Reading Ruth Marcus is a frustrating experience. Unlike so many of her colleagues, she cares about policy. Cares enough to write about taxes and health care and models and projections. But her columns come out like a parody of the Washington Consensus. Take today's missive on the need for a "new sobriety." Marcus makes some fair points about the long-term budget situation, the need for more honest accounting, and the folly of tax cuts. But the point of the column, broadly speaking, is that the candidates must be prepared to respond to this recession and the current budgetary moment by really tightening that fiscal belt. As Matt Yglesias says, this is NeoHooverism. We're in a moment where whatever else you believe, we need massive fiscal outlays to strengthen a dangerously weak economy. Marcus, who professes to care about policy, apparently has never heard of Keynes. Or even the Larry Summers op-ed published in her own newspaper. Calling for "a new sobriety" is like calling for another depression. It's as if the dissonance between what wise Washington types are supposed to believe (government should spend less!) and what the moment demands (government must spend more!) have driven some of them mad. But Marcus isn't mad. She's just an ideologue. And fair enough: Everyone has their ideology. When columnists write pieces that only quote Cato economists, you tend to know where they're coming from. Libertarianism is understood as a distinct school of thought. When they write columns only quoting from the Economic Policy Institute, you understand the premise. Labor-liberalism is a distinct school of thought. When they write columns only quoting folks from the Concord Coalition, and Marcus has here, few people know where they're coming from. The Concord Coalition -- and the editorial board consensus it powers -- is not understood as a distinct school of thought. But Concord Coalition types are ideologues of the sort that would make Cato and EPI blush. They believe in deficit elimination the way Cato believes in government reduction, the way EPI believes in raising median incomes. It's not one of their things. It's the whole thing. And so they mouth the same vows during a sharp recession as during an expansion. They talk of entitlement spending even though the problems have nothing to do with Social Security and the issues with Medicare and Medicaid require reform of the whole health sector, not just government entitlements. They've got a hymnal, and it's not updated that often. That's how ideologies are. And the hymanl even makes some good points. But the problem with the Concord Coalition is that it's become the Washington establishment ideology, an ideology that's also an extremely convenient posture, as it lets you bash both parties, and thus it's not recognized as an ideology at all. But it is, and at this moment, it's more pernicious than most, in part because it's less visible than the others. And it's a pity to see someone who's as serious about this stuff as Marcus fall prey to it.
