Is Paul Krugman right that our politics are shaped by glaring inequalities?

You do not have to register to participate in this poll for the first two weeks; after that, registration is required. We do ask all readers to abide by our civility guidelines whether they register or not.

To participate in our poll simply drop down to the bottom of this page and click on the word"Comments."

For an economist, Paul Krugman rests an awful lot of the argument he makes in his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal, on history. His chief claim is that we are living through a second Gilded Age which has put the rich in the driver's seat of American politics, ending a period of Middle Class egalitarianism brought about by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers.

He admits starting the book with a misconception. He initially had believed that burgeoning inequality in the 1980s transformed our politics, giving conservatism momentum. But he finished the book convinced that inequality in the 1980s was the product and not the cause of conservative policies. How did conservatism achieve its great success? Movement Conservatism, he argues, used race in the 1970s to divide the New Deal coalition and win over disgruntled whites in the South. This is an old pattern in American history, he contends. Citing a Harvard study he insists that racism is the reason the United States did not establish a European-style welfare system. He provides as an example of the dynamic what happened to Harry Truman's plan to create a system of national health insurance. Despite overwhelming public approval of the plan whites in the South torpedoed it out of fear that hospitals would be integrated.

In a devastating review in the New York Times, Stanford historian David Kennedy dismissed much of Krugman's history:

History according to Krugman goes something like this: the nation suffered through a ''Long Gilded Age'' of let-'er-rip, dog-eat-dog capitalism until the New Deal created a new social order characterized by income-leveling taxes, job security, strong labor unions, a prosperous middle class, bipartisan solidarity and general social bliss. Krugman invokes that post-World War II ''paradise lost'' in his first paragraph, and his yearning to restore that Edenic moment informs all the pages that follow.

But as the story unfolds, serpents slither into the garden, in the form of pesky ''movement conservatives.'' Those upstarts set out in the 1960s to exploit racial tensions, national security anxieties and volatile value-laden matters like abortion, school prayer and gay rights ''to change the subject away from bread and butter issues.'' By century's end they had managed to fasten upon their hapless fellow citizens ''a second Gilded Age'' in which inequality is on the rise and even the modest American version of the welfare state that the New Deal put in place is in danger of being dismantled.

For this dismal state of affairs the Democratic Party is held to be blameless. Never mind the Democrats' embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats' vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security. As Krugman sees it, the modern Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. ''There hasn't been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today's bitter partisanship.'' No two to tango for him. The ascendancy of modern conservatism is ''an almost embarrassingly simple story,'' he says, and race is the key. ''Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican. ... End of story.''

Is Kennedy right? Is Krugman's analysis thin?

Excerpt from The Conscience of a Liberal.

America in the 1950s was a middle-class society, to a far greater extent than it had been in the 1920s--or than it is today. Social injustice remained pervasive: Segregation still ruled in the South, and both overt racism and overt discrimination against women were the norm throughout the country. Yet ordinary workers and their families had good reason to feel that they were sharing in the nation's prosperity as never before. And, on the other side, the rich were a lot less rich than they had been a generation earlier.

The economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo call the narrowing of income gaps that took place in the United States between the twenties and the fifties--the sharp reduction in the gap between the rich and the working class, and the reduction in wage differentials among workers--"the Great Compression." Their deliberate use of a phrase that echoes "the Great Depression" is appropriate: Like the depression, the narrowing of income gaps was a defining event in American history, something that transformed the nature of our society and politics. Yet where the Great Depression lives on in our memory, the Great Compression has been largely forgotten. The achievement of a middle-class society, which once seemed an impossible dream, came to be taken for granted.

Now we live in a second Gilded Age, as the middle-class society of the postwar era rapidly vanishes. The conventional wisdom of our time is that while this is a bad thing, it's the result of forces beyond our control. But the story of the Great Compression is a powerful antidote to fatalism, a demonstration that political reform can create a more equitable distribution of income--and, in the process, create a healthier climate for democracy.

Related Links

Michael Kazin: Is Paul Krugman a Good Historian?