I was surprised not to find a diary about Paul Krugman’s salon piece in the New York Times. Armpits, White Ghettos, and Contempt is a powerful piece about how the Republican party really feels about, and treats the so-called “Real America.”
He gives examples, which we here know about, that the Republican policies hurt the people who vote for them the most, for example cutting Medicaid in West Virginia. But his concluding paragraphs are what struck me.
The point is that if you look at what conservatives say to each other, as opposed to what they pretend to believe, it becomes clear that contempt for middle America is much more prevalent on the right than on the left. And this contempt is reflected in the right’s policy agenda, which would badly hurt the people it claims to consider the only real Americans.
I know that this will be a hard point to get across. Indeed, I’m sure that some people in the heartland will take any effort to convince them that they’re being misled as just another example of liberal disrespect. But all Americans, wherever they live, deserve to be told the truth.
The entire country is being misled, at least partly because the Democratic candidates have not broken through the Republican media wall for years.
You can look at who is getting, and not getting coverage. Biden, who the press begged to get into the race against Hillary Clinton, and Sanders, who is first or second in the polls this time, but who the media suppressed for a long time 4 years ago. Inslee will be counted out, because he says (actually correctly, IMNSHO) that global warming is the most important issue, because tackling that requires enormous changes. The “Green New Deal” must remain a joke. For why, take a look at “This changes everything” by Naomi Klein.
So what to do now? Break through the media wall. When an interviewer says to a Democratic candidate or spokesman, “well you say this, but the President says THAT”, the reply needs to be “the president is lying.” The effects of climate change are not in 2100, 2050, or even 2020. They are NOW. Military bases are being severely damages by fire or flood.
Decades of lies need to be addressed. Hopefully it is not to late to start.