Sufficient Liberal Stories–The Krugman Function Part 4 – Transition Milwaukee.
On the face of it, Paul Krugman appears entirely confident in the future of the American way of life and the growth of a globally inclusive economy. He is similarly confident in our ability to address climate change by running that economy on renewable energy.
This needs two significant qualifications. First, it is unclear whether this is what Krugman hopes, or what he expects; whether he is rallying us in an inspirational mode, or lecturing in an analytic one. In contemporary political culture the roles of coach and analyst are becoming increasingly indistinct and it may not be possible to separate the two. Second, Krugman’s optimism is clearly dependent on the ability of political liberals to get wrong-headed, fuzzy-thinking conservatives out of the way; it is only by becoming lost in the enthusiasm of a pre-game pep-rally that one could feel all that confident about liberal prospects in upcoming political contests. A good deal of commentary these days seems to be busy staking out terrain from which the commentator can say, when things have gone very badly indeed one day, “don’t look at me, I told you this would happen if you didn’t listen to me”
Setting aside the various undercurrents that pull at any person putting ink to paper or fingers to keyboard, Krugman’s narrative, itself, is very optimistic, and for reasons that form the major subplot of that same narrative. As we began to show in our last installment, political efficacy, easy choices, as well as the ever-popular free lunch, are built into the narrative as the ultimate driver of action. All narratives contain within them a “theory” of cause and effect, whether it is the fate, history, chance, and interconnection we see in Thomas Hardy, or the exercise of individual virtues Jane Austen deploys, to mention two very different narrative theories of cause. In history, Karl Marx argued that history was driven by class conflict, while in Darwin history is moved by the act of survival and ability to procreate. Enlightenment philosophers viewed historical change as the conquest of myth by reason. Krugman is most similar to the latter. In his story the action is moved by practical insight, the courage to accept its conclusions, and the determination to act upon it.
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