Readers may not be familiar with Professor Paul Krugman.
Most will probably not be aware of his exemplary, world class, innovative thinking and writing as an economist who discovered my former scholarly field, economic geography. Books like Geography and Trade in the 1990s changed debates, and for the better. He was smart and a heavy hitter. A Nobel winner, no less.
Sadly, the later Krugman has descended into mediocre, derivative, written-form demagoguery against “the right”. This turn dates from his acquisition of a columnist position at The New York Times in 1999. His early target was Bush 43 and Iraq. The Guardian once described Krugman as “Bush’s most scathing critic”. And there were many. And many who were ultimately proven correct, on clueless Bush. Krugman was, certainly. Bush was a disaster at every level, in foreign and domestic policy, and his deeply flawed interpretation of 9/11 led to a tyrannical attack on freedom which, in turn, paved the way for the Covid State. His Iraq adventure helped no one and harmed millions. Whether he and Blair are war criminals, I don’t know. Whether their lies were “noble” or not, they have the dark red stuff on their hands.
For a good summary of Krugman on Bush, see:
https://truthout.org/articles/no-redemption-for-george-w-bush/
Krugman came back into my mind while reading an essay by the truther-teller Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi was reflecting on the massively supportive reactions of progressive leftists like Krugman to a recent book called White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/opinion/white-rural-voters.html
Krugman describes the book and the phenomenon of rural rage the authors claim to describe as “terrifying”. “Devastating”. “Baffling”. As Mandy Rice Davies might have said, “well, he would, wouldn’t he?”
Krugman says:
But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.
Think about this, for a minute. White rural rage? Gosh, that IS a problem. Que? One can only wonder, what planet is this guy inhabiting?
Let us return to reality.
What got my attention, though, in particular, was the sub-title of the book. For I, and many others of the outside-the-beltway class, firmly believe that democracy is, indeed, under threat, but not from us. It is under threat from:
· Outsized and growing government;
· The deep state;
· Out-of-control executive overreach;
· Out-of-control inference in our lives by unelected bureaucrats, global governance types, non-government corporations and woke corporations;
· The sidelining of parliaments;
· Climate and net zero b.s.;
· Getting into bed with, and ignoring the multi-generational crimes of Big Pharma;
· The surveillance state;
· Turbo-charged corporatism;
· The total absence of respect for voters at elections (and at every other time);
· The abandonment of (admittedly flawed) election mandate theory;
· A non-inquiring legacy media bought up by governments and corporates;
· Public health tyranny.
This list merely kisses the surface. It doesn’t even scratch it.
But, the authors of the book mentioned and their cheer squadders think that WE are the problem for democracy. This is idiocy on stilts, and Paul Krugman is a goose for not seeing the irony and the dumbness of his venting. As Taibbi notes, Krugman has spent much of his time recently telling middle America it is ignorant.
As it happens, there is nothing remotely original in members of the elites taking aim at those who live in “flyover country”. In accusing them of all sorts, like this:
Tom Schaller took a swing. He and Mika first complained rural voters should be supporting Joe Biden, given his roots — you’d have to be pretty high to call Scranton “rural,” but whatever — then Schaller read off small town America’s charge sheet: rural whites, he said, are the most “racist,” “xenophobic,” “anti-immigrant and anti-gay,” “conspiracist,” “anti-democratic,” they “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech,” and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence,” for starters.
This is a bit of a yawn. Thomas Frank was saying this stuff, decades ago. And totally evidence-free. A catch-all collection of elite obsessions and ideological imperatives, simply inverted. It basically says, what we are for, they are against. There!
The book argues:
Schaller and Waldman show how vulnerable U.S. democracy has become to rural Whites who, despite legitimate grievances, are increasingly inclined to hold racist and xenophobic beliefs, to believe in conspiracy theories, to accept violence as a legitimate course of political action, and to exhibit antidemocratic tendencies. Rural White Americans’ attitude might best be described as “I love my country, but not our country,” Schaller and Waldman argue. This phenomenon is the patriot paradox of rural America: The citizens who take such pride in their patriotism are also the least likely to defend core American principles. And by stoking rural Whites’ anger rather than addressing the hard problems they face, conservative politicians and talking heads create a feedback loop of resentments that are undermining American democracy.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/734507/white-rural-rage-by-tom-schaller-and-paul-waldman/
Matt Taibbi said he “made the mistake” of reading the book. Make sure you don’t. He called all this “undisguised class hatred”. Ironic for “people of the left”, whose spiritual godfathers, back in 1848 (in The Communist Manifesto) urged the outsiders to rebel against the ruling class. Those same outsiders who now “threaten democracy”.
Ah, those anti-democratic tendencies! Compared to my little list of how and how much the elites are screwing us all and turning our former democracies into what Mike Benz has recently and accurately describes as “military rule”, the views of “rural whites” – they should surely have added “heterosexual” and “male” to the ascribed characteristics – are fairly tame in comparison.
These authors, Krugman and the rest of them have achieved that rare feat of not just missing the point, or narrowly missing the target (and cigar), but getting recent political developments 180 degrees wrong. Being as far from the truth as you can get, and not even beginning to see by how far you have evaded the mark.
Yes, they all admit, the rural electorate has grievances. Their own list, which overlaps my own, is long and warranted. But, inadvertently or not, the looking-downness – after all, isn’t this what defines “elitism”? – of these types fails even to mention, to take just one example, the opioid crisis inflicted on the innocent and not-so-innocent populous over time. This the anti-JD Vance view of American democracy. Ignorance is bliss for the urban elites.
(Incidentally, it was appalling that the formerly formidable Jay Nordlinger, caught up in the war on anti-neocons, maligned Vance in the most intemperate way. Over his Ukraine posture and his failure to buy all the recent lies of the military-industrial complex. This was called out by Rod Dreher).
The evil described farcically by the look-downers might best be summed up as “populism”.
Without getting into a discourse on the nature of political legitimacy, democracy, representation, majoritarianism and the often-dangerous power of minorities, suffice it to say that, well, isn’t populism mostly about ensuring that the actual will of the people is at least taken into account, occasionally, by the ruling class? The meagre expectation that rulers will do what they say they will, not do things for which they haven’t sought a mandate, not lie to the voters, not rig elections. That sort of thing.
There is, of course, a word that inevitably rolls into these “debates”. Certainly in America. The word, of course, is “Trump”.
To say that these people are obsessed with The Donald is to not do justice to the meaning of “understatement”. They are also obsessed with Le Pen, with Orban, with Milei, with Meloni, and with the new Germanic force, the AfD. If they knew about Australia, they would be obsessed by Pauline Hanson. And Clive Palmer. In Britain, it would be Farage, though he is pretty mainstream these days.
Taibbi notes:
When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original “rigged games” in finance, relentless propaganda ensued. Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted, ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a “frantic challenge against every feature of our civilization,” and waged a “shameful insurrection against law and national honesty.” A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilized America …
The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators, and other “essential workers,” the people working those jobs were demonized during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists. Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them, and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired “misinformation” that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.
Indeed. Taibbi also notes:
Schaller and White Rural Rage co-author Paul Waldman make the same point, that “cities produce far more of the nation’s wealth,” and rural citizens are increasingly “subsidized by the taxes paid by higher-income metropolitans.” What gives? Why won’t they shut the fuck up?
Double indeed. Racist demagogues AND spongers on the wealth and endless productivity of the cities. A suitable enemy for those who have managed to meld progressivism with libertarian economics. As the current ruling elites have done.
For those who think and say, these arguments (assertions?) are all rubbish (and so easily to be dismissed), well, we should remember that it is these same people who run the world. With unbridled power, they need not rational, evidence-based, sound, considered story-lines. And all the racist scum out in the burbs and the rural regions should simply get over their grievances (globalism, anyone?), move to the cities, grab a rainbow flag, get a job in tech or fact checking, and vote for Joe. And Sir Keir. And Macron. And Justin. And Airbus Albo down under.
Of course they should.
Or, perhaps, they should push back, strangely still clinging to hopes of a better democracy, and engage in civil disobedience in the tradition of the Mahatma, and go on voting in people like JD Vance. And all those other aforementioned political leaders for whom “leadership” embodies an element of listening to we-the-people. And resist the nudging, evil propagandist pretenders of our age, the witting or unwitting latter-day disciples of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau and Joseph Goebbels, who occupy the parliaments and governments of the globe.
Maybe it is time for the common man to “penetrate ze cabinets”. Now, Paul Krugman, that would be democratic. N’est-ce pas?
Paul Collits
2 March 2024
The likes of Krugman et al claim to be progressive. But what they advocate as progress is actually regress, back to the dark ages and beyond, if regarded with a critical and skeptical mind.
One of the fundamental problems is the human ability to copy which is a blessing but also a curse because it facilitates non thinking fashion - the mob mentality which is a form of insanity.
This affliction is currently prevalent to say the least.
Even a minority of thinking citizens who speak up ( and act up ) will eventually see this garbage put in its proper place - the dump. But not before a lot of damage is done.
PS - I was born and remain a " rural white ". But I have been to a few other places as well.
I know dem voters in USA who glorified Vance when an author but now denigrate him because he is a Republican representative.