Cat Fight

This could be fun. David Brooks, the New York Times' in-house conservative columnist, this morning launched a frontal attack on the paper's in-house liberal columnist Paul Krugman. Brooks accuses anyone who points out that Saint Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with an overtly racial appeal to southern voters of propagating a calumny.

The essence of Brooks' argument is that the man who made his first mark in politics by attacking welfare queens and Berkeley demonstrators should be excused for highlighting "states rights" in that opening speech outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been slain. Why? Because a weekly earlier he showed up at Vernon Jordan's bedside and offered the inner city tax breaks for breakfast.

I recently read Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal." A major theme of his book is that the politics of race, and the South's wholesale defection to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights era, is the real cause of the nation's rightward drift in recent decades. It provided the plutocrats who control the Republican party with the political cover needed to impose their unfair economic agenda.

Krugman repeatedly says that in writing the book, he was forced to confront his own bias as a professional economist that economic events and evolution drive political change. In that standard view, rapid technological change and the evolution of a high tech society raised the rewards to education and skill, thus creating a more unequal society in terms of income and wealth. In Krugman's new view, the growing inequality that has characterized American life over the past three decades is the product of political decisions to change tax law, regulations and to eviscerate social programs, changes that were enabled by the southern strategy political realignment initiated by Nixon and achieved under Reagan.

Brooks never mentions Krugman in his column. It will be interesting to see if Krugman rises to the bait and answers his critic -- without naming names, of course.