Today Paul Krugman wrote Nasty, Brutish and Trump, inspired by the response to the school shooting in Parkland, FL. Ursalafaw posted about it, as did Egberto Willies. Neither post got as much attention as they should have, though the comments at the Times had hit 1440 last time I checked.
Much of the column is devoted to guns and how America deals with them — but the key message in the column is something Krugman lays out in these excerpts:
...What’s going on in America right now isn’t just a culture war. It is, on the part of much of today’s right, a war on the very concept of community, of a society that uses the institution we call government to offer certain basic protections to all its members.
...What I’d argue is that our lethal inaction on guns, but also on cars, reflects the same spirit that’s causing us to neglect infrastructure and privatize prisons, the spirit that wants to dismantle public education and turn Medicare into a voucher system rather than a guarantee of essential care. For whatever reason, there’s a faction in our country that sees public action for the public good, no matter how justified, as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom.
...you might want to think of our madness over guns as just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
emphasis added
We hear about the politics of division, but this is about more than just cleaving us along issue fault lines. It’s about isolating us as individuals, trapped behind walls of fear, suspicion and greed. There’s a saying that “libertarianism is just anarchy for rich people”.
If you look at who is funding the Republican Party and the media machine that propagandizes their base, what you find time and time again are sociopathic billionaires whose wealth and power leads them to regard community as dispensable. They don’t think they need it, and they’re not willing to pay for it. They see it as standing between them and even more wealth.
They’re not wealth creators, as their propaganda puts it, they’re looters. They regard America like an extraction industry regards the land over mineral deposits — as something to be dug up and tossed aside while every last bit of value is dug out of the ground.
Their evil genius has been to persuade so many that their freedom depends on being able to rely on no one but themselves, to regard everyone with suspicion, and to attack the institutions that hold society together. It’s why there’s such a determined assault on public education for one thing, and the entire social safety net for another.
There is something toxic about too much wealth in too few hands. There is something deleterious in the effect wealth has on the minds of those whose lives are shaped by it. The desire to put the pursuit of wealth and power above all is a symptom of a dangerous derangement.
It’s on display every time Trump speaks. It’s reinforced by the people he surrounds himself with. It has eaten out the heart and soul of the Republican Party — and the Democratic establishment has not been left unaffected.
Pick any issue and follow the money. What we know is that inequality makes almost everything worse, and the greater the gap, the worse it gets. Gun violence is part of a larger problem. We have to deal with it — but let’s keep our eyes on the bigger picture too.
That’s my take on it. You can see Ursulafaw’s here, and Egberto Willies here — and you can Read the whole thing and see the rest of context Krugman has.