Have zombies eaten brains of Bloomberg and Buttigieg?

Zombie ideas are ideas that should have been killed by evidence, but just keep lurching along. In the modern United States, most important zombie ideas are on the right, kept undead by big money from billionaires who have a financial interest in getting people to believe things that aren’t true.

But sometimes zombie ideas also manage to eat centrists’ brains. Sure enough, some of the most destructive zombies of the past dozen years have shambled their way into the Democratic primary fight, where a couple of centrists are repeating ideas that were thoroughly debunked years ago.

So let’s start with the origins of the 2008 financial crisis, a topic that’s relevant if we want to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Although few saw 2008 coming, in retrospect it was a classic banking panic, the type of thing that happened frequently before the 1930s. First, lenders got caught up in a gigantic housing bubble; then, when the bubble burst, much of the financial system just froze up.

What made this panic possible, after two generations of relative financial calm? The answer, clearly, was the erosion of effective financial regulation over the previous few decades.

But right-wingers refused to accept the obvious. Instead, they pushed an alternative narrative in which liberals somehow caused the crisis by forcing poor innocent bankers to lend money to people of color. This narrative was so nakedly self-serving it’s hard to believe anyone took it seriously; but some influential people bought it. And among those was Michael Bloomberg.

The evidence against the liberals-did-it story is overwhelming. The surge in bad loans came neither from government-sponsored agencies nor from regulated banks, but from unregulated mortgage originators. The fallout was so severe because investors believed, wrongly, that fancy financial instruments protected them from risk.

Zombie ideas can’t be killed by evidence. Perpetrators of the liberals-did-it lie are still out there, still getting space to spread their disinformation in mainstream media.

Pete Buttigieg is also facing criticism for buying into another zombie idea — the obsession with government debt. That obsession helped hobble recovery from the financial crisis.

Deficit panic wasn’t as naked a scam as the claim that do-gooders caused the financial crisis, although some of the loudest voices decrying the evils of deficits were obvious phonies. What happened instead was that many important people imagined that inveighing against the dangers of debt made them sound serious.

At this point, however, the debt obsession has been thoroughly debunked by economic research and experience. We live in a world awash in private savings looking for someplace to go, with investors willing to lend money to governments at incredibly low interest rates. It’s actually irresponsible not to put this money to work investing in the future, both by building physical infrastructure and through programs that help children develop their potential.

Look: It’s easy to make the political case that Democrats should nominate a centrist, rather than someone from the left wing. Candidates perceived as ideologically extreme usually pay an electoral penalty; this is especially true if, like Bernie Sanders, they pose as more radical than they really are.

But a key part of centrism’s appeal is the belief that centrists are realists, who understand how the world works. It’s harder to make the case for centrists who repeat false claims, especially if those claims were essentially right-wing propaganda.