Krugman Unveils the True Nature of the Republican Party

I enjoyed this post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog. I agree that the Republicans are headed on a self-destruct path of political extremism:

Charlatans and Cranks

Politico writes that

In this Republican primary season, no economic or monetary policy is too unorthodox for an electorate hungry for change.

There’s not much new in the story, but it does remind us that Tim Pawlenty — who is supposed to be a non-crazy– has declared his opposition to fiat currencies — i.e., demanded a return to the gold standard (although he may not know that that’s what it means).

What Politico doesn’t include, but should, is the lemming-like rush to endorse the Ryan plan, which, although Very Serious, is also complete crank economics, with its insistence — in the teeth of all the evidence — that privatizing Medicare can somehow provide adequate health care at much lower cost. And then there’s the recent rise of default denialism — hey, let’s signal to everyone that we’re a banana republic, what harm can it do?

In the first edition (but only the first edition) of his textbook, Greg Mankiw famously derided Reagan’s supply-side advisers as charlatans and cranks. It’s pretty clear that when Mankiw wrote that he imagined that this was only a phase, that the GOP would return to more sensible policies. In fact, however, the party is sinking ever further into deep voodoo.

Digby suggests that it’s a kind of Mission Accomplished phenomenon:

I think we’re seeing the decadence and delusion of the end stages of a successful political movement. They pretty much fulfilled the corporate wish list. The only things they haven’t accomplished are the looney wingnut agenda items, which until now they’ve managed to keep at arms length, only giving little bits when necessary to keep the rubes on board. Maybe they just have nothing left to do.

Maybe. But my take is that the hermetic nature of movement conservatism — its loyalty tests, its closed intellectual world where you get all your alleged facts from Fox News and the Heritage Foundation, the “wingnut welfare” that ensures that defeated politicians always have a cushy job waiting at a think tank somewhere, always made it vulnerable to this kind of spin into policy craziness. The Bush debacle undermined the control once exercised by the establishment, which tried to keep up the appearance of reasonableness; and now people like Pawlenty and Romney need to sound crazy even if they (possibly) aren’t.

The 2010 election may, in retrospect, turn out to have been a disaster for the GOP: it empowered the extremists, leading them to believe that they could go the whole way and keep winning elections. I guess we’ll see.

Go read the original to get the embedded links.

It may be wishful thinking on my part that the Republicans are bound to self-destruct. They have had crazy policies in the past and managed to survive (the Warren G. Harding era of corruption, the McCarthy era of fanatical "patriotism", the Nixon years of paranoia, the Reagan "revolution" that declared war on the bottom 90% of the population) and managed to survive. But I find it really hard to believe that somebody who reads and thinks could spend a minute looking at their policies and not running hair-on-fire as fast as possible away from these crazies.