The anti-bailout petition retroactively legitimized the vilification of TARP after Republican losses.

Evidence

Senator Richard Shelby then went before the cameras on September 25, waving the petition and claiming that most prestigious economists at our leading universities were united in opposition to the bailout. As per usual, this was a bit misleading. Most (but not all) of the signatories were denizens of the financial–think tank nexus we have been describing in this chapter, and some were MPS members. It was not so clear that they so uniformly opposed a bailout, so much as they felt the need to head off the political dangers of government takeover of the financial sector. One might speculate that the banking sector wanted something like TARP that week, so there is no sense that the signatories were directly responding to any immediate bidding or specific objectives of the banks. The real practical effect of the petition was twofold: (1) to provide a list of whom in the economics profession might be available to be mobilized by Republicans in Congress, in the eventuality they might need to gin up opposition; and (2) to provide retrospective justification for the vilification of TARP, which is what happened once the Republicans suffered their rout. I doubt anyone had the foresight to imagine that this in turn would provide a basis for the reversal of the Democratic tide in 2010, so that the banks could get their cake and eat it, too. Rather, mostly it was the unceremonious jockeying for position in a highly fluid and confusing situation, with the neoliberals opting for the default position of cunctation and dissimulation. But of course, that is precisely when sharply drawn contraries can potentially have their greatest impact. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 638

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates the thought collective mechanism in action; connects to how the petition’s rhetorical function outweighed its actual economic content.