ABSTRACT
Paul Krugman (1953–) is a Nobel Prize–winning professor of economics, at Princeton and, currently, at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a columnist for the New York Times. He is also an unabashed liberal, and in this essay he explains why. Krugman argues that the substantial degree of economic equality that prevailed in the United States for more than a generation after World War II was largely a result of political policies put in place earlier by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which provided the basis for a broad bipartisan consensus on fundamental economic values between Democrats and Republicans. However, in the 1970s, “movement conservatism” effectively took over the Republican Party, whose leaders subsequently instituted policies that created massive economic inequality, a shrinking middle class, increasing poverty, and the rise of a small class of the super-rich. These policies took root in the Reagan era and were markedly exacerbated under the presidency of George W. Bush. The moral of this story, according to Krugman, is that political ideologies truly matter because politics tend to drive economics, not the other way around. Thus if we want greater economic equality, on Krugman’s view, we need politicians committed to creating it through appropriate public policy measures. Ironically, Krugman contends, in attempting to reestablish the long-standing historical commitment to a more economically equal society, the “liberals” are the true “conservatives,” protecting past gains from the New Deal and the Great Society—Social Security, Medicare, and other popular programs—while those who call themselves conservatives are, in fact, radicals.
