Update 11/23: Daily Kos has a post critiquing the Republicans as party of ideas.
I keep hearing blathering experts on teevee that the Republicans failed because they aren’t the “party of ideas” anymore. Most of the people who say this are Republicans.
It reminds me of a conversation I had a couple of years with a friend of mine who had worked over thirty years at the Fed. She had taken a class of mine on international political economy and had come to realize, I believe, that you can’t use the market to solve all problems. (A key text was Everything for Sale, by Robert Kuttner.)
She said, “The problem with the left is that their ideas are so complicated, while the right’s are so simple: Just use the market.” While that simple one-size-fits-all solution might lend itself to effective marketing, it sure doesn’t work when we’re in a economic Armageddon. Almost by definition the Republicans can’t come up with any new ideas. If they did, coming up with something other than their wonderfully simple, and simplistic, “just use the market”, they would cease to be Republicans.
It reminds me of a conversation I had a couple of years with a friend of mine who had worked over thirty years at the Fed. She had taken a class of mine on international political economy and had come to realize, I believe, that you can’t use the market to solve all problems. (A key text was Everything for Sale, by Robert Kuttner.)
She said, “The problem with the left is that their ideas are so complicated, while the right’s are so simple: Just use the market.” While that simple one-size-fits-all solution might lend itself to effective marketing, it sure doesn’t work when we’re in a economic Armageddon. Almost by definition the Republicans can’t come up with any new ideas. If they did, coming up with something other than their wonderfully simple, and simplistic, “just use the market”, they would cease to be Republicans.
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