It is a great detriment to civil discourse that the divide between left and right in the United States is often depicted as being purely cultural — as if one’s politics were solely mediated by aesthetics, such as whether one prefers shooting guns or drinking lattes. This fabulist understanding of politics is harmful inasmuch as it masks the real social effects of the policy agendas pushed by left versus right. Seeing politics as aesthetic transforms what should be a quantitative debate — with statistics and numbers about taxation and public policy, questions of who benefits more or less from policy changes — and devolves it into a rhetorical debate over values.
This is especially bad for liberals because there is a lot of quantitative evidence that the right’s economic agenda is a dismal failure in terms of providing any real gains to the vast majority of the population. As most Salon readers are aware, economist, professor, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has spent much of his career doing precisely this: debunking the asserted merits of right-wing fiscal and economic policy through unemotional facts and statistics. Continue reading.