Sorry about blog silence; real life intruded.

Before all that, I wrote a post about Marty Feldstein, a conservative economist who imagines himself to be a Republican — but who in fact has no place in today’s GOP. Feldstein, you see, is a perfectly ordinary Keynesian who believes — as he should — that expansionary fiscal policy is expansionary. And he’s under the delusion that there are people with actual political influence on the right who might be persuaded to support temporary fiscal stimulus.

Ramesh Ponnuru, it seems, falls into the same general category. He calls on Republicans to abandon their “inflation paranoia”, their continuing insistence that the Fed’s efforts to boost the economy will produce a debased dollar and runaway inflation any day now, even though they have — as even Politico notes — been wrong, year after year, for five years straight.

Like Feldstein, Ponnuru is appealing to the economically sensible wing of the GOP. But that wing doesn’t exist.

Think of it as a matrix:

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Clearly, the big ideological divide in America is between people who want to maintain the welfare state and maybe expand it a bit and those who want to shrink it sharply. At the same time, there is a divide between people who buy into more or less sensible economics — as defined by what’s in the textbooks, or if you prefer by what the supposedly representative group of economists regularly surveyed by the Chicago school of business has to say — and those holding views most professional economists consider crankish.

In principle, there could be a significant number of politicians in all four boxes: say, liberals who believe in the superiority of central planning over markets, or conservatives who nonetheless believe that Keynes had a point.

In practice, left-wing cranks have never played a significant role in US politics, while right-wing cranks always have. Still, back in the days of George HW Bush — and even, to some extent, in the days of Bush the lesser — there were politicians in the lower left box.

But no more. The GOP’s top policy wonk — he’s actually innumerate, but don’t tell anyone — gets his ideas on monetary policy from an Ayn Rand character. The GOP went all in for expansionary austerity and looming hyperinflation, and has shown no hint of learning from actual events. The only people actually listening to Feldstein and Ponnuru are, well, liberals. (Bruce Bartlett has figured this out, and I suspect that Josh Barro has too.)

It would take more time and energy than I have right now to try to explain how this happened. But it’s simply a fact about our current debate.