Simon Wren-Lewis has a thoughtful post on the reasons for austerity mania, in which he accepts the role of special interests but argues that there are also psychological roots. Specifically, he suggests that politicians know that they are often irresponsible, and

when the market starts to punish fiscal profligacy, it is as if a parent has discovered the child’s guilty secret. (The market is seen by many as a mysterious deity.) The politician wants to repent (or at least be seen to repent), and atone for past sins. After eating too many pastries, we go on a crash diet. After deficit bias, we have austerity.

His analysis had me thinking about President Obama’s first inaugural, and my (lonely) upset reaction:

In response to an unprecedented economic crisis — or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedent is the Great Depression — Mr. Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: he spoke, more or less in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests. That’s not enough. In fact, it’s not even right.

Looking back, I think we can see the austerian temptation even there, literally in the first hour of the new administration. Since then Obama has veered back and forth between reasonable Keynesianism and acceptance of deficit fetishism, but if even he, even then, was pulled in by the emotional tug of austerity, you can see why good macroeconomics has had so little impact on policy.