The Brutal Clarity of the "L" Word

Keep telling low-information people that they are in hell, they will vote for the devil, himself, to get out.....of course, they will find themselves in the deeper recesses of the pit.

Last week, NY Times economics correspondent Floyd Norris noted a major development that, as major developments go, is elsewhere observed with peculiar infrequency: "The American economy," began Norris' lede, "appears to be in a cyclical recovery that is gaining strength.

"Firms have begun to hire," he continued -- indeed, in the first quarter alone the economy added more than a million jobs, "the best performance since the spring of 2005" -- and of perhaps even better news for the long-term outlook, that prime mover of the economic machine, consumer spending, "seems to be accelerating."

Additionally, the stock market has rallied more than 3,000 points since President Obama took office, and that's enormously good news for many an individual's retirement plans.
So all in all, the economic legacy of the previous administration's blinding misrule, mismanagement and miscalculation is happily turning from present reality to good-riddance history.

Yet, although we're hardly out of the woods, which even the White House is randy to remind us at every podium and press-release opportunity, "it is surprising," wrote Norris, "that many commentators ... seem to doubt that such a thing could possibly be happening."

Worse, in this layman's opinion, is that their complicating "doubt" is often converted to simple dismissal, which, in J.M. Keynes' famous metaphorical terms, only suppresses the economy's "animal spirits" -- a collective kind of spooky financial zeitgeist that plagued FDR's New Dealers to a palsied frustration; they soon found themselves boxing dark and elusive shadows rather than toasting the economy's somewhat optimistic tangibles. It's a pathology that feeds on itself.

In Norris' answer to Why all the doubt (and dismissal)? he offered several explanations "for the glum outlook that are unrelated to the actual economic data," including empirical evidence of traditionally slow recoveries; economic gurus' mortification at having blown past predictions, so now there exists their "understandable hesitation to appear foolishly optimistic again"; those plucky Republicans who "are loath to give President Obama credit for anything"; and, counterintuitively, Congressional Democrats who "would love to give the president credit" but also want "another stimulus bill ... [and] chances for that are not enhanced by the perception the economy is getting better."

Given the shortest shrift in Norris' piece, however, is possibly the most conspicuous reason for the nation's sustained gloom: the GOP's cranky, relentlessly depressing doomsday machine (see above; the Great Depression's psychological factors).

I'm certainly not saying that 24/7 Republican gloom and doom is the principal contributor to the economy's structural troubles -- of which there are many, most notably vast inequalities in wealth and the redistributive shortfalls that maintain and exacerbate those undeserved inequalities -- but in the way of unremitting drags on indispensible optimism, you'll find no better source than the Grand Old Party.

To hear Republicans tell it, we are, in fact, doomed. The economy may have added hundreds of thousands of jobs, the markets may be bubbling upwards, and consumer spending and business investment may indeed be on the wary uptick, but we're doomed, they'll tell you: doomed, Doomed, DOOMED!

Sure, that's politics; that's the way it goes, and no one should expect those tirelessly patriotic hypesters of the indomitable American Spirit and the American Way and the American Dream to say anything different (wait, is there a rhetorical flaw somewhere in that?). There are, after all, only 535 jobs + 1 that Republicans are interested in -- and the invincible gloom of "Anything is better than this" is always a splendid entry in the "Objectives" section of any political resumé.

No, what irks me -- and quite possibly irks Floyd Norris -- is that Democrats are so repeatedly hesitant to rebuff the Republicans' gloom: Isn't it becoming a trifle close to reelection time to be downplaying economic improvement, notwithstanding the Democratic desire for an additional stimulus package?

But what irks even more is Democratic resistance to the simple yet devastatingly accurate use of the "L" word: Republicans, despite alpine mountains of economic data which prove otherwise, are simply lying to the American people when they hammer away at the invented ineffectiveness of last year's stimulus package -- hundreds of billions spent and "Not one job created," they cry.

There's no better word for it. They're lying. Republicans aren't just distorting, they're not merely twisting, and they're far exceeding any tasteful boundaries of political spin. They're lying. They know it and Democrats know it; problem is, millions of low-information, American would-be consumers -- those prime movers -- don't know it.

On the whole, the news that first filters down and registers among habitually inattentive voters is the Big Bad Lie of altogether negative information. And the only way to effectively combat and conquer the Lie is to pointedly, ruthlessly call it what it is: that makes the news -- pound, pound, pound, Democrats Call Republicans Liars, pound, pound, pound -- and that then registers in the woefully part-time civic mind.

Little lightbulbs ensue.

Some might object that calling a lie a lie -- traditionally, to be sure, a political no-no -- would only add hostility to our already overhostile and polarized environment. No doubt, it would. The counter-objection, however, is that calling a lie a lie adds perhaps brutal but necessary clarity.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

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