Hating Paul Krugman

Brad DeLong on the Krugman haters:

First, there were an awful lot of people who knew in the summer of 2001 exactly what Paul Krugman knew, and I knew--that George W. Bush was a horrible president, intellectually lazy, incurious, suspicious and fearful of expertise, yet convinced that it was his job to be the "decider" and to make decisions based on inadequate information and then never to revisit them--for that would be a sign of "weakness." But they didn't say what they knew. And know they feel very guilty. And one way the guilt works itself out is by denigrating those--like Paul Krugman, like Ron Suskind, like Philippe Sands--who were brave enough to say that the emperor was buck-naked at the time.

Second, the right-wing slime machine worked spectacularly well in the 1990s.. And the slimers continued into the 2000s. And a bunch of other people said: "Hey, if it worked for Rush Limbaugh, it can work for me." And so you got the first wave of Krugman-haters--the Mickey Kauses, the Andrew Sullivans, the Donald Luskins--and from then on it was monkey-see monkey-do.

What to do going forward is unclear. It is certainly the case that in a good world nobody who was not denouncing Bush by the end of 2003 would have any place in American politics or in our public sphere of discourse--to have been so spectacularly wrong or so spectacularly cowardly or both tells us something about their judgment and honesty, and there are lots of politicians and commentators of good judgment and honesty out there to listen to, who should have the available slots


I have a slightly simpler theory: There is nothing that the true believer hates more than an unbeliever proven right by history. Also, fools don't like people smarter than them who show that they are idiots. Or am I repeating myself.

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