For the last week or so, I’ve been reading up on economic policy arguments going back to World War II. No, I haven’t been wading deep into academic journals that much. Mostly I’ve just been reading newspaper and magazine accounts and looking at what some intellectuals said during various decades. I’m not going to put up a long post on everything I’ve found. But what is particularly striking is how the arguments and the fears never change.

To give you a sense of what I mean, take <a href=”http://www.theamericanscene.com/2005/09/why-not-mccain-you-know-its-bad-times.php

” target=”_blank”> Ross Douthat’s perfect sensible post about all the McCain chatter. He writes:

Second – and this is a corollary of the first, in a way – I think that McCain is the wrong kind of big-government conservative for the contemporary Right, and contemporary America. The other day, Jonah remarked that “conservatives should really only care about three things these days: Killing the bad guys, cutting government, appointing good judges.” I’m sympathetic to the argument, but I don’t think this trinity is going to be enough to keep the GOP in power going forward – not unless conservatives become more responsive to the economic concerns of their increasingly working-class, increasingly financially anxious constituents.

[Emphasis mine]

Now, not to pick on Ross, but this sentence could have been written during any year since 1970. I stop there, because Ross is emphasizing that the economically anxious are members of the Republican base, and I’m not positive people were writing that before Nixon. However the far more common lament about widespread “economic insecurity” among the American people in general has been a refrain — from what I can tell — nearly every year since the 1930s, if not the 1870s. And, the policy prescriptions offered by left and right also remain almost unchanged in their first principles (though the parties do shuffle around a bit). This doesn’t mean that anyone offering the observation that Americans are economically insecure at a given moment is wrong. Nor am I trying to speak to the proposed policy remedies specifically. But it does help underscore how America has always been economically turbulent, how economic insecurity is a constant of the human condition under capitalism (which probably explains why capitalism is so productive) and the Brave New World everyone loves to announce isn’t really so new.