By: Paul Krugman<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a baby boomer, which means that I\u2019m old enough to remember conservatives yelling \u201cAmerica \u2014 love it or leave it!\u201d at people on the left who criticized racism and inequality. But that was a long time ago. These days, disdain for America \u2014 the America that actually exists, not an imaginary \u201creal America\u201d in which minorities and women know their place \u2014 is concentrated on the right.<\/p>\n
To be sure, progressives still see a lot wrong with the state of our society, and seek change. But they also celebrate the progress we have made, and for the most part the change they seek is incremental: It involves building on existing institutions, not burning everything down and starting over.<\/p>\n
On the right, however, you increasingly find prominent figures describing our society as a nightmarish dystopia.<\/p>\n
This is obviously true for Donald Trump, who views the world through blood-colored glasses. In his vision of America \u2014 clearly derived largely from white supremacist and neo-Nazi sources \u2014 crime is running wild, inner cities are war zones, and hordes of violent immigrants are pouring across our open border. In reality, murder is at a historic low, we\u2019re seeing a major urban revival and net immigration from Mexico is negative. But I\u2019m only saying that because I\u2019m part of the conspiracy.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, you find almost equally dark visions, just as much at odds with reality, among establishment Republicans, people like Paul Ryan, speaker of the House.<\/p>\n
Mr. Ryan is, of course, a media darling. He doesn\u2019t really command strong support from his own party\u2019s base; his prominence comes, instead, from a press corps that decided years ago that he was the archetype of serious, honest conservatism, and clings to that story no matter how many times the obvious fraudulence and cruelty of his proposals are pointed out. If the past is any indication, he will quickly be forgiven for his moral spinelessness in this election, his unwillingness to break with Mr. Trump \u2014 even to condemn him for questioning the legitimacy of the vote \u2014 no matter how grotesque the G.O.P. nominee\u2019s behavior becomes.<\/p>\n
But for what it\u2019s worth, consider the portrait of America Mr. Ryan painted last week, in a speech to the College Republicans. For it was, in its own way, as out of touch with reality as the ranting of Donald Trump (whom Mr. Ryan never mentioned).<\/p>\n
Now, to be fair, Mr. Ryan claimed to be describing the future \u2014 what will happen if Hillary Clinton wins \u2014 rather than the present. But Mrs. Clinton is essentially proposing a center-left agenda, an extension of the policies President Obama was able to implement in his first two years, and it\u2019s pretty clear that Mr. Ryan\u2019s remarks were intended as a picture of what all such policies do.<\/p>\n
According to him, it\u2019s very grim. There will, he said, be \u201ca gloom and grayness to things,\u201d ruled by a \u201ccold and unfeeling bureaucracy.\u201d We will become a place \u201cwhere passion \u2014 the very stuff of life itself \u2014 is extinguished.\u201d And this is the kind of America Mrs. Clinton \u201cwill stop at nothing to have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Does today\u2019s America look anything like that? No. We have many problems, but we\u2019re hardly living in a miasma of despair. Leave government statistics (which almost half of Trump supporters completely distrust) on one side; Gallup finds that 80 percent of Americans are satisfied with their standard of living, up from 73 percent in 2008, and that 55 percent consider themselves to be \u201cthriving,\u201d up from 49 percent in 2008. And there are good reasons for those good feelings: recovery from the financial crisis was slower than it should have been, but unemployment is low, incomes surged last year, and thanks to Obamacare more Americans have health insurance than ever before.<\/p>\n
So Mr. Ryan\u2019s vision of America looks nothing like reality. It is, however, completely familiar to anyone who read Ayn Rand\u2019s \u201cAtlas Shrugged\u201d as a teenager. Nowadays the speaker denies being a Rand devotee, but while you can at least pretend to take the boy out of the cult, you can\u2019t take the cult out of the boy. Like Ms. Rand \u2014 who was basically writing about America in the Eisenhower years! \u2014 he sees the horrible world progressive policies were supposed to produce, not the flawed but hopeful nation we actually live in.<\/p>\n
So why does the modern right hate America? There\u2019s not much overlap in substance between Mr. Trump\u2019s fear-mongering and Mr. Ryan\u2019s, but there\u2019s a clear alignment of interests. The people Mr. Trump represents want to suppress and disenfranchise you-know-who; the big-money interests that support Ryan-style conservatism want to privatize and generally dismantle the social safety net, and they\u2019re willing to do whatever it takes to get there.<\/p>\n
The big question is whether trash-talking America can actually be a winning political strategy. We\u2019ll soon find out.<\/p>\n
Source: The New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By: Paul Krugman I\u2019m a baby boomer, which means that I\u2019m old enough to remember conservatives yelling \u201cAmerica \u2014 love it or leave it!\u201d at people on the left who criticized racism and inequality. But that was a long time ago. These days, disdain for America \u2014 the America that actually exists, not an imaginary …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5285],"tags":[5781,5780],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5907"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}