by Frank Brenner
Paul Krugman is a leading voice of mainstream liberalism, which gives his columns in the New York Times a larger political relevance than just records of his private opinions.
Paul Krugman is a leading voice of mainstream liberalism, which gives his columns in the New York Times a larger political relevance than just records of his private opinions.
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| Paul Krugman |
A staunch and even aggressive supporter
of Hillary Clinton (aggressive against Bernie Sanders), Krugman's first
reaction to the election was to denounce Trump supporters as an unthinking mob
motivated by "blood and soil, traditional patriarchy and racial
hierarchy." He soon backed off from that and instead adopted a more benign
and bemused attitude, which amounted to: how could they have been so stupid?
These two attitudes pretty much sum up the range of liberal opinion when it
comes to the workers who voted from Trump: they're either "a basket of
deplorables" or dumb-ass dupes. A term that covers both variants is white
trash.
His latest column is in the head-scratching vein:
Krugman says that Trump's policies are all evidence of his
"contempt for the voters who put him in office." He focuses on West
Virginia, one of the poorest states in the country and one of the most
dependent on federal govt programs like Medicaid, Social Security and food
stamps. Trump's margin of victory there was over 40 percent. But Trump's budget
cuts and Trumpcare would devastate West Virginians. Krugman is not exaggerating
when he calls these changes "apocalyptic". "Hundreds of
thousands would lose health insurance, medical debt and untreated conditions
would surge, and there would be an explosion in extreme poverty, including a
lot of outright hunger."
After invoking an apocalype, Krugman concludes with the
following: "Will they [i.e. West Virginia voters] ever realize this, and
admit it to themselves? More important, will they be prepared to punish him
[i.e. Trump] the only way they can - by voting for Democrats?" The disproportion
between the severity of the situation and the thudding banality of the solution
on offer is so extreme as to be laughable.
It also points to Krugman's own contempt for the workers
of places like West Virginia. He knows that these workers were already living
through an apocalyptic decline in their living conditions long before the
election. In 2015 a widely reported demographic study came out which found an
unprecedented increase in the mortality rates between 1998 and 2014 for white
middle-aged males with no college education. This was the only demographic
group in the country to suffer such an increase, and those mortality rate
spikes were due almost entirely to suicide and drug and alcohol abuse -
amounting to over 500,000 premature deaths, comparable to the death rates for
HIV-AIDS and much higher than Ebola.
West Virginia is one of the epicenters of this contagion
of what one journal dubbed "death by despair". Life expectancy there
is 73 - a full TEN YEARS LESS than life expectancy in Washington DC, which is
only a few hours drive away but is worlds apart when it comes to economic
security and material well-being.
Krugman has to ignore these facts because if he didn't, it
would be obvious that the Democrats, as much as the Republicans, were
responsible for creating this social disaster in the first place. And while
Trump will make conditions much worse, the Democrats are only promising to
preserve the status quo - which is to say, to perpetuate the disaster that is
already going on.
Krugman acknowledges that a big part of Trump's appeal to
working class voters was his promise to bring back well-paying jobs in
industries like coal mining. It was a bogus promise, but at least it addressed
the problem. The attitude of liberals like Hillary Clinton and Krugman was to
dismiss the problem out of hand: Those jobs are not coming back FULL
STOP.
This is where liberal contempt for the working class
becomes evident. Liberals are indifferent to the plight of these workers, whom
they treat as collateral damage in the march of neoliberal 'progress'. The
message to these workers is basically: You are useless and expendable, we'll
give you a few handouts like Obamacare but don't expect anything more. And you
are not only expendable, you are also dumb. Either dumb or racist and
misogynist or all of the above - that's the only explanation for how anyone
could have been taken in by a con artist like Trump.
This kind of class contempt is now widespread among
liberals and even self-described radicals. It is the most pernicious of
political afflictions. A left which holds the working class in contempt is no
longer a left.
2 comments:
Frank,
Do you have any comment on the recent snap election in Britain in regards to the blog's topic?There has been a celebration over Labour's victories demonstrates a different kind of contempt for workers and left-leaning people, and it has even taken in ostensible Marxists. If one didn't know better, it would seem that Britain has achieved socialism by means of parliament! How does one go about dissecting this mistaken faith in Corbyn and pinning it to definite and concrete class interests?
My impressions of the UK election are similar to yours. While I think the surge of support for Corbyn is significant and points to an emerging radicalization, especially among young workers and students, the radical left in Britain has reacted with a 'join the bandwagon' approach. I'm thinking here especially of the biggest of the UK radical groups – the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. The SP, led by Peter Taaffe, even organized rallies to back Corbyn, and their reporting of the official Labour party rallies was breathless cheerleading. The SWP's tone was more reserved but their material wasn't any more critical of Corbyn. The only notable exception on the left was, of course, the WSWS which made a blanket condemnation of Corbyn and (throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as sectarians typically do) denied the political significance of the electoral support Corbyn was getting.
What to make of all this? First I'd say it's rather similar to the problems of the American left with regards to the Sanders campaign. The SP counterparts in the US organized for Sanders and, if I'm not mistaken, even signed up members for the Democratic Party as part of that effort. So we're dealing here with a problem of the left rather than just specifically the UK left. It's a left that has been isolated for over a generation, with only the most tenuous links to the life of the working class. Now, almost a decade after the Wall Street crash, the political aftershocks have finally arrived, and suddenly dazzling possibilities have opened up for contact with the masses. For some radicals the dazzle has gone to their heads, like prisoners who've been locked away too long and are suddenly out in the sun. (The sectarian reaction is to rush back inside.) The job of Marxists isn't to join bandwagons but it is to engage the masses and help develop their political consciousness. Can you fight austerity within the constraints of globalized capitalism? Can you bring about fundamental social change that millions now want through the party of Tony Blair? These are issues which revolutionary socialists in Britain could use effectively to open up a dialogue with Corbyn's base.
FB
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