Romantic Psychosis
by digby
Boy has Krugman really hit on something today. Talking about the delusion of technocratic saviors, he says this:
I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people — the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity — aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.
They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are…
[O]ur discourse is being badly distorted by ideologues and wishful thinkers — boring, cruel romantics — pretending to be technocrats. And it’s time to puncture their pretensions.
Read the whole column. He does know from technocrats and even though he doesn’t mention it, he’s talking about exactly the same dynamic we saw in the run up to the Iraq war. There it was the starry-eyed Neo-cons pretending to be “realists” by invading a country in order to build their own version of Barbie’s dream house.(See: Imperial Life in the Emerald City.)
These romantic delusions happen on all sides of the political spectrum but in recent years it’s the gooey dreamers of the right who have been wrapping the world in their fantasies of Greatness. History shows that tends to lead in some very unpleasant directions.
.