I find that I have written 17 blog posts critical of Paul Krugman since 2005. Since 2008, these posts have generally been defenses of Barack Obama. As I wrote in February 2009, “Krugman’s critiques of Barack Obama … represent one of the most interesting debates in American politics.”

Today’s Krugman column provides an opportunity to sum it up. This is the key paragraph:

In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance–we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions.

During the campaign, Krugman wanted Obama to capitalize on the unpopularity of George W. Bush to make a sweeping and persuasive case to the American people: things had gone badly because of conservative ideas; liberal ideas were better. It was deeply frustrating to Krugman, Sean Wilentz, and many others (including some of my friends) that Barack Obama wouldn’t say that forcefully and relentlessly. He did say much of it, but mixed with other themes that had no resonance for Paul Krugman. What Krugman heard was a call for “bipartisanship,” which seemed exactly the opposite of what we needed. Bipartisanship meant blurring the distinctions between liberals and “people with the wrong ideas” and signaling an excessive willingness to compromise.

After the election, Krugman argues, Barack Obama should have explained and defended liberal policies, whether or not they could get through Congress. Above all, he should have “fought” for an “economic plan commensurate with the scale of the crisis.” Krugman doesn’t explain what “fighting” means for a president, but perhaps it means vigorously debating one’s opponents in public forums. If, despite Obama’s most vigorous ideological arguments, a huge stimulus package failed in Congress, the “people with the wrong ideas” would have to take the blame.

Instead, Krugman believes, the president compromised on his liberalism, and therefore Americans did not understand their options. Communication is everything for Krugman. From today’s column: “What Mr. Obama should have said … Mr. Obama could and should be hammering Republicans …There were no catchy slogans, no clear statements of principle … ” The president “has the bully pulpit.”

I don’t believe that bipartisanship was the distinctive message of the Obama campaign; in fact, the candidate paid no more than the usual and customary homage to it. But Obama did reject the diagnosis that we were simply “in trouble … because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas.” He didn’t think that he could explain or argue the American people into a different political philosophy, one in which our major troubles stemmed from conservative ideas and the solutions lay in a more activist government. Obama wanted a more activist government and has taken the largest step in that direction since 1974 with the health care bill. But he didn’t believe that the way to get there was to conduct a debate on ideology. He did think, contra Krugman, that the main problem was the process and not the misguided people in office.

After all, the number of “people with the wrong ideas” (as defined by Krugman) is very large. All Republican elected officials, plus the majority of American voters who supported that party in several recent elections, have the wrong ideas, from Krugman’s perspective. So do at least one third of elected Democrats and a large proportion of Democratic voters. So do all the leaders of major foreign economies, who are asking Obama to lower deficits and not spend. So do many impressive economists. I personally find Krugman’s economics quite persuasive, but the task of explanation and persuasion is much harder than he realizes.

People begin with a very deep distrust of the federal government. Because of that distrust, just six percent of Americans believed that the $787 billion stimulus package had created even one job a full year after it passed Congress. I suppose Krugman would say that the stimulus was too small to be noticeable. But the kind of stimulus he wanted was certainly too big to pass Congress, so Obama could only have won the debate, not the policies he needed. In any case, if you live in a country where 94% of people believe that almost one trillion dollars of their money bought no jobs, you have a deeper problem than being “governed by people with the wrong ideas.” You need to diagnose why most people are so deeply distrustful and skeptical.

One reason is a natural and healthy distrust of a large and distant federal government. No other diverse, continental-sized country has a central government that has addressed national problems and won broad popular support. The European democracies are far smaller; Russia, India, and China have worse governance problems than we do. Governing from Washington is a tough task.

A second reason is poor results. We devote large amounts of our income to taxes, but because of military spending, wasteful health spending, and misconceived programs like the Farm Bill and the mortgage income deduction, we don’t get very good value for our money.

A third reason is distaste for political leaders who appear to squabble and score points rather than cooperate to solve our problems. Krugman wants Democrats to pin the blame for bad policy and obstructionism on Republicans. But Americans hear the counter-charges as well as the charges and decide that they don’t want to entrust large amounts of their money to any of these people.

A fourth reason is exclusion from public life. For a generation, we have been replacing democratic participation in public institutions (like schools) with technocratic governance: with efficiency measures, accountability systems, and other tools that ordinary people cannot control.

A fifth reason is “the Big Sort“–our mass migration to enclaves (whether neighborhoods, news sources, or organizations and associations) where we only encounter others who agree with us. The Big Sort lowers trust in government because individuals believe that most other people agree with them, yet the government acts contrary to their values. They underestimate the degree to which we actually disagree with one other. Our opponents, meanwhile, become shadowy enemies motivated by terrible values, instead of flesh-and-blood neighbors with different life experiences.

A sixth reason is the collapse of powerful intermediary organizations, associations with grassroots chapters and national lobbies that once connected people to the policy process. Those associations included fraternal and ethnic clubs, unions, and churches (of which only the evangelical conservative ones remain strong). They gave people a feeling of ownership by multiplying their power.

And a final reason is a terrible process. As long as elections are privately funded, districts are gerrymandered, and legislative procedures are rigged, it doesn’t matter who makes what argument or what the people believe who govern us. Policy will be determined by power.

Obama explicitly understood these points. He concluded that the problem was the process. Debate wouldn’t solve anything, but we needed to build new relationships–relationships of trust between citizens and the government and among diverse citizens. Krugman scoffs at the idea of “men and women of good will … coming together to solve our problems.” That is indeed too much to expect of Congress, but it happens regularly in civil society. At the national level, politicians can at least display more of the civility that Americans expect of fellow citizens. (Civility, by the way, is not the same as bipartisanship.)

I think Obama’s diagnosis and promise were correct. That doesn’t mean that the execution has been satisfactory. There have been no new policies that permit or encourage broad public participation. There have been no serious changes in the rules and processes of Washington. The administration has tried to negotiate its way to satisfactory policies and explain their merits to the American people, instead of changing the system itself. In that sense, they have been doing what Krugman recommends, but with less economic ambition and impact. We need the kind of transformational presidency that Barack Obama promised and that Paul Krugman considered a mistake.

Few forms of writing are as depressing as the comments posted on major newspaper and news channel websites. People are entitled to their opinions, but the degree of repetition, cliché, incivility, irrelevance, and incoherent rage in comment threads is discouraging. Notice, for example, how almost any article about a survey will attract vituperative comments accusing the pollster of fabricating data to help one political party.

I do see exceptions. For instance, somehow the Atlantic’s Ta-Nahesi Coates maintains an active comment space in which people actually write interesting remarks that build on one another. But I have met reporters who won’t look at the comments on their own articles, despite mandates from management to do so, because they are so tired of being called names regardless of what they write.

I don’t know how many people even glance at such comment threads, nor what happens (if anything) when they do. But I worry that after reading comments, we start to think we live among people who aren’t capable of reasonable conversation, and that depresses our interest in deliberation and democracy.

Some sites seem to restrict participation. For example, I think you need a New Republic subscription to comment on TNR (a barrier that prevented me from posting a civil but highly critical response to Sean Wilentz). Apparently, some sites use a combination of software and human labor to delete the really offensive stuff. But that leaves a lot of comments that, while they break no rules, add no value.

Is there a better way?

Austin, TX: I am here for a Millennials and News Summit at the University of Texas, subtitled, “The Real Challenge to the Future of Journalism and Journalism Education.” Meanwhile, back in DC, Temple University’s Renee Hobbs released her Knight Commission White Paper on Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action at an Aspen Institute event, to comments from FCC Commissioner Michael Hobbs, the head of the American Library Association, and many other luminaries. In her paper, Hobbs summarizes the challenges of using the modern media responsibly–and creatively–and she develops some specific proposals, such as “a national network of summer learning programs to integrate digital and media literacy into public charter schools,” and a “Digital and Media Literacy (DML) Youth Corps to bring digital and media literacy to underserved communities and special populations via public libraries, museums and other community centers.” The whole paper is an excellent primer to the subject we will be discussing in Austin today.

According to new research released today by CIRCLE and the Generational Alliance, younger African Americans (ages 18-29) represented 14% of all younger voters, just about the same as their proportion of the whole young-adult population (14.4%). That means that young African Americans voted on par with other young adults, not a bad comparative showing when you consider that they face the challenges of lower average educational attainment and higher rates of disenfranchisement. On the other hand, keeping pace with other young Americans was not such a great result when the turnout of all 18-29s was only 21%. And younger African Americans lost a lead that they had previously held: they had the highest turnout rate among young people in 2008. If Black youth turnout had been higher in 2010, it would have been good news for Democrats (86% of young adult African Americans voted Democratic) and a source of political strength in the African American community.

Could anything have been done to raise the turnout rate? To start, politicians should not have taken it for granted. Biko Baker, one of the best young organizers in America and a member of CIRCLE’s advisory board, offered to take a leave of absence from his nonpartisan work to help organize for the Democrats in urban Wisconsin. The party told him it wasn’t necessary: “we truly think that people will be inspired to help the President during these next couple of weeks.” But our own focus groups in Baltimore in 2008, plus the observations of real experts like Cathy Cohen (director of the Black Youth Project) found that young African Americans were never in love with Barack Obama. Even in 2008, they felt hope mixed with a great degree of skepticism. It was an open question whether they would be “inspired to help the President,” and much would depend on what he did for them. In the end, turnout was low–not compared to other young people, but compared to what the Democrats needed to win.

To engage young African Americans, the administration could have explicitly addressed racial injustice and issues perceived as racially salient, such as sentencing disparities. Instead, as Cohen writes, a decision was made to “run away from race, and only respond to the issue of race when it was in crisis mode …, leaving young people feeling alienated by the rhetoric and discourse around race in this country.” I agree that the administration has been muted on racial issues–probably more so than other Democratic administrations would be–out of fear of reinforcing animus against the Black president. But I also think that the politics were tough. Explicit discussions of race would have alienated some white voters, and it would have been hard for the president to deliver more than rhetoric on issues like sentencing disparities.

A second strategy would have been to address the critical issues facing young African Americans. The September unemployment rate for African Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 was 32 percent (edging down to 29.7 percent in October). That is catastrophic. But I fear that our political system and climate gave the administration inadequate tools to respond.

The third strategy would have been to give young African Americans a voice and work to do on behalf of the causes that they care about. Many thousands were mobilized as active supporters of Barack Obama in 2008. When the election was over, they should have been maintained as part of an interracial social movement. It would have been illegal as well as unethical to use public funds or the White House to support that movement, but the millions of Obama donors could have been persuaded to fund grassroots work privately.

That would have meant hiring people like Biko Baker and giving him real authority. In turn, he advises integrating media and creative work into a youth movement. He cites as an example the Black Youth Project’s “Democracy Remixed” Video Contest. Thus I’ll end with my favorite video from that contest, by Chris Webb. I don’t necessarily agree with Webb’s whole message, which focuses relentlessly on culture change within the Black community. But I post his work because it exemplifies the excellence of young people’s political voice.

I will be going to Austin, TX later this week for a “Millennials and News” summit at University of Texas. I just made the following graph to orient my own thoughts:

It shows a severe decline in newspaper readership since the early 1970s. The decline is much less pronounced for young adults (ages 18-29): they started out lower but their elders have fallen to meet them. This trend is ground for concern because traditional newspaper readers had many civic virtues, being much more likely to engage in community affairs. I believe the reason for the decline is not a disappearance of civic virtue, but rapid changes in the news business.

The graph also shows a decline in following the news and public affairs “most of the time.” As newspaper readership plummeted in the 2000s, following the news did not fall in tandem–because people were switching to new sources of news. But those new sources didn’t solve our problem, because attention to the news remains lower than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. For youth, the “attention” rate has been pretty constant, despite rapid changes in the news environment, since 1980. It is also very low by any reasonable standard, with less than 15% regularly following the news.