But on the more grave and pressing issues of the day--recession, say, or terrorism--people have a tendency to ignore that, or assume that in moments of crisis, people put aside their selfishness and argue in good faith for the greater good. To some extent, I think that's warranted--there are more conservatives willing to align themselves with progressives to pull the economy out of the toilet than there are on just about any other issue. But there's an unseemly element who no doubt kinda sorta want the economy to stay bad for a long time (just like there were some who kinda sorta wanted a terrorist attack to occur just in time to help John McCain win the presidency) because that would be good for their political fortunes.I've been reading this elsewhere lately, and I think it's a bad idea for liberals to argue with conservatives about whether or not conservatives are deliberately trying to make the recession worse for political reasons. We just had a version of this argument for the past eight years over 9/11, Iraq, surveillance, torture, etc. because conservatives would rather argue about who was a traitor than argue the merits of different policies. So I'm not looking forward to an argument where liberals are basically arguing the same thing with a different language and a different set of circumstances.
The better thing to do is to continue pointing out, as Beutler and others have done, that many of the policies conservatives are advocating will stall, rather than aid, economic recovery. We also have a great term someone coined, "Neo-Hooverism," that appropriately describes why a focus on fiscal austerity would be disastrous at this point in time.
Barack Obama just won more than an election, he won an argument about how best to deal with recession. It seems to me that even post-election, liberals are winning this argument, as evidenced by traditionally "centrist" economic figures embracing the liberal approach for stabilizing the economy. But I think it's likely that if this argument becomes about who wants the country to recover and who doesn't, people will eventually decide that there really isn't much difference between how the parties behave after all.
--A. Serwer
