Larison: “Chill Out”
Daniel Larison with some sober thoughts on the financial crisis and the bailout, on which our wise and esteemed party leaders and president are purportedly nearing a deal. Silver lining: if a bailout agreement is reached before John McCain even arrives on the scene, then his ludicrous and embarassing stunt will look even stupider. (Update: whoops, I guess he got there in time to mug for the cameras, dang.)
Larison:
Something that I have noticed over the last decade or so is the insistence, usually but not always by Boomers, that such-and-such a crisis or threat is the greatest we have ever faced. Put it down to generational self-absorption or self-importance, or put it down to wanting to outdo the experience of their parents, but at several points in the last decade there have been hysterical reactions on both sides of the political spectrum to events that some large part of the population deems the greatest, most important or worst thing to have ever happened. The threat of jihadism, we have been regularly told, is greater than any threat we have faced before, which is objectively absurd. Some of the more excitable antiwar activists have repeatedly said that the war in Iraq is the greatest blunder in U.S. history (not so–entry into WWI was), as if to invest the conflict and opposition to it with a kind of world-historical importance that it will remarkably probably not have in retrospect. As with opposing jihadism without hysterics, it is possible to oppose the war and recognize it as deeply wrong without these theatrics. Now we are in the midst of a financial crisis, and it is very serious, but it is as if one cannot recognize something to be serious and very worrisome without engaging in neocon-like hyperbole. If there is a danger of economic contraction, it can’t just be like any old recession. No, it must be a second Depression, and if you don’t accept this fearmongering you are not to be taken seriously. When people are trying to scare you like this, it is because they are covering over some weakness in their argument. They make it seem as if they are trying to get you to focus on real dangers, but they are more often distracting you from their abuses or errors.
