As Dean notes below, Paul Krugman has a particularly distasteful column in today's New York Times, reviving John Stuart Mill's mantra that conservatives belong to the Stupid Party. According to Krugman,
[T]he debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I've been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the "party of ideas," have become the party of stupid. Now, I don't mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don't mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.
What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism - the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there's something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise - has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party's de facto slogan has become: "Real men don't think things through."
Of course, one could say the same about Democrats who called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq the second things weren't going right. Krugman's position is not all that original. Seeking to explain how Bush won reelection, many on the left have insisted for years that Republicans were good at politics but bad at governance. This take confuses the anti-intellectualism of many right-wingers for stupidity.
Krugman's article fails in an even broader sense as well, because he doesn't grasp that the real difference between Republicans and Democrats is less a question of intelligence than in how each party addresses the existence of the so-called irrational voter. While the right draws a connection between public ignorance and limited government, the left purports to be populist even while it cedes greater authority to democratically unaccountable institutions like the United Nations. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Schumpeter, who tried to reconcile public ignorance and democratic theory, doesn't seem to be part of Krugman's plan. He's too busy calling the opposition stupid to engage in a real battle of ideas.
