Tip of the hat to Jonathan Chait for making this connection in his response to Niall Ferguson’s self-beclowning:
Ferguson views debt as a moral issue, and thus despises Keynes, and Obama, for treating it as a macroeconomic tool rather than a symbol of virtue. There is always a place for superstition-riddled fulminations against immoral debt. But there isn’t much of a place anymore for such fulminations served with a side of gay-bashing.
One thing I’ll note about Ferguson’s understanding of morality — which was already quite suspect before he slipped loose on Keynes — is that it doesn’t have much time for actual living, breathing, suffering human beings. Ferguson’s got outrage to spare when it comes to those amorphous future generations to which we owe so much (but not quite enough to tackle climate change, which is another matter). But as concerns the millions upon millions of people currently suffering in some way due to Ferguson’s chosen policy, austerity, he’s got nothing much to say at all.
Similarly, while Ferguson himself might not be a day-to-day homophobe, and might not consider himself politically anti-gay, his comments on Keynes (recent and previous) indicate that when dealing in abstractions — Keynes as the historical and intellectual figure rather than the person sitting next to him at a Pete Peterson roundtable — he’s pretty comfortable relying on lazy and lizard-brained bigotries. To put it bluntly, Niall Ferguson’s moral compass has led him into becoming a bit of a dick.
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