Krugman: Why Do Right-Wingers Mock Attempts To Care For Other People?

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Paul Krugman: Why Do Right-Wingers Mock Attempts to Care for Other People?

By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash. Posted October 12, 2007.

Paul Krugman talks about his new book, Conscience of a Liberal, and the almost lethal refusal among some conservatives to consider the problems of suffering of others.


In a sea of media transcribers and mediocrity, Paul Krugman has held a longstanding spot as one of the most popular liberal columnists in the media. But actually, although a New York Times columnist, Krugman is not a journalist. In fact, when I spoke with him for this interview, he was preparing a lecture for one of his economics classes at Princeton.

Maybe, that's one of the reasons that he pens such "spot on" commentaries. He's not a professional pundit. He doesn't live in NYC or D.C. He's a professor first. Yet, Krugman is skillful at making his case in cogent columns that are both compelling and accessible.

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Karlin: The right wing has again fostered this connotation among its followers, but it also seeps into the mainstream media, that somehow the "L word" is something that's un-American. Yet, isn't it a basic American value to have a solid middle class where people who work hard can keep up with the rate of inflation, and if there's increased productivity, their wages will increase, not stagnate or fall? You promote a diverse economy that gives people their due and is not tilted as far as it is toward the very wealthy. How does the right-wing get away with making it seem that if you call yourself a liberal, you're somehow un-American? Those seem to me like the American values that we were found on.

Krugman: Yes. There is a funny thing. If you look at the polls that ask if you consider yourself a liberal, it's a relatively small minority. If you ask people do you think that the government should guarantee health insurance to every American, a huge majority says yes. So people think they're not liberals, but they're in favor of quintessentially liberal policies.

A lot of the usual things people say that are identified with cultural liberalism they're identified with. Cultural liberalism, which is supposed to be something we as Americans don't like -- well, that's less and less true. It got identified with being soft on crime and so on. But very, very largely, if you ask how did liberal get to be a bad word, it's the theme that runs through a lot of the book, which is race. Liberal became somebody who was in favor of being permissive towards bad behavior by you-know-who. And that's been a problem. But I think the answer is not to run away from liberal and say, oh, I'm not one of those people. This is being used to distract and exploit working families all across the country of whatever color. So it's both politically impractical and just wrong to run away and say, oh, I'm not one of those liberals, because that's not the problem.

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Karlin: In The Conscience of a Liberal, you give a wonderfully broad historical context on what that means. But is part of what the right wing has such contempt for in so-called liberals like ourselves is that we do have a conscience? In other words, they see something wrong with not being out for your own self-interest. There's a certain contempt, as though this was a football game. Why would you care if a guy is injured on the other team, you know?

Krugman: Yes, that's actually something I touch on in the book, and I've been thinking about doing a column to enlarge on it for The New York Times. In some sense, the meanness is the message. On the right, there's an almost lethal refusal to consider the problems of suffering of others. And it goes right back through time. Ronald Reagan has this line, in the famous speech in 1964 that launched his political career, in which he said, "They told us that 17 million people in America go to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet." The problem of malnutrition in America was and is a serious problem. But to Reagan, from the beginning, it was all a big joke. And Bush remarked, "Well, I mean, everybody's got access to health care in America. You just go to an emergency room." It's just this complete lack of empathy for people who aren't as lucky as yourself.

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That's how these smallbrained fools see it. They're trapped, like rats, in a fourth grade cage of their own minds.

but fourth grade would work just as well.

:shrug:

Part of it is a lack of empathy; a lack of inability on the part of conservatives and say to themselves "what if it were me?" My own personal opinion is that in a lot of cases, it's a lack of empathy born of arrogance. It comes from the idea that a person is much too smart, capable, talented and motivated to find himself in that position, coupled with the narrow-minded opinion that a person who has made it has done so wholly on their own merits, without outside help. So, poor people are poor because they are lazy, stupid and lack talent. And successful people are successes because they've done everything for themselves.

My old college roommate was one of those. He was the grandson of a surgeon who had paid his expensive, private school, undergraduate tuition, and the son of an architecture professor who worked at our graduate school, and, thereby provided my roommate with a free education. But if you asked him, it was the Grapes of Wrath and he'd crossed the country in a pickup truck held together with spit, scotch tape and his own red-blooded, American drive to succeed. Anyone could achieve the same success, he'd tell you. All they had to do was knuckle down, grit their teeth and brave the world of privileged, white Southern, revisionist academics the way he had done and they'd be fine. I think he honestly believed that everyone was born with the same chance and that most just squandered theirs out of an outright disrespect for the flag and the golden suburbia it was desperately trying to bestow on everyone it waves above.

It never seemed to dawn on him that some people are born with crack-addicted parents and that others are too busy dodging fists to concentrate on homework. He couldn't fathom the idea that there are a lot of people in this country who will reach middle age without ever hearing the words "tax bracket" or "dividend." He can't imagine entire neighborhoods or rural counties where people grow up with lowered expectations, where big dreams are dreams of living a life that he would consider to be a failure. He can't understand why his tired illustration of the "Chinese immigrant who can come over here and make it with nothing but the clothes on his back" is narrow-minded bullshit; even after I explain that it's unfair to compare Chinese, ten-in-a-billion entrepreneurs with the wherewithal to get here in the first place, with your average, poor American. But that's who he was deep in his own head -- a hard-driven, star-crossed soul who somehow found the inner fortitude to make it, against all odds and the hurled misfortunes of a harsh and unforgiving world; not as some talentless, privileged jackass who barely squeezed through undergrad with C's.