With a gentleness that nevertheless implies a strong, professorial disapproval of a proposed dissertation's argument, Paul Krugman writes that though it would "be helpful if [Occupy Wall Street] protesters could agree on at least a few main policy changes ... [their] indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right."
In other words, behold the ambiguity of outrage.
The protesters' grasp of injustices committed by these particular plutocrats is altogether fitting and proper, but woefully unfocused; and, from the Obama administration's point of view, potentially self-destructive. Their lashing out at the powers that be may be cathartic and refreshing and all that, but wild punches have a way of hitting the powerfully innocent, too.
Or at least that's the way President Obama sees the protests -- probably correctly -- as evidenced in his press conference yesterday. His response was, in so many words, Get a grip.
What Wall Street did lo those many years was incontrovertibly stupid and despicable and "reckless," he noted, but not "against the law." The pseudoconservative ideology of boundless deregulation had legalized high-financial stupidity -- so what, mused a tacit Obama, is the latter-day law enforcer to do? Prosecute dumb?
That's what many of the protesters would prefer, yet that could be as destructive to civilized order as what the original perps committed. Such presidential restraint might be emotionally unrewarding, but I rather like the idea of a president upholding the law, rather than demagoguing outrage.
And that outrage might very well hit the wrong political targets next year. Outrage is feral and undisciplined and profoundly imprecise, hence many a good incumbent could wind up paying its cost. We could, that is, actually wind up with more right-wing idiots in high national office than ever.