Krugman: "What's our bitter partisan divide really about?"

In his latest column, Paul Krugman writes about the fluctuating history of the GOP and class warfare in America--the two words that explain why the Republican party has become viciously partisan in the last generation.

[F]or the past century, political polarization and economic inequality have moved hand in hand. Politics during the Gilded Age, an era of huge income gaps, was a nasty business--as nasty as it is today. The era of bipartisanship, which lasted for roughly a generation after World War II, corresponded to the high tide of America's middle class. That high tide began receding in the late 1970s, as middle-class incomes grew slowly at best while incomes at the top soared. As income gaps widened, a deep partisan divide re-emerged.

Both the decline of partisanship after World War II and its return in recent decades mainly reflected the changing position of the Republican Party on economic issues.

In the years following WWII, the most of the GOP gave support, however grudging, to government programs--both taxation and spending--that helped curb economic equality inequality. But that only lasted for a time.

When the elite once again pulled away from the middle class, however, Republicans turned their back on the legacy of Dwight Eisenhower and returned to a focus on the interests of the wealthy. Tax cuts at the top--including repeal of the estate tax--became the party's highest priority.

But if the real source of today's bitter partisanship is a Republican move to the right on economic issues, why have the last three elections been dominated by talk of terrorism, with a bit of religion on the side? Because a party who's economic policies favor a narrow elite needs to focus attention elsewhere. There's no better way to do that than accusing the other party of being unpatriotic and godless.

Thus in 2004, President Bush basically ran as America's defender against gay married terrorists. He waited until after the election to reveal that what he really wanted to do was privatize Social Security.

The fundamental dishonesty of the current Republican party, driven by the yawning gap between how the GOP campaigns and how it governs, means that ugly, polarizing, smear-laden, swift-boating, gay-bashing, "traitor!"-shouting, push-polling, voter-suppressing, rat-fucking campaign tactics are not incidental to Republican strategy--they are absolutely essential.

The wrap-up is blunt, even by Krugman's standards:

So what do we do about all this? I won't offer the Democrats any advice right now, except to say that tough talk on national security and affirmations of personal faith won't help: The other side will smear you anyway.

But I would like to offer some advice to my fellow pundits: Face reality. Some commentators long for the bipartisan days of yore and flock eagerly to any politician who looks "centrist." But there isn't any center in modern American politics. The center won't return until we have a new New Deal and rebuild our middle class.

This gets us back to frequent topic of conversation lately: Who should the Dems nominate in 2008? The most popular names at the moment are also the two who have already taken the full force of the Republican smear machine, with varying degrees of success: Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.

I've written things in the past suggesting that this all but disqualifies them as candidates, for practical purposes (including Gore, who at this point still claims he isn't interested in running, and I'm still inclined to believe him). My point has been that the Republican smear machine will simply pick up all the zombie lies (the ones that come back to life no matter how many times they're disproved; think: "Al Gore claimed he invented the internet") already lying around, still sharpened and ready to use. Other possible Democratic nominees would, at least, make the GOP machine go to the trouble of working up new, less familiar smears.

Now, I'm starting to figure that doesn't matter quite so much.

As I've said before, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 will face one major party opponent; the Democratic candidate will face two: the Republican candidate and the major news media, still operating off the "Democrats are inauthentic" script. College Republicans, on summer internships, are already doing opposition research on any conceivable Democratic candidate. And unless the GOP transforms itself, perhaps following a chastening defeat in the 2006 elections--a possibility so remote as to be scarcely worth mentioning--we can look for 2008 to be a replay of 2002, 2004, and 2006: Bury discussion of the rot at the heart of our economy, whoop up hysteria about terrorism and God Gays 'n' Guns, and crank up the smear machine.

Unless the Dems figure out how to duck, block, or counterpunch--to shake off the slime and force the subject back to their issues--they're going to have a tough time of it no matter who they nominate. The fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the GOP strategy all but guarantees it.

Krugman's column is behind the NYTimes Select pay-per-view wall; if it gets picked up by Truthout.org or another non-fee distributor, I'll update with a link.