The Dark Ages Are Back

Here we go. The Dark Ages are upon us. I realize that post modernists have a hard time with the concept of the Dark Ages, but I don’t. They were dark, and filled with a willful ignorance born of an ideological and religious zealotry. Intellectual discourse was suppressed to make way for the only truth – in Europe this was Roman Catholicism. The authoritarian church burned and otherwise disposed of anything that was not within their narrow view of the world. This included the entire corpus of ancient Greek thought which was only rediscovered a thousand years later when Europeans ventured into the middle east and came across the great seats of learning in the Arabian world.

And now, with us?

We have forgotten all the learning of the 1930’s. The Fed is lambasted for doing what it is supposed to do. And the Republicans have now launched an attack on its very reason for being. This is ugly. We are trying to be ignorant. We are trying to expunge alternative ideas. We are falling prey to dumb thinking dressed as cleverness.

Not only is it difficult to press for an all out Keynesian response to the crisis, even though it is the only proven solution that doesn’t consign millions of our citizens to abject poverty, but it has now become difficult to engage anyone seriously about the alternatives. Apparently the forces of free market ideologues are making a stand, and will not concede their error. They prefer to sink America as long as they sink Obama too.

Setting aside the question as to whether Obama deserves to survive. This is nihilism at its very worst. Read your Nietzsche quickly.

So obsessed are the Republicans with ousting Obama that they would gladly advocate policies that undermine the economy. Thus they attack the Fed for daring to undertake QE2: it might succeed and thus bail out Obama. They have now begun a campaign to alter the Fed’s official mandate to strip it of the goal of bolstering employment. Right now the Fed has a dual mandate: keep inflation low, and, at the same time, maintain full employment – which is generally thought to mean an unemployment rate of about 5.0%.

Yes. You read that correctly.

The GOP wants to take the Fed’s unemployment franchise away and force it to focus simply on inflation. According to Senator Corker from Tennessee this would simplify things for the Fed. It would also mean it could not follow policies like QE2 which are designed to stimulate the economy.

I will not defend the Fed’s success or failure. In my view they have failed terribly: they have not kept full employment and they have allowed inflation to drop below their target range. Unemployment is too high and inflation too low according to the Fed’s own targets. The Fed is also the regulator responsible for the mortgage market. I need say no more on that topic.

Nonetheless the GOP attack is extraordinary for its recklessness and total abandonment of the nation’s unemployed. It is vicious. It is deliberate. It is tantamount to plunging us back decades in terms of economic thinking.

The notion that it is Congress alone that should combat unemployment is laughable. Corker knows full well that his party have stalled, gutted, and undermined every single attempt to help the unemployed. His party offered not one plan to stimulate the economy. Other, that is, the failed policy of cutting taxes.

This astonishing attack on our economy has only that one goal: to unseat Obama.

So not only is Keynesian fiscal policy not to be deployed to help our situation. Nor is Friedmanite monetary policy. What’s left? the Bible? Hope, wing, and a prayer?

These zealots are committed to the institution of a modern version of the Dark Ages in which we are cleansed of our ideological errors and are forced to live only by the one good book. The Palin wing, of course don’t even allow books, but that’s anther question.

Is America this stupid?

Yes.

Even erstwhile sophisticated analysts like David Brooks get tangled up in the right wing backlash against modern thought. His column today sent poor old Paul Krugman into fits. I see why. It was replete with a revisionist and totally false history. Brooks accused left of center economists of being model bound and beholden to uber-ratuonalist thinking. Nothing could be farther from the truth: it was the right wing Chicago school who developed the rational model of economics. They did it to unseat the more real world and pragmatic Keynesian mode of thought. Brooks is accusing the left of the sins of the right. Yet he gets published. He either is completely ignorant of modern economic thought, or he is deliberately lying about it. Both explanations of his column are odious.

So here we are.

The next phase of the great war has begun. We are plunging rapidly into an intellectual void. The dumber the leader the better. The more outrageous the lie the more easily it is believed. Dialog is expunged and looked at as unnecessary. The cultural wars began as a push from the right to re-assert discredited values or to impose supposedly “family” values on those who dared to think differently. The fear of difference was stoked from being a marginal oddity into the central mass of right wing political ideology.

Nothing is allowed to get in the way of the radical transformation the right wants to impose on middle America.

And that crusade to take us all back to the Dark Ages has now focused on the Fed.

Yesterday I picked up my copy of Gibbon. His conclusion at the end of his epic history was that the decline and fall of Rome was driven by four great forces: the passage of time that undermined the empire’s original vitality; the empire’s abuse of its environment; the rise of Christianity and the concurrent invasion of the barbarians; and above all its eventual loss of civil internal discourse.

And after that decline and fall, Europe was plunged by those same forces into the thousand years of ignorance and poverty we call the Dark Ages.

This sounds all too familiar.

The analogy is stark.

The next two years will be brutal.