The Republicans want a deep recession.

It's beginning to look a lot like the Republican Party really wants the U.S. to go into a deep recession. Just watch their behavior and listen to their rhetoric. They are doing whatever they can to prevent the government from actually conducting any stimulus, Paulson is rapidly saving banks like the one he led before becoming Secretary of the Treasury, and as Ed Kilgore points out, they believe that a deep recession is needed to wring the effects of the financial excesses they caused out of the economy, while at the same time, the do NOT want to give the Democrats a single success that they can run for reelection on.

This is an old, old story in American politics. Go back to the convulsions of the populist era of the nineteenth century, and read what "hard-money" advocates had to say during deflationary periods. Economics aside, "goldbugs" constantly justified their views as synonymous with honesty and integrity and the sanctity of contracts. And that was a tradition that long predated Wall Street's support for a gold standard. One of the bedrock principles of the Jacksonian Democrats was an identification of hard currency policies (and for that matter, opposition to general taxation) with the sturdy folk virtues of American farmers and artisans, who shouldn't be fleeced by capitalist predators demanding easy credit for their wicked and greedy designs. Jacksonians viewed the Second Bank of the United States with a moral and even religious horror, as a Moloch sapping the vital instincts of the citizenry.

Stir into this ancient tradition the quintessentially American habit of treating financial success as proof of moral worth and even divine favor (the latter being a staple of today's "prosperity gospel" preachers), and you certainly have the raw material for a robust conservative hostility to any government-enabled economic recovery, particularly now that it will occur under the auspices of a "liberal" Congress and administration.

Perhaps the deepening of the current recession will soon quiet such talk, as the damage spreads beyond the financial sectors and debt-ridden industries and encompasses millions of people who never took out a risky loan or ran up the credit cards (or more likely, for one reason or another, never had to). But just as Republicans like Phil Gramm couldn't stop themselves from calling economically distressed Americans "whiners" a few months ago, even in today's crisis there will be a significant group of Republicans betraying an affection for the bracing moral "lesson" being taught to the afflicted.

Besides, Republicans do not believe in macro economics. They consider the economy as part of the magic controlled by God, and God will give the moral people (the Republicans consider that they represent morality) the rewards.

Think not? Just listen to the rhetoric out of the Congressional Republicans as the effort to provide stimulus to the economy is discussed. They'll save the bankers, but not the much more important American automotive industry.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo posted the following from TPM reader JF:

...I tend to believe there is a simpler explanation for the Neo-Hooverite positioning: Given the new demographic realities of the country, Obama's presidency must be a failure if Republicans are to ever emerge from the political wilderness. The more they obstruct, the more Obama and Cong[r]essional Democrats will be forced to water down economic policy. And a watered-down policy just won't cut it at this moment in history. This is sabotage, pure and simple. If the poor and the middle class have to suffer in order for Republicans to have something to run against in 2010, so be it.

The Republican Party considers that America, the American government and the American people exist to serve the wants and needs of the Republican Party rather than believing that the government exists to serve the American people.