Jon Cohn has a good post outlining the ways in which liberal economists and center-left economists have converged in recent years. I'm a tad less sanguine than he is, if only because I don't really trust ideological rapprochement that happens during "out" years to fully carry over to an administration. Right now, everyone can agree that things are crummy, but when it comes to arguing priorities -- social investment or deficit reduction? card check or trade agreements? job retraining or industrial policy? -- consensus has a habit of vanishing real fast. But in the aggregate, folks are clearly closer to each other than they once were, if only because the moderates got a lot of the trade and deficit reduction they wanted, and are going to see those gains undone if progressive social policy doesn't come in and ease worker anxiety. Indeed, for the best look at how the thinking of the center-lefties has changed, check out Bill Galston's essay on How Big Government Got Its Groove Back from the latest issue. Galston was the signal intellectual of the New Democrats. Now he's writing articles arguing, "in 1996, President Bill Clinton proclaimed that the era of big government was over. It is now clear that the era of the end of big government is over." That's a big deal, and folks interested in this debate should read his take in its entirety.
