Krugman on the serious dangers of romantic "bipartisan" illusions and pretensions about today's Republican Party

Paul Krugman was one of the few major columnists who was not only talking sense about the Iraq War in the runup to that disastrous invasion, he was also sounding the alarm from the start of the Obama-Biden Administration on the dangers of a too-timid approach to economic stimulus and the vapidity of the "Very Serious People" (aka, VSPs) advising austerity policies in order to soothe what he called the "confidence fairy" who, similar to Tinker Bell, would wither and die if more attention were not given to balancing budgets and cutting civilian government programs. All this in addition to playing Cassandra during the last euro crisis, giving good advice that the relevant policymakers cheerfully ignored.

Krugman has also been pretty cold-eyed in recognizing the Republican Party's authoritarianism during the Cheney-Bush Administration and ever since.

So his current warning is something everyone in the Biden-Harris Administration should take very seriously (How Will Biden Deal With Republican Sabotage? New York Times 11/30/2020):

When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge — and I don’t mean the pandemic, although Covid-19 will almost surely be killing thousands of Americans every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous.

And he expands the observation with this critical point: "And this won’t simply be because they fear a backlash from the base if they admit that Trump lost fair and square. At a fundamental level — and completely separate from the Trump factor — today’s G.O.P. doesn’t believe that Democrats ever have the right to govern, no matter how many votes they receive." (my emphasis)

Historians still refer to the German Weimar Republic of 1918-1933 as a "Republic without republicans," by which they mean not only the Communists on the left and hardcore rightists who each for different reasons rejected the notion of a liberal democratic republic, but especially conservatives in establishment institutions from the army and government bureaucracies to corporations and universities. Many of the supposed respectable conservatives were especially interested in conserving democratic government. Which led to increasing authoritarianism is the form of a conservative President and conservative Chancellors (prime ministers) like Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher, ending with Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. Krugman himself during the last euro crisis referred repeatedly to Brüning's brutal austerity program during his 1930-32 Chancellorship as a dire warning that is still relevant.

If Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are successful in obstructing needed economic measures, Krugman urges the Biden-Harris team to do the thing that always seems so difficult for establishment Democrats. That is, to fight for their own side.

First, he needs to start talking about immediate policy actions to help ordinary Americans, if only to make it clear to Georgia voters how much damage will be done if they don’t elect Democrats to those two Senate seats.

If Democrats don’t get those seats, Biden will need to use executive action to accomplish as much as possible despite Republican obstruction — although I worry that the Trump-stacked Supreme Court will try to block him when he does.

Finally, although Biden is still talking in a comforting way about unity and reaching across the aisle, at some point he’ll need to stop reassuring us that he’s nothing like Trump and start making Republicans pay a political price for their attempts to prevent him from governing. ...

[W]hat Biden needs to do is what Harry Truman did in 1948, when he built political support by running against “do-nothing” Republicans. And he’ll have a better case than Truman ever did, because today’s Republicans are infinitely more corrupt and less patriotic than the Republicans Truman faced. [my emphasis]

This is absolutely critical. Today's Republican Party doesn't just pursue bad policies and oppose constructive ones. It wants to do away with the current democratic system of governance.