The more things change, yadda, yadda yadda
by digby
It was such fun yesterday watching all the right wingers try to appropriate John F. Kennedy as the one true conservative just as they do whenever we honor Martin Luther King. It’s actually a good strategy to take credit for the things your popular enemies do that are in line with your agenda, so I don’t blame them. Democrats should do more of it themselves. (Reagan the peacenik! Newt Gingrich the environmentalist! George W. Bush the … patron of the arts?)
Unfortunately, the conservative economic mavens have Kennedy wrong. I have no way of knowing what he would do in today’s circumstances and neither do they. But we have a pretty good idea of how he thought about economics in his day, and contrary to Grover Norquist’s fevered tweet dream, it wasn’t a celebration of laissez faire capitalism. Last night Stephanie Kelton posted this fascinating excerpt from his speech on that subject at Yale in 1962, that’s well worth reading, if only to remind yourself that there is nothing new under the sun.
I’ll just excerpt this bit from the rest of the speech, which is absolutely true, (and also incredibly ironic considering what Perlstein wrote about yesterday.)
Anyway, this is great:
[T]he great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Mythology distracts us everywhere—in government as in business, in politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs. But today I want to particularly consider the myth and reality in our national economy. In recent months many have come to feel, as I do, that the dialog between the parties—between business and government, between the government and the public—is clogged by illusion and platitude and fails to reflect the true realities of contemporary American society.
Some things never change apparently.
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