As soon as Paul Krugman announced he was leaving the New York Times, I subscribed to his substack column. This morning’s contribution makes a point I’ve been arguing for, for decades now: We Americans are so focused on ourselves as individuals that we too often ignore or even dismiss the need to consider the common good.
Krugman’s column, Trump To New York: Drop Dead, is primarily about Trump’s demand that New York City drop its congestion pricing, even though — perhaps especially though — it has made commuting easier and reduced traffic snarls, and is popular with those who are paying it:
Overall, there’s no reason to believe that significantly fewer people are entering lower Manhattan; they’re just getting there in ways that hurt others less.
The congestion charge is also proving increasingly popular among those actually experiencing its consequences . . . [emphasis in original]
However, adds Krugman,
residents of New York State as a whole disapprove by a substantial margin. What this tells us is that negative views of the charge come from upstaters, people who will almost never pay it or experience its effects.
That includes Trump, of course, who no longer lives in NYC, and even if he did go there, he would be immune to traffic jams. The thinking behind this opposition, according to Krugman (and me) is:
But maybe the biggest reason for Trump’s desire to kill the congestion charge is a phenomenon I identified the last time I wrote about this: the rage some Americans obviously feel at any suggestion that people should change their behavior for the common good. What we’re seeing with regard to the congestion charge is that some Americans feel that rage even when they themselves aren’t being asked to make changes. [emphasis added]
Trump, of course, is the ultimate exemplar of this attitude (though Musk is now giving him stiff competition); everything is all about him, whether a policy benefits him, makes him look good or bad (simple but graphic example: in the early days of Covid, he didn’t want to much if any testing for the disease because “by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad.”)
I recently wrote about this attitude here (“we value the individual over the community”), and Krugman is giving an explicit example. He goes even further: people who aren’t even affected by the congestion fee are upset about it anyway, because it signals that they too might one day be called upon to think about the common good above their individual desires.
The refusal to accept climate change is perhaps the paradigmatic example of this. Too many of us reject climate change, not just because those who profit off destroying the climate have spread lies that it isn’t happening, but also because doing something about it would be, <sigh>, inconvenient and could disturb our comfort level. We would rather let the planet burn (though we won’t admit it) than stop driving gas guzzlers that give us a fleeting sense of hyper-masculinity. (Women can supply similar examples.)
Here’s another example: Attacks on Catholics, Lutherans suggest new Trump approach on religion. The story is largely about Trump, Vance, and the GOP generally being upset at religious charities feeding the hungry and housing the homeless (to paraphrase Isaiah), but this item near the bottom caught my eye:
For many of Trump’s supporters who describe themselves as “Christian,” or “religious,” attacks on faith-based charities may not feel like an assault, [Dave] Campbell[, a professor of politics and religion at the University of Notre Dame] said. That’s because Americans increasingly define faith in very personalized terms that don’t necessarily connect to specific religious institutions or groups, he said.
If you want to understand Trump’s appeal, consider this: He gives permission to his followers to act out their worst instincts: racist, misogynist, sexist, intolerant, and perhaps above all, selfish. Why else do we explain poor people voting Republican against their true self-interest because they think of themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”? (“Distressed” is a common misquote.)
How to counter this? In the short run, we need to broadcast loud and clear just how much damage the selfishness of those in power is doing to all of us — the Niemöller quote is a good place to start. In other words, counter Trump’s selfishness by appealing to Americans’ self-interest. We are too far down the individual road to do it the right way. Restoring (or really, creating) the right way will take generations, time we may not have but must try anyway.
I feel I have to make one last, particularly distasteful, point: Trump’s actions in opposing congestion pricing, in dismantling USAID, in rounding up immigrants and anyone who looks like one, are cruel. We would be tempted to say “needlessly cruel,” but is not correct: for Trump, the cruelty is the point. (The Cruelty Is the Point — from 2018; don’t say we weren’t warned.) That is a quintessentially selfish and individualistic attitude, and it is, unfortunately, another aspect of Trump’s appeal.
