Brooks and Krugman

Bobo has produced a thing called “Going Home Again” in which he ‘splains to us how a blogger who is part of a communitarian conservative tradition decides to move home to his small-town roots.  The “communitarian conservative tradition” of which he burbles are the so-called “crunchy cons” babbled about by Rod Dreher first in 2002.  Prof. Krugman says “Keynes Was Right,” and that once again, when politicians and policy makers decided to focus on deficits, not jobs, they proved Keynes right about a slump being the wrong time for austerity.  Here’s Bobo’s three-hanky offering:

Rod Dreher grew up in St. Francisville, La., a town of about 1,700 people 30 minutes northwest of Baton Rouge. He left for college and then lived in Washington, New York, Miami, Dallas and Philadelphia, working as a writer for various magazines, a newspaper and a foundation.

His younger sister, Ruthie, went to L.S.U., returned to St. Francisville as a middle-school teacher and married an Iraq war veteran who worked as a fireman. On Feb. 22, 2010, Ruthie, who was 40 then, was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer. She told her brother that she was afraid that her three young girls would be angry with God for taking her from them: “We can’t have anger,” she told him. “Make sure nobody is angry at the doctors, either. They couldn’t have caught it earlier.”

The entire town rallied around her. There were cookouts to raise money for her medical care. Ruthie met a woman named Stephanie when they were both getting chemotherapy. Stephanie continued to accompany Ruthie to the hospital even after her own round of treatments was finished.

April 10, 2010, was officially Ruthie Leming Day in St. Francisville. More than half the town went to a fund-raising concert. Somebody took a camper-trailer to the concert so Ruthie would have a place to rest and take oxygen.

Dreher, one of the country’s most interesting bloggers, captured Ruthie’s illness in real time. “It’s so beautiful to see it’s almost painful,” he wrote the night of the concert, “and so unreal in its generosity that you think it must have been a movie.”

As Ruthie’s illness worsened, Dreher’s grief would be mixed with something else. “The outpouring — an eruption, really — of goodness and charity from the people of our town has been quite simply stunning,” he blogged. “The acts of aid and comfort have been ceaseless, often reducing our parents to tears of shock and awe.”

She died on Sept. 15 this year. More than 1,000 people signed the guest book at the funeral, Dreher reported. Mike, her husband who had wrenched his back trying to perform C.P.R. on her, stood for hours by the open coffin as people filed past. Since Ruthie liked to go barefoot, the pallbearers took off their shoes, rolled up their pants and carried the coffin to the grave in bare feet.

During the wake, Dreher and his wife received an e-mail informing them that the deal for a farmhouse they had hoped to rent in Bucks County, Pa., had fallen through. They were surprised as waves of relief swept over them.

Then a thought occurred. Maybe they should leave the Philadelphia area and move back to Louisiana. “Standing in Ruthie’s kitchen the day after she died, laughing with all of Mike’s friends who had surrounded him to hold him up (‘We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other,’ Mike later said), I thought, ‘Even with all the sadness, there’s no place else in the world I’d rather be.’ ”

They considered the practicalities. They wondered if they were experiencing a passing emotion from a traumatic event. To their great astonishment, they decided to make the move.

They wanted to be enmeshed in a tight community. They wanted to be around Ruthie’s daughters, and they wanted their kids to be able to go deer hunting with Mike. They wanted to be where the family had been for five generations and participate in the rituals ranging from Mardi Gras to L.S.U. football. They decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being a part of a community.

They moved in just before Christmas. For the past many years, Ruthie and her mother had a tradition of going to a nearby cemetery on Christmas Eve to put candles on all the graves. This year, with Ruthie in that cemetery, her mother was too sad to do it. But, as she was driving by the cemetery that night, she noticed little flames dotting the graveyard.

She called Dreher, sobbing. “You’ve got to find out who did this for us. … Whoever it is, they will never know what this meant to me. They will never, ever know.”

It turns out that it was a neighbor named Susan Harvey Wymore, who had learned that Ruthie’s mother would be unable to light the cemetery and did it for her.

Dreher is a writer for The American Conservative and is part of a communitarian conservative tradition that goes back to thinkers like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. Forty years ago, Kirk led one of the two great poles of conservatism. It existed in creative tension with the other great pole, Milton Friedman’s free-market philosophy.

In recent decades, the communitarian conservatism has become less popular while the market conservatism dominates. But that doesn’t make Kirk’s insights into small towns, traditions and community any less true, as Rod Dreher so powerfully rediscovered.

And, as we ALL know, only Republicans live in small towns or give a shit about community.  Bobo is SUCH an asshole.  By the way — the places where Dreher has plied his trade, which Bobo chose not to identify in his opening graf, include The Dallas Morning News, The American Conservative, National Review and the John Templeton Foundation.  Feh.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way.

Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they knew better, that we should focus on deficits, not jobs, even though our economies had barely begun to recover from the slump that followed the financial crisis. And by acting on that anti-Keynesian belief, they ended up proving Keynes right all over again.

In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash.

So the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the ideology that dominates much of our political discourse. In March 2011, the Republican staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy.” It ridiculed concerns that cutting spending in a slump would worsen that slump, arguing that spending cuts would improve consumer and business confidence, and that this might well lead to faster, not slower, growth.

They should have known better even at the time: the alleged historical examples of “expansionary austerity” they used to make their case had already been thoroughly debunked. And there was also the embarrassing fact that many on the right had prematurely declared Ireland a success story, demonstrating the virtues of spending cuts, in mid-2010, only to see the Irish slump deepen and whatever confidence investors might have felt evaporate.

Amazingly, by the way, it happened all over again this year. There were widespread proclamations that Ireland had turned the corner, proving that austerity works — and then the numbers came in, and they were as dismal as before.

Yet the insistence on immediate spending cuts continued to dominate the political landscape, with malign effects on the U.S. economy. True, there weren’t major new austerity measures at the federal level, but there was a lot of “passive” austerity as the Obama stimulus faded out and cash-strapped state and local governments continued to cut.

Now, you could argue that Greece and Ireland had no choice about imposing austerity, or, at any rate, no choices other than defaulting on their debts and leaving the euro. But another lesson of 2011 was that America did and does have a choice; Washington may be obsessed with the deficit, but financial markets are, if anything, signaling that we should borrow more.

Again, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We entered 2011 amid dire warnings about a Greek-style debt crisis that would happen as soon as the Federal Reserve stopped buying bonds, or the rating agencies ended our triple-A status, or the superdupercommittee failed to reach a deal, or something. But the Fed ended its bond-purchase program in June; Standard & Poor’s downgraded America in August; the supercommittee deadlocked in November; and U.S. borrowing costs just kept falling. In fact, at this point, inflation-protected U.S. bonds pay negative interest: investors are willing to pay America to hold their money.

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.

The good news, such as it is, is that President Obama has finally gone back to fighting against premature austerity — and he seems to be winning the political battle. And one of these years we might actually end up taking Keynes’s advice, which is every bit as valid now as it was 75 years ago.

As an aside, I find it interesting that all of a sudden this morning there are no comments to the columnist’s pages.  It will be interesting to find out if this was just a fluke, or whether we’re no longer allowed to beat Bobo with sticks…