We told you so. Repeatedly. Since 1993 and Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the Republican Party and Bob Dole’s decision that he would rather go along with trying 100% to portray Bill Clinton as a failed president rather than work to make America a better place. (I remember arriving in DC, and finding two weeks later Paul GIgot in the “Wall Street Journal” telling flat-out lies about Treasury Department, that is, my personal, spread of estimates of the economic impact of tax increases.) And we got given a lot of s*** for it. The GOP did not break in 2025. It did not break in 2017. It did not even break in 2012. It broke in 1993:
In this 2012 post, Paul Krugman looks back on more than a decade of being dismissed as “shrill.” His offense was accuracy: he insisted early that George W. Bush was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, not the blunt honest conservative the commentariat described. He also refused the mandatory pretense of symmetry — the fiction that Democratic caution and Republican radicalism were morally equivalent. By 2012, with a primary field of “not-Romneys” he calls stark raving mad, Krugman argues the party’s condition was decades old. The only new thing was that the pretense of reasonableness had become impossible to sustain:
<https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/looking-back-with-shrillness/>
Brad DeLong notes that the GOP we now see in the primaries has been building for a couple of decades; I can’t help thinking of my own decade-plus in the journalistic trenches.
Early on in my tenure at the Times, I felt I had no choice but to point out the inconvenient truth that the official line of the commentariat was all wrong. George W. Bush was not a nice, blunt, honest guy who happened to be a conservative; he was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, who among other things deliberately misled America into war.
For this I was labeled “shrill”.
More than that: throughout these past ten-plus years, it has been considered ill-mannered and uncouth, not to mention unacceptably partisan, to suggest that the parties aren’t symmetric — that, for example, the reluctance of Democrats to cut Social Security and Medicare is not equivalent to the GOP’s consistent pursuit of huge unfunded tax cuts, that the occasional desire of Democrats to put evidence in a more favorable light is not equivalent to the constant, raw dishonesty emanating from the right. And pundits in good standing have been expected to make calls for bipartisanship that involve pretending that Republican politicians are actually the kind of statesmen the party used to contain, but no longer does.
So now we see a primary struggle in which the choice is between a series of not-Romneys whose political and policy views are stark raving mad, on one side, and the not-not-Romney who is, maybe, just pretending to share those views. How did that happen?
The answer, as Brad suggests, is that it happened a long time ago. The GOP isn’t just spectacularly unlucky in its menu of candidates; this is what the party has been for decades. Rick Santorum isn’t someone out of left field; he’s always been what you see now, and he was a central figure in his Senate days.
All that has happened now is that the mannerisms have finally gotten to the point that the pretense of a reasonable party is no longer sustainable.
But you weren’t supposed to notice until just about now.
<https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/looking-back-with-shrillness/>
Brad DeLong here: The thing to understand about Paul Krugman’s 2012 “Looking Back With Shrillness” is that it was not a complaint a much as a diagnosis — and, more than that, a vindication delivered in the flat, tired voice of a man who had been right for a decade, and had gotten little for it but the label “shrill”.
Go back and read what Krugman actually wrote in February 2012. The proximate occasion was a post of mine — “Where Were You in 1993, David Brooks?” — in which I had made the boring, documentable point that the Republican Party then staggering through its clown-car primary had not suddenly gone mad. It had been building toward exactly this for a couple of decades. Paul read that and did what Paul does: he generalized it, sharpened it, and turned it into an indictment not merely of the GOP but of the entire respectable commentariat that had spent ten years insisting the emperor was fully clothed.
His confession — and it reads like one — was that “early on in my tenure at the Times, I felt I had no choice but to point out the inconvenient truth that the official line of the commentariat was all wrong. George W. Bush was not a nice, blunt, honest guy who happened to be a conservative; he was a serial liar pursuing a hard-line agenda, who among other things deliberately misled America into war. For this I was labeled ‘shrill.’”
Now. I have some standing here, because I was a charter member of the order. The Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill was not, in its original conception, a club of the angry. It was a club of the accurate.
The defining trait of a Shrill One was never volume. You looked at the Bush tax cuts and the Medicare drug benefit and the war, you did the arithmetic, and you said the arithmetic out loud — and the doing of it, calmly, was itself treated as a breach of manners. The sin was that we counted. The sin was not that we screamed, not that we were shrill. Indeed, originally we were not so.
“It has been considered ill-mannered and uncouth,” Paul Krugman wrote, “not to mention unacceptably partisan, to suggest that the parties aren’t symmetric.” The reluctance of Democrats to cut Social Security was to be treated as morally identical to the GOP’s relentless pursuit of unfunded tax cuts. The occasional Democratic massaging of evidence was to be filed alongside “the constant, raw dishonesty emanating from the right.” To notice the difference — to say that one side was lying more, and worse, and on purpose — was to disqualify yourself from polite company. The high priests of even-handedness demanded that you pretend Republican politicians were still the statesmen the party used to contain but no longer did.
And so we have, even today, a Danielle Allen stroking her chin and writing:
Danielle Allen: Our Parties Have Trapped Us <NO. SOMETHING THIJS DISHONORABLE DOES NOT GET A LINK>: ‘A good way to understand our current predicament as Americans is to imagine that we are a bear in the woods being attacked by hungry wolves. And our paw is caught in a trap. The wolves are politicians. Some are gray, some are black, but wolves are wolves. We are all of us, together, that bear. It doesn’t matter what side of America’s yawning political divide you stand on…
As if a Nancy Pelosi is as dishonorable as a Paul Ryan, or a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama or a Joe Biden is as dishonorable as a Donald Trump. Danielle Allen knows better. But she thinks she is being clever by being dishonest here. I do not have to like it.
The job of the commentariat was to price political behavior — to tell the public which actions were normal and which were aberrant, which claims were true and which were fabricated. The doctrine of symmetry was a deliberate corruption of that signal. It said: no matter what one side does, we will report the spread between the parties as roughly constant, roughly balanced, roughly a matter of taste. Voters who trusted the referees were told, year after year, that there was nothing unusual to see. So they didn’t see it. That was the whole point of the arrangement.
Paul’s was insisting back in 2012 that 2012 was not a rupture but a reveal. “The GOP isn’t just spectacularly unlucky in its menu of candidates; this is what the party has been for decades.” Rick Santorum, he wrote, “isn’t someone out of left field; he’s always been what you see now.” The radicalism on display had not arrived. It had merely become impossible to costume. “All that has happened now is that the mannerisms have finally gotten to the point that the pretense of a reasonable party is no longer sustainable.” The disguise failed. The thing underneath had been there the whole time — since 1993, since Gingrich, since the party decided that the way to power was to treat the opposing party’s legitimacy itself as negotiable.
And here is where I get to be shrill in the present tense, because the vindication is now total and it is not a happy one. Everything Paul described in 2012 was the overture. The demand that we treat asymmetric dishonesty as symmetric; the punishment of accuracy as bad manners; the steady discounting of a party’s radicalism because acknowledging it would be “partisan” — run that machine for another decade and you do not get Rick Santorum. You get worse, and you get it in power. The commentators who called us shrill in 2003 and 2012 were not merely wrong on the merits. They were the mechanism. Their false balance was the subsidy that kept the whole enterprise solvent long past the point where an honest market would have repriced it to zero.
So what was Paul Krugman saying in 2012? He was saying: I told you, and you called me shrill for telling you, and the telling was the service and the shrillness was the smear. He was saying the disease was old and the symptoms merely newly visible. He was saying that the unforgivable act in the moderate center of our politics was never raising your voice. It was keeping accurate books.
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