A conflict has erupted between columnists Aaron Sorkin and Paul Krugman.  The question in conflict is relatively trivial — whether Krugman called for nationalization of the entire banking system or just a swath of what he called “zombie banks”.  As a matter of policy, this is trivial because it involves a debate over something that is never going to happen.  In spite of cat-calls from the fringes slamming President Obama as a “socialist”, true nationalization — defined as full and permanent government ownership of industry — is a non-starter in American political culture and will remain so for the foreseeable future.  Government influence, as is the case with General Motors and is proposed to be the case in regulatory reform of the “too big to fail” portions of banking industry, will in the United States always be constrained by a strong cultural aversion to actual government control.

But the conflict nonetheless exposes a critical defect in current American political discourse.  Krugman’s complaint against Sorkin is illustrative at the same time it is grossly hypocritical:

[Krugman] said that if Sorkin wanted to argue that advocates of nationalization were “excessively pessimistic about the prospects for a light-touch bank strategy, fine. But caricaturing their position, making it sound far more extreme than it actually was, is definitely not O.K. (emphasis added)

For Krugman to complain about “caricaturing” is frankly hilarious.  Ever since receiving his Nobel prize (for academic work unrelated to his partisan political views), Prof. Krugman has accelerated into a turn towards outright demonization towards pretty much any and all who dissent from the Democratic Party’s agenda.   His disagreement frequently crosses the line into outright misrepresentation of his opponents’ positions.  He has become an attack dog, willing to sacrifice his intellectual honesty in the pursuit of ideological warfare.

But even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  And Krugman’s complaint identifies a very common problem in current political discourse.  It is not only that the various sides disagree strongly and express that disagreement in often vicious terms (e.g. “communist”, “traitors”, “teabaggers”, etc.), but that it has become common to actually lie about what the other side even says or believes in the first place.  The problem has even advanced from vice to strategy, as with the plans by some Democrats to infiltrate the “Tea Party” rallies with agents carrying racist signs, so as to more easily cast all “Tea Partiers” as racists.

The single most important reform that could be done to the American political system has nothing to do with grand policy schemes.  It is rather an individual choice to simply be honest about what the other guy says, believes, and does.  And until we all do that, we have no one to blame for the escalating hate but ourselves.