Check it out! Paul Krugman has the day off, so his New York Times page-mate, Bill Kristol, decided to be a good sport and write Krugman's column for him. I exaggerate, but not much. Suddenly, the hard-right neocon columnist who was Sarah Palin's chief patron and advocate is concerned that conservatives have no answers to the central problem of the age, that George W. Bush could be the new Herbert Hoover, and that this could be another 1933, the beginning of a very, very long Republican winter.
What's most striking to me about this column -- apart from the fact that Bill Kristol is actually saying some things that are true, for once -- is that it doesn't even try to assert that it's wrong to blame Republicans and their economic theories for the financial collapse and looming recession. (Kristol says that Bush will get the blame "fairly or not," but doesn't make any effort to explain why he shouldn't.) Moreover, Kristol isn't brimming with his usual unearned confidence about what should be done; he does not even try to explain what conservative economics ought to be advocating, nor point to any current right-wing theories or nostrums in which the answers might be found. In effect, that is, he admits that today's conservatives don't have any answers.
And in sketching what their eventual answers will need to contain, he outlines a more or less liberal agenda of new regulations and controls on markets. In ignoring the need for such controls, Kristol suggests, conservatives have seemed intent on proving Karl Marx right about the evils of capitalism.
Granted, the further paragraphs where Kristol praises FDR and the Democrats for recognizing these problems and advocating successful solutions to them, solutions that Republicans then fought tooth-and-nail for decades and succeeded at badly undermining, apparently had to be cut for reasons of space. Still, a Kristol column that reeks of despair like this can only brighten one's day. So, here's the whole thing:
http://www.nytimes.com/...