Books like Geography and Trade in the 1990s changed debates for the better. He was smart and a heavy hitter. A Nobel Prize winner no less.

Sadly, the older Krugman has descended into mediocre demagoguery against “the Right”.

TARGET

His turn dates from his acquisition of a columnist position at The New York Times in 1999. His early target was Bush 43 and the Iraq war.

The Guardian once described Krugman as “Bush’s most scathing critic”. And there were many who were ultimately proven correct on the clueless Bush. Krugman certainly was.

George W Bush was a disaster at every level, in foreign and domestic policy. His deeply flawed interpretation of 9/11 led to a tyrannical attack on freedom which, in turn, paved the way for the COVID State.

His Iraq adventure helped no one and harmed millions. Whether he and Blair are war criminals remains to be determined.

Whether their lies were “noble” or not, they have the dark red stuff on their hands.

Krugman came back into my mind while reading an essay by truther-teller and US journalist Matt Taibbi.

Taibbi was reflecting on the supportive reactions of progressive Leftists like Krugman to a recent book called White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldan.

Krugman describes the book – and its claimed phenomenon of rural rage – as “terrifying”, “devastating” and “baffling”.

As UK actress Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, “well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

RAGE

Krugman says: “But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it.”

Think about this for a minute. White rural rage? Gosh, is that really a problem? One can only wonder what planet this guy is inhabiting?

Let us return to reality.

What attracted my attention, though, was the sub-title of the book – The Threat to American Democracy.

I – and many others outside-the-beltway – firmly believe that democracy is, indeed, under threat, but not from the little people.

It is under threat from:

• Outsized and growing government;
• The deep State;
• Out-of-control executive overreach;
• Out-of-control inference in our lives by unelected bureaucrats, global governance types, non-government corporations and woke corporations;
• The sidelining of parliaments;
• Climate and net-zero BS;
• Getting into bed with, and ignoring the multi-generational crimes of Big Pharma;
• The surveillance State;
• Turbo-charged corporatism;
• The total absence of respect for voters at elections (and at every other time);
• The abandonment of (admittedly flawed) election mandate theory;
• A non-inquiring legacy media controlled by governments and corporates;
• Public health tyranny.

This list merely kisses the surface. It doesn’t even scratch it.

Yes, the authors of White Rural Rage think that we are the problem for democracy.

This is idiocy on stilts, and Paul Krugman is a goose for not seeing the irony and the dumbness of his venting.

As Taibbi notes, Krugman has spent much of his time recently telling middle America it is ignorant.

As it happens, there is nothing remotely original in members of the elites taking aim at those who live in “flyover country”.

There is, of course, a word that inevitably rolls into these “debates”. Certainly in America. The word, of course, is “Trump”.

OBSESSED

To say that these people are obsessed with The Donald is to not do justice to the meaning of “understatement”.

They are also obsessed with France’s Le Pen, with Hungary’s Orban, with Argentina’s Milei, with Italy’s Meloni – as well as with the new Germanic force, the AfD.

If they knew about Australia, they would be obsessed with Pauline Hanson. And Clive Palmer. In Britain, it would be Farage, though he’s pretty mainstream these days.

Taibbi notes: “When rural voters in the late 1800s defied New York banking interests and demanded currency reform to allow farmers an escape from one of the original ‘rigged games’ in finance, relentless propaganda ensued.

“Rural populists were depicted as dirty, bigoted and ignorant. They refused expert wisdom, represented a ‘frantic challenge against every feature of our civilisation’ and waged a ‘shameful insurrection against law and national honesty’.

“A populist caricature in Judge magazine showed a violent, destructive idiot, a real-life Lennie from the still-unwritten Of Mice and Men, standing over the defiled corpse of civilised America.

“The theme is back, condescension multiplied. Despite a pandemic that just graphically demonstrated the social contributions of farmers, truckers, train operators and other ‘essential workers’.

The people working those jobs were demonised during the crisis as murderous horse-paste eaters and insurrectionists.

“Their chief crimes: protesting lockdowns and school closures that disproportionately affected them – and being consumers of supposed foreign-inspired ‘misinformation’ that led them to refuse appropriate political choices offered them.”

RAINBOW

According to the Left, all the racist scum out in the burbs and the rural regions should simply get over their grievances, move to the cities, grab a rainbow flag, get a job in tech or fact checking, and vote for Kamala, Sir Keir, Macron, Justin or Airbus Albo.

Of course they should.

Or, perhaps, they should push back, strangely still clinging to hopes of a better democracy, and engage in civil disobedience in the tradition of the Mahatma, and go on voting for people like JD Vance.

Maybe it’s time for the common man to “penetrate ze cabinets”. Now, Paul Krugman, that would be democratic.