Conscience of a Liberal

Krugman may be the prophet of thinking Democrats, but this book - I guess his manifesto? - didn't really get my blood going. Not like “What's the Matter with Kansas?”, a book Krugman cites - and corrects (in his view) by incorporating the US's fraught racial history into current political lines. But even the racism thing, certainly not a thesis original to Krugman, didn't really get me going. I felt like he wasn't adding much. There are other books about these same topics that are better-written, more mind-blowing and intellectually exciting: “A History of White People”, for example, which really picks apart the whole white supremacy thing, and Randall Kennedy's book titled with the n-word, which looks at contemporary racism from a sociologist's perspective. Even “The Hidden Cost of Being African-American”, a relative chore to get through, stirred me more.

The best bits of Krugman's book, indeed, come not when he sings the praises of FDR's equality-generating social policies (and the relative moderation of 1960s Congresses), nor when he laments the rise of “movement conservatives” (the GOP's crazies infestation/the Tea Party), but when he discusses - with urgency, clarity and eye-opening figures - the necessity of universal health care in the US. I really zipped through that chapter (towards the end), since it was the first time I had really read an overview of the US's healthcare woes. So I appreciated that. But otherwise this book may sit on my shelf as a middle-of-the-road, kinda dull, somewhat useful book. Maybe more anger, or just more fancy wordsmithing, would have earned my affections. As it stands, Krugman was a bit too economisty (i.e. dry) and not enough pundity (i.e. fist-shaking). I know, I know. We should all be level-headed and data-driven like Spock, blah blah blah...