unemployment insurance, and labour laws, Krugman also points out how Democratic president Bill Clinton arguably governed to the right of Richard Nixon, who raised taxes, expanded environmental regulation and even sought to introduce national health insurance.
However, if Nixon did not share the hard-right's hatred of government intervention and the welfare state, he nonetheless largely invented its political strategy of exploiting racial divisions, fear of social change and external security threats, along with manipulating the media, in order to win elections.
Krugman is especially good on the enduring and malignant effect of racial division on American politics, which saw Southern Congressional Democrats block president Truman's attempt in 1946 to introduce national health insurance from fear of Southern hospitals being desegregated, and fuelled a white backlash to the civil rights movement (and LBJ's Voting Rights Act) in the 1960s that effectively delivered the Southern states to movement conservatives and the Republican party.
He also reminds us of how a recently reconstructed but undeniably divisive president Ronald Reagan repeatedly used racial antagonism to advance movement conservatism's economic and political agenda, dressing up right-wing elitist policies in populist rhetoric, while decrying Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" - which even the dogs in the street knew was code-speak for African-Americans.
At the same time, Krugman may also be squarely on the money with his claim, made long before Barack Obama captured 52 per cent of the white vote in the Virginia primary, that race is no longer the potentially divisive force that has heretofore helped to empower the hard right. For starters, its increasing numbers of minorities means America itself is less white; plus, Krugman asserts, many whites themselves are now less racist, as suggested by, among other things, a series of Gallup polls that show the percentage of Americans who approve of mixed marriages soaring from 36 per cent in 1978 to 77 per cent in 2007.
BELIEVING THE US is poised to embrace a new progressive politics of equality, Krugman argues that universal health care for all Americans - something every other advanced nation has enjoyed for decades - needs to be the key priority of the next Democratic administration. So far, so plausible, especially given that universal coverage would likely cost less than the current, and hugely inefficient, US health system, which leaves 45 million Americans uninsured.
However, his summary assertion that a new progressive agenda, while requiring major changes in public policy, would itself "be anything but radical", further underlined, for this reader at least, all that Krugman has left out in framing his liberal vs. hard-right argument and the monumental economic challenges that confront America.
Which is to say, his discussion of US political economy makes no mention of its military-industrial complex, which stands to reap a windfall 2008 military budget of $700 billion, a payoff to date unchallenged by US liberals, including Democratic presidential candidates Clinton and Obama. Nor is there any mention of the massively crippling US budget or trade deficits; nor, for that matter, a single mention of anything of a global nature - whether climate change, peak oil, or how the 1950s to 1970s US middle-class society that Krugman hopes to see restored actually achieved its comfort level by lavishing 20 per cent of annual world energy consumption on 5 per cent of the world's population.
Liberal trumps hard-right to be sure, but it strikes me that America needs a far more radical paradigm - never mind game plan - for the daunting global challenges that lie in wait for us all.
Anthony Glavin is a writer, editor and critic. He was born in Boston.