Paul Krugman elaborates on a profile in the
The question you should ask, then, is why this always-wrong economic doctrine now has a stronger grip on the GOP than ever before.
It wasn’t always thus. George W. Bush’s inner circle clearly had little use for the likes of Laffer; they engaged in a lot of deceptive advertising about the economy (and a few other things), but they never made extravagant supply-side claims — and remember that Greg “charlatans and cranks” Mankiw served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But since 2009 the GOP has swerved hard right into fantasy land — and it has done so despite a remarkable string of dead-wrong predictions by the people peddling that fantasy. [snip]
What seems to have happened to American conservatives is that they have lost all the checks and balances that used to limit that kind of solipsism. And of course it’s not just economic policy.
As we know, the madness of the Republican/ New Confederate/ Stupid Party doesn't begin and end with its attraction to supply side/ trickle down economics. It also shows up in its anti-science, anti-woman, anti-LGBT, anti-poor, anti-Latino, anti-black, anti-Muslim pathologies. The answer to Krugman's rhetorical question is, we each do everything we can to remove these people from power and keep them away.What do we do in the face of a major party gone mad?
