Why the N.Y. Times ruins Bush's breakfast

"The Great Unraveling" collects Krugman's best work, catching those mistakes in snapshot flashes of criticism as they were being made. No one wrote with more clarity and foresight on the California energy crisis (which had nothing to do with environmental regulations and everything to do with energy companies rigging markets). No one took Alan Greenspan to task more vigorously for betraying his own legacy in embracing Bush's budget-busting tax cuts. No one rode Bush harder for his dubious past as a crony capitalist who made his fortune thanks to his connections as a president's son, and to self-dealing accounting of the same species that later turned into a national scandal during his administration, with the implosion of Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen and other corporate shell-game players.

Krugman is merciless about both the secrecy under which the Bush administration drew up its energy policies and the irrationality of the policies it coughed into the light. From the Bush White House's hostility to conservation and its obsession with opening the Alaskan tundra to oil drilling to its schizophrenic free-trade policies and its strange collusions with OPEC, Krugman surveys the landscape of Bush policy and finds a wasteland of brazen hypocrisy populated by "cynical political operators" wrapped in the flag, "an extremely elitist clique trying to maintain a populist facade."

This is columnizing of a very high order. But reading one 750-word column after another creates a monotonous prose rhythm over hundreds of pages that does not frame Krugman's writing in the best light. After reading dozens of columns you start to hunger for something more in-depth that might answer the central political problem of our era: With so much to get mad about, sitting in broad daylight, why hasn't America risen in rage?

Krugman cites several factors in passing in individual columns, including the concentration of corporate media power. (As Krugman tells it, Big Media loves Bush's deregulation: Bush's people relax the rules, so that Big Media can fill the Republicans' campaign chests, and both go home happy.) But only once, in its extended introduction, does "The Great Unraveling" move beyond the quick-hit column mode to grapple with this question of America's passivity in the face of ideological coup. Here, Krugman draws an unexpected and tantalizing historical parallel to explain why centrist American institutions have not responded more actively to what he diagnoses as a radical movement on the right that has hijacked the nation's political and economic destiny.

His source is, of all places, Henry Kissinger's doctoral dissertation on Metternich and the post-Napoleonic restoration. The story of mainstream America's failure to understand the radicalism of the Bush/Cheney Republican regime, Krugman argues, echoes Kissinger's account of the difficulties Old Europe faced in recognizing the rise of a "revolutionary power" that did not play by its rules and that did not acknowledge its legitimacy. Turning Kissinger's geostrategic diagnosis inside out, Krugman casts Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove & Co. as today's Jacobins and Napoleons, determined to upend the status quo of American democracy and slaughter its sacred cows -- like a tax-supported social safety net, civil liberties, electoral norms and international cooperation.

"The Great Unraveling" is mostly a chronicle of malfeasance rather than a prescription for righting wrongs, but Krugman does propose some principles for dealing with Bush revolutionaries: "Don't assume that policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated goals. Do some homework to discover the real goals. Don't assume that the usual rules of politics apply. Expect a revolutionary power to respond to criticism by attacking. Don't think that there's a limit to a revolutionary power's objectives."

These dicta are all good advice, and any reader of Krugman will find ample examples of their application in his articles. But the historical analogy Krugman borrows from Kissinger has broader and more disturbing implications that the economist never acknowledges. Europe's counterrevolution against Napoleon did not achieve success on the basis of simply recognizing a threat and defeating it; it took the persistent and sometimes devious leadership of Kissinger's hero, the extraordinary Austrian diplomat Prince Metternich, to hold together a coalition and keep a watchful eye for any sign of the revolutionary enemy's revival.

In the fight to save America from the increasingly reckless ravages of the Bush regime, where's our latter-day Metternich? It's awfully hard to cast any of the current Democratic presidential hopefuls, though Howard Dean is beginning to turn a lot of heads. But whoever may be waiting in the wings to take on this role in the struggle to contain and ultimately defeat today's conservative revolutionaries needs to get cracking: He's got a heap of work to do before we can ever hope to pack George Bush off to some latter-day Elba.

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