I, with 50 -100 mile days in the car, often turn to audio books, from Lincoln’s speeches to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. A few months ago I listened to Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder and shared weekly phone calls with three others reading it. [A very good demythification of Kit Carson and the American west before and after the Civil War.]

This month I have been listening to Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal.

This is not perhaps the best choice for in the car study. Though a book aimed at the educated it is not technical or abstruse. Krugman writes in the same accessible style we appreciate in his newspaper columns. By it’s nature however, there is a rich mine of quotes and data one, on listening, would like to remember. This is difficult in the car, with a porous brain and the impossibility of taking a few notes. Nevertheless one can follow his general argument and be struck by major themes, principally the centrality of race, as he sees it, in the skewing to the right of the electorate. The book is his worked out answer to two questions:

The first puzzle is economic: what happened to the middle class. I argue in the book that a large part of the rise in inequality is political in origin, having to do with the rise of movement conservatism, the cohesive set of people and institutions that has taken over the Republican Party. Maybe we’ll talk more about that in later conversation.

The other puzzle is why rising inequality, far from provoking a populist political backlash, has been accompanied by a move to the right: politicians who wanted to cut taxes on the rich and create bigger holes in the social safety net have more elections than not.

I’ll try to up date this post with my own thoughts and questions, but as time is pressing on with plenty of other tasks before me I thought I’d hook you up to TPM Bookclub where Professor Krugman starts off with an overview of the book, followed by 143 comments!

This opening post is followed by posts from other invited readers, each with a string of comments in their wake. [ To read the posts in sequence, start with the link above. When ready, click on the “Tag” “The Conscience of a Liberal (here) or below Krugman’s post but before the comments. This will bring you to all the posts. Scroll down to find Krugman’s, which you’ve just read, and go to the one above it, and then above that, etc.]