Krugman’s Book Blames ‘Southern White Voters’ for All Economic Ills

Apparently the conscience of a liberal isn’t bound from making ad hominem attacks against Southerners and their voting patterns.

That’s the impression one would get from Paul Krugman’s 286-page diatribe, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” espousing the expansion of the welfare state. The welfare state that would be possible, that is, if it weren’t for Southern white voters who voted Republican.

“It’s almost embarrassing. I talk a lot to political scientists, and you go through the numbers and the polls. And it all boils down – almost everything else goes away, except for five words: ‘Southern whites started voting Republican.’ The backlash against the civil rights movement explains almost everything that’s happened in this country for the past 45 years,” Krugman said in an interview promoting his book on the left-wing Democracy Now! newscast on October 17 .

Krugman has been a columnist for The New York Times since 1999 and is an economics professor at Princeton University.

Krugman believes the ideal situation for the United States hinges on the success of what he calls “the welfare state” – a notion he reiterates over and over again.

But it is Southern whites that have prevented “the welfare state” from existing as he sees fit:

“White backlash against the civil rights movement is the reason America is the only advanced country where a major political party wants to roll back the welfare state. Ronald Reagan began his 1980 campaign with a states’ rights speech outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered; Newt Gingrich was able to take over Congress entirely because of the great Southern flip, the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support for Democrats to overwhelming support for Republicans.”

What constitutes the welfare state? According to Krugman, it all begins with the Democratic-led Congress pursuing “an unabashedly liberal program of expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality – a new New Deal.”

“I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty,” Krugman wrote. “I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal and I’m proud of it.”

Krugman has claimed he is not a socialist – but his ideas of strangling the free market in the name of social justice are more socialist than capitalist.