League of Women Voters of Maryland

Book Review by Rebecca Goode In his recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman describes how 20th Century politics and economics grew into a politics of inequality, resulting from a partisan divide that he terms “the great divergence.” Krugman, a professor of economics at Princeton and a bi-weekly op-ed columnist for the New York Times, is the author of seven previous books, the most recent of which was entitled The Great Unraveling. The new book describes how the New Deal in the 1930s brought three decades of near economic equality and comity among the political parties. Calling the current presidential administration “movement conservatives”, he said this conservatism began and grew into an intellectual infrastructure such as the American Enterprise Institute, which was set up to resemble academic institutions but which publishes studies that play into a preconceived point of view. Media such as The Public Interest and The American Spectator were part of this infrastructure, and the dire mood of the 1970s period allowed a claim that liberal politics had been discredited. Thus began a period he calls “the great divergence”, when the politics of inequality created a partisan divide. He implies that much of the success of “movement conservatism” is based on race, since the emotional politics of race is now waning. Krugman also maintains that since governance during a time of war is not effective, there is an opportunity for a change. War mobilization prompts calls for equal sacrifice, which is anathema to “movement conservatism”, and defense does not at present look like an enduring source of conservative advantage. The final chapters are devoted to laying out how the country can begin to recover. His primary concern is national health care since that will begin to allow the middle class to recover some equality. Indeed, exceptionalism owing to race may be the reason this has been so extremely difficult to attain politically “To be a liberal is in a sense to be a conservative – it means to a large extent, wanting us to go back to a middle class society,” he says. “To be a progressive, however, clearly implies wanting to move forward.” This book is his program for change.