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Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo offered up a brief moment of reflection Thursday in the midst of continuing chaos at the debt ceiling circus. His post, "A Short Comment on Keynes," suggests that "Keynes has taken a mighty hit. But my read of the situation is that the hit is almost entirely in the realm of politics rather than economics." He then goes on to wrestle with the notions Keynes is associated with by so many. "There's something in the nature of the political economy, forces vastly stronger today than they were 80 years ago, [sic] that leads to this," he writes. "And there's a simple paradox. It does make some intuitive sense that the government should have to tighten its belt when the rest of the country is. Only it's not true. And like a disoriented pilot without instruments to guide, what definitely makes sense can prove fatal."
Not to pick at this, but: well, yeah. Sometimes our metaphors, our commonsense view of the world, can kill us. It's not that Keynes has not taken a particularly mighty hit from a bunch of Tea Party legislators that may not be able to spell his name; the cartoon version of Keynes has been taking whacks from the right since the '70s. In fact, the financial crisis and fallout has done quite a bit to resurrect the man and his supple, often-paradoxical, occasionally murky thought (see Paul Krugman's "The Return of Depression Economics" and Robert Skidelsky's "Keynes: The Return of the Master"), as distinct from the related, but more rigidly quantitative "Keynesianism" of the post-war years. I'm not sure what Marshall means by "something in the nature of the political economy, forces vastly stronger
today than they were 80 years ago," but I do know one big difference between the two eras: When Roosevelt foolishly tried to balance the budget in 1937, Keynes' "General Theory" was just being published. The notion of deficit spending to restart or drive demand was little more than a gut call, lacking the theoretical underpinning Keynes and his successors would provide. In short, it was easy to fall for the paradox. There's no excuse today except ignorance or partisanship. Lastly, there are many deep disagreements in economics, but on the basics (and Keynesianism, as even Richard Nixon once admitted, is one of them), there's no lack of instruments. You have to deliberately close your eyes. 
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