In the modern United States, most important zombie ideas are on the right, kept undead by big money from billionaires who have a financial interest in getting people to believe things that aren’t true.
But sometimes zombie ideas also manage to eat centrists’ brains. Sure enough, some of the most destructive zombies of the past dozen years have shambled their way into the Democratic primary fight, where a couple of centrists are repeating ideas that were thoroughly debunked years ago.
Elizabeth Warren argues that Bloomberg’s embrace of a false right-wing narrative about the financial crisis should disqualify him for the Democratic nomination. But I’d be willing to cut him some slack if he’d admit that he was taken in by right-wing disinformation. If he isn’t willing to make that admission, she’s right.
At the same time that Bloomberg is being called out on his housing bubble zombie, Pete Buttigieg is facing justified criticism for buying into another zombie idea — the obsession with government debt. That obsession did much to hobble recovery from the financial crisis.
To be fair, deficit panic wasn’t as naked a scam as the claim that do-gooders caused the financial crisis, although some of the loudest voices decrying the evils of deficits were obvious phonies. What happened instead was that many important people imagined that inveighing against the dangers of debt made them sound serious, because that’s what all the other serious people were doing.
At this point, however, the debt obsession has been thoroughly debunked by both economic research and experience. We live in a world awash in private savings looking for someplace to go, with investors willing to lend money to governments at incredibly low interest rates. It’s actually irresponsible not to put this money to work investing in the future, both by building physical infrastructure and through programs that help children develop their potential.
Now, the Trump administration is doing it wrong — borrowing large sums, but squandering the money on tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. But even bad deficit spending boosts the economy to some extent, and it is the reason America is still growing reasonably fast while Europe, still in the grip of austerity ideology, is stagnating.
Look: It’s easy to make the political case that Democrats should nominate a centrist, rather than someone from the party’s left wing. Candidates who are perceived as ideologically extreme usually pay an electoral penalty; this is especially true if, like Bernie Sanders, they actually pose as more radical than they really are.
But a key part of centrism’s appeal is the belief that centrists are realists, who understand how the world works. It’s much harder to make the case for centrists who repeat manifestly false claims, especially if those claims were essentially right-wing propaganda.
As I said, you can make a good case for the proposition that Democrats should, in the end, nominate a centrist. But a centrist whose brain has been eaten by zombie ideas? Not so much.
