I am so glad you left the NYT. We finally get to see an unfiltered Krugman, and it makes this day a little better (update: please see the discussion below, this was a somewhat trite sigh of relief and does not so much reflect distrust toward the NYT as a relief that Krugman does not do self-censorship. Difficult times sometimes lead to me saying silly things).
"Buckle up. But by god, enjoy the fight and get in some licks! Trust me, it’s fun to fight, especially when the bad guys are expecting you to lie down. And trust me on this too: courage is literally the only thing the bad guys respect. The only thing." — Chris Jones, "A Democracy Runs Through It," https://riverraccoon.substack.com/p/a-democracy-runs-through-it, written shortly after the election.
No. See my reply above. I do not accuse the NYT of censorship, I think a newspaper has more tame standards for language. Also whatever the NYT was in the past, it is not that anymore.
umm... the Judith Miller fiasco on the run up to the Iraq war has never been fully addressed. I have never trusted them since the Oops we did not find weapons of mass destruction report. When do you think they reclaimed their legitimacy?
Ah, I had completely forgotten this. Somehow I guess I had blocked that fiasco but never fully trusted them since then. Decided to completely cut ties leading up to last year's election. I'm done with NYT, WaPo, and the Atlantic. I thought they were all decent, but... damn.
Did you ever hear Krugman complain that NYT editorial staff "toned down" some of his words/wording? I never did, either in the past or in the present before Krugman left. So, I have no reason to think anything like that had anything to do with his leaving the NYT.
In this format Krugman can run off what he's thinking about without going through a process. I suspect it will also be financially lucrative. If people pay a $50 subscription times say 50K, that's not bad.
Frankly I think many people are in the same situation as me that they are disappointed by some publication and then are relieved that someone is still upright. Everybody new at a place thinks they are saying something original I guess, and do not realize how this sounds to the ones who have been around for a while.
Dude, columnists at every print publication have proscribed column lengths. Krugman can ramble in this format if he chooses, although I don’t see him as”rambling.” You know, like what Trump does.
People here are claiming K left the Times because he couldn't say what he wanted. That's a lie and hardly trivia. It also equates the Times with WAPO and the L.A. Times, both of which failed to endorse Harris, unlike the NYT.
I sincerely apologize. Like I said, Krugman sounds sharper because everyone, including the NYT, is changing for the worse (e.g. I understand Doughat interviewing Andreesen even though I think both are crazy, because they are at least somewhat relevant, but there is no need to drag in random Nazis and give them a stage). This does not mean I think he has been censored, or that I think the NYT is on the level of the Wapo (as for "transfering my subscription", that is not because sudden distrust for the NYT, it is because I cannot afford everything at once).
While I feel a need to justify myself (this was just a sigh of relief, and maybe he just sounds sharper now because everyone else suddenly is dull) this also not something I need to fight over, so in a short while I will delete the comment (I am not sure how substack works and hope this will delete the whole thread). However you should not be running around and accuse everyone you disagree with of working for the enemy, because that kind of paranoia is really more damaging than me saying something that is at least unnecessary, and quite probably as you point out stupid.
Sorry, but every single article he has written here has been immediately followed by a post implying he was held back by the NYT. Others who have come here from WaPo and LAT, did flee due to censorship over Harris's endorsement, but not Krugman. Sorry for the accusation, I will remove that part and reword my comment, maybe you should too. There are tree tiny dots above our own posts with and edit feature.
You are clearly a thoughtful person - maybe just having a bad moment. And gee- today of all days maybe we can cut a thoughtful person a little slack if they should have an off moment or two. Rock on!
I do not think he was censored (his column was the reason I had a subscription, and I will gladly transfer this here once this is becomes a paid offer). I think he was a bit more circumspect, and in the NYT would have refrained from strong language and being overtly direct even when it would have been appropriate for the circumstances. I do not think the content has changed (I would be disappointed if it had tbh), it's more that I like the new tone of voice, especially given how most most newspapers immediately went downhill (NYT discussed with some crazy person if slavery was okay for gods sake).
Frankly, probably my bad. I just made some unnecessary noise without thinking a lot about how this would sound to other people. Thank you for believing me that I meant no harm.
I don’t know if this will help you, but I never read your comment as referring to anything but tone. Perhaps because I see it that way myself, lol! Prof Krugman is gently funny, for example. What a joy to discover that! But at the Times he had to stick to a more formal analysis. Now he has room to be the prof you wish you had in college–warm and nice to be around, while still covering the material completely. Everyone here is okay, no bad feelings. In the written word we can’t always tell how it will land for others.
Hi, thank you. I am not really worried if people disagree with me for whatever understandable reason, but I was worried because I was apparently sounding like I was ascribing motives to Paul Krugman beyond the things he told us himself. I very much try not to do that (I am speaking only for myself), so I was embarrassed enough that I felt I had to explain myself. It is my second language after all, so bear with me (great vocabulary, no ear for subtleties alas).
The NYT “crime”, apart from its pomposity as the “newspaper of record”, is its insistence on airing both sides’ point of view. When people, starting with but not limited to Trump, are mendacious from the outset, there should be no obligation to provide them with the “oxygen of publicity”, in Thatcher’s memorable phrase. And the NYT’s excuse, that “we’re just reporting the news”, is chickenshit.
I feel the NYT is doing a lot of normalizing - e.g. when they report on how people feel "more united" now without pointing out that, more or less, this is whites and males united against minorities and women. I blame them for still feeling they need to do "balanced" reporting when in times like this the only way to get a resemblance of balance would be to provide a solid counterweight. But personally I would not want to declare them the enemy, not in the least because fighting people with whom I have something in common would detract from the real issue (and I have just seen Elon Musk doing a Hitler salute during the inauguration, so I am sure there is a bigger problem than lackluster reporting).
They were terrible leaders, but Trump is much, much worse. I'm afraid I find no comfort in those comparisons and worry they might normalise Trump who intends to be a dictator.
Yes, and like the Civil War traitors, Trump (a convicted felon) and his acolytes have no trouble living with themselves. They are proud of their most deeply held “values” (racism, misogyny, and related hatreds).
It has been a decades-long spiral downwards from Nixon to Reagan to Bush to Trump. A downward spiral accomplished by the same tactics: white supremacy, economic privilege, otherisation, racism, and lies. Think of it as a play with four acts. At least, I hope we are near the denouement and that there will not be a fifth act.
I find the comparison with Andrew Jackson more useful & relevant. Racist genocide? ✅ Poor decision making based on poor understanding of economics? ✅ Elected to enact a jingoist nationalist policy? ✅
I've been reading more 18th Cent US history lately, and the 1830s to 1890s were really difficult times for the nation. In retrospect, post-WW2 US has been a period of relative calm *governance* that was accompanied by numerous economic shocks.
Have you read “Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz? I highly recommend it for a sweeping historical foundation for the current situation.
I have not, thanks for the recommendation. I just finished American Nations and found it offered some powerful insights into cultural threads that have persisted across space and time.
I also consider David Graeber as offering a great "big picture" view of modern industrial society writ large - TL;DR: historically speaking, things haven't been great for most people around the world for modt of the last 500-odd years.
It makes me kinda wish Cheney actually was a Sith Lord. The Dark Side of the Force would be a lot more human than what is being shit into the White House today.
They were bad -I lived through all three - this is above and beyond anything I could have imagined. My disappointment in my fellow Americans can’t be accurately put into words.
I'm 77 and also lived through all of those years. This is those years turbocharged. It's going to be a rough day. I'm going to listen to music and learn to paint today.
Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes made a pretense of being nice people. When people connected to George W's campaign swift boated John Kerry, Bush pretended to know nothing about it.
Donald makes no pretense. He just puts the hate and divisiveness out there and is proud of it. He or his associates are openly selling everything that they can put a price on.
Trump makes no pretense and thus has the rabid support of 77 million voters who can see exactly who he is with eyes wide open. That is the most terrifying part. Wait till the maga police and military have their ways with us.
I don't actually agree with the sentence "Trump makes no pretense and thus has the rabid support of 77 million voters who can see exactly who he is with eyes wide open."
I think the 77 million see different things in Trump. MAGA is a canvas where people can paint their own picture. The lies and hyperbole are so constant they can dismiss what they don't like.
An example is a Puerto Rican Trump supporter who was disturbed after hearing MAGA call Puerto Rico a garbage dump. He was truly shaken, so he researched and found that Puerto Rico has a problem with garbage collection and disposal. So, in his mind, it wasn't a bigoted comments, it was addressing an infrastructure problem. (I'm sure he didn't know that Trump more or less ignored Puerto Rico after it was hit by a devastating hurricane.)
I think the biggest factor is right wing media. It's often been said that lies heard long enough become truth. Their eyes may be wide open, but they're watching a constant stream of lies. I bet 90% of the 77 million consume right wing media.
Most people who lived through Watergate got a reminder not to trust any politician too much. But a handful took the lesson that more media control helps you get away with anything. Eventually that led to Fox, Rush and grew to what we see today.
Watergate had a direct influence on the formation of Fox propaganda channel. Roger Ailes was Nixon's media guy. When Nixon stepped down, he resolved to start a right-wing slanted Tv show (posing as News) so no republican president would ever have to step down, like his beloved Nixon did. He got Murdoch to finance it, and Reagan expedited Murdoch's citizenship so he could own the station.
Aaaaaaaaaand that is how we got here. GOP gave voters cover for years. Decades. Here we are. This is not just a 1-story building of lies, it is a skyscraper, built, sure, from pre-Civil War white supremacy, but also, very very deliberately, beginning with Nixon. And, again, here we are. They might not have literally predicted THIS, but they built it. And that includes Cheney, Kinzinger--who I respect for their courage and perspicacity, but who nonetheless supported the party--and 'moderate'/'centrist' Repubs going back that far.
You can take Bush, Reagan, and Nixon and put them in the one side of the crap scale, then put just Trump in the other side. The scale would not only tip to the Trump side, it would fall over.
I’ve lived through the whole bunch of those dirty dogs. I know my history; I read and watched news reports before political organizations and big monied interests got their grubby hands on the news organizations and took “fair and balanced” out of the picture to the extent they now have. I do know my history, Lewis.
The point with Trump is gratuitous, narcistic, cruelty. He wants to affirm his supremacy and debase his betters. Once we understand that, there is understanding. Unfortunately, he is a magnet for an army of malicious and amoral trollls who will bend to his will and will wreak revenge and havoc on our country.
Watch the Netflix documentary Mr. McMahon. I never really cared for wrestling, so dismissed it, but many, many people love it. Trump is the first wrestling president. "Kayfabe" started in wrestling, evolved into reality TV, and took control of the world with social media. Society and our sense of self have always been built on stories. It's an attention economy now. There is no going back, the younger generations are hollow. Whatever comes next will not be anything we remember. It's time to surf the Churn.
Yes we will. YEs we must. Remembering Ronald Reagan's decisive sweep of 525 electoral votes helps us as we also remember that two years later his party lost the senate and the house. Krugman helps us to stop sanewashing and truthwashing--that is allowing things that are really insane be treated as sane, and things that are really untruths, be treated as truth.
Wait, Reagan never had the House. But apparently he and Tip O’Neil were able to make deals…they preserved Social Security and mostly left programs for the poor alone, and Reagan got to spend like crazy on the military. The House didn’t go Republican until 1994, and it was an epochal event at the time.
I confess to being an optimist. America has gone through ups and downs in the past and survived. I believe it will be challenging but we’ll survive again and the pendulum will swing towards normalcy.
I think of Andrew Johnson and his lecturing Frederick Douglass and the other civil rights leaders, telling them that Lincoln and his policies were dead, in the grave, and that the nation would revive its supremacy policies, reconstruction was over. This is that moment reprised
As Paul says, you have to stay in the fight, and I hope that those of us in the fight get some help. P aul mentions the media. It would be great if our faith leaders would develop a spine and speak out about what is happening in the name of religion, too.
Whether we like it or not, the Democrats and liberal MSM helped us get here. Although I did not vote for Trump, there were very good reasons for me and others not to vote for Biden or Harris.
Yesterday I heard CNN implying that Trump is responsible for the Gaza ceasefire. Why? Because Trump said he was responsible. It is reprehensible that that was reported without comment. But how do we fight that? Not everyone is going to come over to Bluesky and substack and I fear we have blue information silos.
Bezos hired Will Lewis, Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloid hatchet man to take them further right. They have always had far too many tired, old, right-wingers spouting nonsensical opinions. It's like a wingnut welfare retirement home.
Biden is responsible for the Gaza ceasefire!!! Trump had nothing to do with it. I really wish that the CNN and other news sources would stop reporting a lot of what Trump says. Since crazy Americans elected him President again, I am not watching much news anymore. The shit show will happen, but I won't be watching.
To the extent that Trump got Netanyahu to agree to Biden's deal he was partially responsible. I imagine Netanyahu got something in return. A freer hand in the West Bank? A green light for an attack on Iran? We'll see.
By the way, come over to Blue Sky if you haven't already. I'm done with FacePuke.
Two thoughts. 1. Biden, Blinken and Burns spent 15 months negotiating this deal and if you look at the details. This is pretty much the same deal so Netanyahu could have gotten this deal a year ago but given his own corruption trial, the certainty of investigations into the failures of Israeli intelligence, his own policies that allowed transfers of wealth to Hamas as, and/or the possibility that the religious right would desert him and bring his government down, not to mention Biden’s resurrection of the two-state solution - - all gave him reason to temporize. Moreover, he had already placed a bet that Trump would win and give him a free hand. 2. I have much the same suspicion that Trump promised him something. The man is transactional. Both men are so this would be natural. I’m just worried that Trump has promised him a free-er hand than Biden would have allowed
Theodore: you can depend on it. It will not surprise me if Trump sits on his hands if Israel annexes the West Bank, even though that would make Israel a global pariah and an apartheid state (he might not too; he very much wants the Nobel Peace Prize and the road to that lies through a two-state solution). Trump has no idea how difficult and complex this is; son-in-law Kushner sold him a pup with the Abraham Accords, thinking he could do a deal over the heads of the Palestinians. Hamas’s brutal reply was a reminder: “Remember us? We’re still here and we’re not going anywhere.” It also reminded the Saudis that they too cannot ignore their own man in the street, and ignore the Palestinians. The key to this whole mess is not Hamas; it’s the fanatical ultra orthodox settler movement who will have to be confronted and if necessary suppressed by force along with the fanatical Islamist movement. Bibi will not even try, and Trump won’t (can’t) make him any more than any of the last five presidents could. Bill Clinton got close in 2001 and that venal fool Arafat turned him down. Imagine this: if he’d said Yes (and survived assassination unlike Sadat and Rabin), today the State of Palestine would be 24 years old and prospering. So sad.
There's a lot of criticism of Substack because of right wing nazi's who are on this platform.
I do think the Israeli's did the ceasefire because they support Trump and want to make him look good. They also want to openly stab Biden and the Democrats in the guts. Trump won't complain as they...incentivize the Arabs to "voluntarily" leave Samaria and Judea.
To be fair, the deal that was made was what Biden was trying to get all year—but Netanyahu always found an excuse not to agree until Trump was about the enter the White House. In a way, Trump seems to have gotten it done without lifting a finger—sometimes things happen that way.
Heather Cox Richardson wrote a column about today, about true heroes
<i>When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.<i>
I think Anne Frank was wrong. Not all are good at heart. I believe she would have written a different line after her imprisonment and death. Sadly, she learned that many of her beliefs were illusory as truly evil people tortured and murdered this child and countless others. NO GOODNESS IN THEM OR MAGA!! —89-year-old granny’s diary
It was the hope that kept her alive. But I agree with you. Not all people are good at heart. The dangers of radicalizing hate and normalizing violence are inherent advantages in Facebook. We need new laws and just eliminate political advertising from social media until we figure out a better way foward. Follow Australia too, outlaw social media until children are at least 16.
Praise the Lord and pass the Ammunition is an historical reference to a chaplain helping to manually pass ammo from its magazine up to the guns during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The ship was in maintenance, without power, and the ammo lifts were down. We do what we can.
I'm hip. And I've heard it attributed elsewhere as well.
I am a conscientious objector because I am compelled. And I try to witness what the hell is going on in real time in the real world. When I moved to DC some years ago I realized I owe it to my friends and family to see what happens here (even if most of the real stuff is done behind many layers of closed doors). It's why I was at the Capitol on Jan 6 2021 – I wanted to see American nazis in action. It's why I will be downtown in DC today – if only to see how dead the city is.
If my prime focus was to bring pain down upon people I would not be a good witness (a difficult enough thing on its own).
Trump's election has given these "good at heart" (really?) people license to be racists, mysogynist, xenophobes and act accordingly. That is the underlying tragedy of it all.
Professor Krugman: although i do agree with your comments, i also recognize that MAGA and their ilk have deluded themselves so thoroughly with their lies and with the lies of those around them that they have no clue what is reality anymore. they're a cult. no, really, they ARE A CULT. and like any cultist, they are in deep need of deprogramming. i've no clue how can we deprogram half of the country, do you? speaking truth to cultists will have NO EFFECT on their beliefs or actions at all, as anyone who has/had a family member who ended up in a cult can tell you.
speaking truth to lies is GOO D FOR OUR SOULS, but will have little effect on the souls of those in the cult.
Yes, they are a cult. You won’t stop them until you use your power.
Those of us in blue states pay most of the taxes and have more purchasing power. We need to use our power to deprive them of the federal subsidies we give them. It may sound harsh, but they are already planning to block disaster aid to our states, even though we pay most of the taxes.
Unless we defund this movement, it will become entrenched and subjugate us with our own tax money. Kill it now, while you still have the chance.
I am copying here a comment which I posted in the main discussion, but will be probably swamped out. As it is concerned with the topic you raised ("deprogramming"), I think it merits repeating here.
The lies presented by TRUMP are NOT to deceive his followers. The lies are to DEFINE his followers, as a social group, defining through acknowledgement or rejection who is "us", and who is "them". Think this through.
If you try to explain (before Trump's ascension to the throne) to a MAGA nation (!) member that the economy is actually quite good, you are not helping this person to come out of deception. You are attacking this person's identity.
This constituting definition ensures that any sane politician will be automatically rejected by the MAGA nation as a "them" (foreign=hostile). Because no sane politician will acknowledge those lies, which is, to MAGA, a giveaway of being "not us, but the other".
I think this is precisely on target, Mr. Szafranski. It is a symptom of the cult nature of MAGA. This is how cults work, and groups that don't include these features are better not called cults.
It is beyond the power of those not in a cult to detach a committed cult member through argument. But opportunities to free people from their commitment to the cult ideology, leader, and social membership do occur when either external or internal circumstances create fissures within the cult, or tensions in the personal lives of an individual cult members. (The Bannon/Musk fissure may become an example on the macro scale.)
Political opposition to MAGA is going to need to figure out how to detect and seize those opportunities on individual and group levels over the coming years. The only advantage we have now is that we've seen what does not work (mostly, what we've been doing and the manner in which we've done it).
The best way to break this cult is to use the greed of the collaborators and others. Much of the MAGA base is living on federal transfers from states that don’t support them.
Americans, including much of MAGA, would love to get rid of the income tax and the IRS. Greedy billionaires would too. Democrats should propose to move it all back to the states and kill the income tax.
This would push all of the politics back to the states and we are free of their lunacy. The resulting pain will break their cult.
The masses are just one of the symptoms. FB and Twitter artificially amplifying Donnie are the problem. Fear, anger, outrage, and lies, with rewards (likes and shares) have an inherent advantage and are eventually believed due to the scale of that advantage.
P Szafranski's repost and yours resonate here. MAGA's - generalizing - have been pissed off for some time. Mostly brought on by The Great Displacement (of wealth) - hollowing out of once quite-viable/stable communities. The racist clown - ever sensitive to leverage and as dumb as a rock - just kept throwing back to them what they were saying. Over and over, over and over - the core narrative became "them". The oligarchs - a whole other devious crowd, some who fostered this cult from the early days - took advantage. They want wayyyy more freedom globally. The clown is always for sale so they bought him his MAGA - as Szafranski puts it - webs to define and capture these followers. Keep all that out front, meanwhile behind the curtain = plans to dissolve all guardrails.
The "Bannon/Musk fissure" is - it seems to me - to be the kind of openings we need to take advantage of. Ask what would the current Republicans do if they saw this break? They would go hard after both sides - fomenting divisions, hyper-media bombs and trolling, total confusion in the narrative. Oh, and with a wrestling twist of course to sustain attention from the rogantypes.
Beyond my creativity level but certainly worth trying: hitting them with their own tactics.
I wish I could see clearly "what/how to do". But certainly a chaos affecting ALSO the Trumpverse will even things out, at least. So far it is the sane people who were getting lost in the apparent wreckage of all things they believed in, like facts, science, ethics, you name it.
Just we somehow have to be careful that the chaos does not become physical.
You are exactly right. It is tribal & they are members of the tribe. To disagree is to be cast out into the cold dangerous wilderness -- inside is safe & warm. So anciently human, & so regrettably primitive. No way to by - pass the cerebellum & speak to the cerebral cortex.
Lewis, I appreciate the perspective you bring to these strings but I think you are overcorrecting. I lived through McCarthy and Nixon (perhaps you did too)--the Trump era is not like those, and the term "cult" is actually apt, not a cliché. It denotes group behavior organized around a personality or set of beliefs in which followers have faith beyond the ability of evidence to shake, perpetually reinforced by social rewards of membership.
I think Trump is not a cult figure to most leading GOP politicians--most reveal inadvertently that they can see through him. But they recognize that he is a cult figure to an enormous base and with few exceptions they have no career in politics without the support of that base. The personal devotion of that cult membership is as visible you could ask. It is inconceivable that any US politician in the last hundred years, with the possible exception of Huey Long, could have demonstrated that more convincingly than Trump just did by launching his meme coin into which followers poured billions of assets overnight (literally). The evidence is overwhelming. Compare any of his rallies and the activity surrounding them to normal politics; note the statues, comics, billboards that people create; analyze the scale of the apophenic conspiracy theories his followers accept; calculate the income he absorbs from marketing scams and the inability of those who give him their money to perceive the most visible con in history--that meme coin has just made Trump one of the two dozen richest men in the world *over the weekend* (that figure's from Axios and I don't really have much faith in its specifics, but that's the scale).
As for the GOP voting in lockstep, political parties in Congress generally do that more or less, but the unity of the GOP in this regard did not exist in the McCarthy and Nixon eras. The watershed is the Gingrich Contract With America Congress of 1994. But that is not related to the cult nature of MAGA, and the room for dissent within the GOP has become dramatically narrower, especially since Trump's reemergence after 2022.
I hope you continue usefully annoying all of us on these strings with your contrarian responses that point away from hair-on-fire hot takes toward measured perspective. But the usefulness of your comments will be much greater if your urge to check distortions doesn't introduce its own brand of them.
What do you think about the divisions within MAGA? They had a hard time choosing a speaker of the house. I wonder what will happen as the various factions start to fight among themselves. I can imagine the Tech Bro MAGAs against the numerically superior working class MAGAs. The Evangelical MAGAs against the Barstool Republicans and Tech Bro MAGAs.
They all seem to like deportation but that's predicated on the deportation of "criminal gangs", not the hard-working meat packing workers who keep food prices down. Tariffs sound great until again, prices go up.
I love your description "the most visible con in history"
I think we can only hope that those divisions provide Democrats and their allies leverage points to turn the ship, Sharon. I don't think the House Speaker fights have provided those sorts of opportunities, at least so far, but some other splits may. We've seen that the Evangelical/Barstool division can be accommodated within MAGA. I don't know whether the Barstool/TechBros split can be: we'll see. One caution is that Democrats have demonstrated that they do not know how to influence MAGA base voters. I worry that liberal/progressive attempts to build on MAGA splits may be so clumsy that they help them heal rather than let MAGA self-destruct.
I do think that the negative consequences of MAGA policy may be a less error prone target. But I worry that combinations of PR misinformation and manipulated government reports may make it harder to show what the consequences are.
But, it’s not just Taylor Swift-like celebrity cult. There is real anger and grievance at the establishment they believe has caused their failure.
Both parties have kissed up to the money. Trump and the tech bros are exploiting the anger double down on the extraction and blaming the “establishment” for it.
The scapegoating will get worse from here because it will satisfy the anger and mask the kleptocratic takeover. We’re fucked unless the remaining establishment gets very serious and very stern.
Rule-of-law has been broken by Trump. Force will be necessary, now!
Taylor Swift does not lead a cult, JazzPaw. We need the word to have meaning. No one needs an intervention to remove them from the grip of Taylor Swift fan clubs.
I don't think it's helpful to say there is "real" anger at "the establishment" they believed caused "their failure." "The establishment" is a cult slogan, not a real thing (which is why Bernie doesn't speak this way), and many--most--people committed to MAGA (apart from some of the preexisting extremist groups that have latched onto it) are doing as well as anyone else.
You're right that we're seeing key actors among the super-wealthy join MAGA to mine it as they do any rent-seeking opportunity. I think you're a little out over your skis in calling for force. You do know who controls the military now, right, and the greater part of the civilian arsenal?
I think no one has an effective strategy to overcome the political momentum of the moment and it's not a good idea to man the barricades just to present a clear target for the firing squad. Contexts are going to change rapidly and unpredictably, starting this afternoon, and those who are not gripped in the cult need to learn from what we see, keep looking for emergent opportunities, and develop tools that we can deploy--bearing in mind that the tools we've been using to date (outrage, snark, argument, marches) have not worked.
About "using force". I wonder if one of the reasons why Biden did not push the limits (are there any now, BTW?) of legality to counter Trump was the quite real possibility of Trump inciting violence in response
.
It is debatable if this new version of "Better Red than dead" is justified. I lean that yes, this version is justified, but I did not think this through enough, yet.
The tools haven’t worked because Democrats are assuming that they can buy off MAGA voters with more offers of “help”. All they succeed in doing is angering their own natural constituents. They tax people in their own states and to send the money to red states. It’s a loser on two fronts.
Voters assume Democrats will save their programs from Trump, so they feel free to bite their so-called values and scoop up the money.
The proper strategy in a democracy is to connect up help with votes. No votes, no help. I just saw a couple of Trump voting educators who don’t want their education budget cut, but they voted Trump. They say that’s not what they want. Well, they seem fine with denying my state residents disaster aid. They need to get what they voted for and Democrats shouldn’t save them from it.
"The tools haven’t worked because Democrats are assuming that they can buy off MAGA voters with more offers of help."
This seems to me a one-dimensional reduction of a deeply entrenched and complex political and cultural context, and a misdiagnosis of where the core problems lie. It is based on a misunderstanding: Blue states do not send locally collected tax dollars to Red states. Blue states contribute high percentages of federally collected taxes because their economies produce more federally taxed wealth. That money is controlled and reallocated by the federal government, which will not in any way be controlled by Democrats.
Lewis, I don't know what history you're reading. I was too young to follow McCarthy with understanding, but I remember when the Republicans (including the party leader) abandoned him, and I tracked every step of the Watergate process. The degree of unity in the political GOP through Trump 45 could fall on that scale, and the initial reaction post-January 6 suggested that it would. But the resurrection of Trump has demonstrated that we are beyond those dynamics now and that we already were four years ago, if "the GOP" is understood to be MAGA.
Yes, my family knew some of those who committed suicide in the McCarthy era; I am not arguing that the complicit behavior of the GOP was benign. And you are not teaching me new information about Watergate--you're missing the fact that the existence of the tapes emerged from Butterfield's testimony relatively early and that individual GOP leaders began a gradual distancing process that cascaded a year later after the SCOTUS verdict.
Let me point out the way in which I think you are making an error. When you wrote, "Only after the tapes were revealed did the GOP stop defending Nixon," I think it should have occurred to you that the comparable situation should have been, "Only after he led an insurrection did the GOP stop defending Trump"--and although it started to for a brief moment, in the end it did not. The insurrection was a far, far greater demonstration of danger than Nixon's tapes and lies about them. If we were in a steady state where GOP behavior was a recurring constant Trump would have been convicted upon the second impeachment or consigned to permanent retirement by party rejection. Instead, Liz Cheney was.
It’s true that Republicans were in lockstep in the McCarthy Era. They were in a similar state of fear of being accused and blacklisted. They also saw that they could use it against Democrats and the New Deal.
Watergate was different. Nixon was abandoned relatively quickly. They put up a small fight for him, but they weren’t afraid of Nixon then the way they feared McCarthy, Cohn and Hoover.
The current situation is much more dangerous. This is really a kind of civil war and a retribution for grievances that go back to the Civil War.
The South and much of rural America has lost economically on a grand scale and lives on blue state welfare. The discrepancy keeps getting larger. They want to use the political system to restack the deck on their terms. They will try to extract our wealth and prosperity and disenfranchise us to hold onto that power.
Eisenhower was a reluctant candidate. He was an outlier. Without him, it’s just the party of the 1% since the TR. Both those presidents warned the public of the dangers, as Biden did in his farewell address. The mass followers are cult like, believing the lies, propaganda, and the myths.
100% a cult. Dr. Bandy Lee has some solid research on deprogramming. It starts with leadership, remove the cult leader from the population and the healing can begin. But I would go further. We need new laws regulating social media. Biden discussed this but Silicon Valley execs took that as an attack and switched parties en masse. Now with Elon, they see themselves as Viceroy's, Gods of Mass Communications of what is real and what is not.
I’m not into calling them that. They are oligarchs pure and simple. “Be kind to the language” -On Tyranny. Using words like bros sounds less threatening, even endearing.
For now, we still have the right to vote, so I’m more concerned about the stupidity and gullibility of the average voter than I am the oligarchs. Once they have the power to rule by decree it will be a different story. Maybe I’ll be dead before that.
Hard to believe for some, but maybe because they don’t realize the effect of the new tooled propaganda of Facebook and Twitter, the speed and the scale for identification through profile analytics for manipulation that presents like persuasion, but as addictive as opioids and gambling.
Continued increases in the cost of living plus growing shortages are the real reason voters went for Trump. The Democrats had nothing to offer except endless propaganda about how great the economy was doing, something which was obviously seen as a lie by the voters who were experiencing gradual and unending impoverishment.
I feel particularly abandoned by NPR— yes, are still usually adding “without evidence” when they repeat a lie (for now) but a couple of days ago I heard them use the phrase “the MAGA reform movement”— is that what we’re calling it now?!— and Steve Inskeep’s bright-eyed-boy-bubbling-with-mirth voice is making me want to throttle my smart speaker.
Thank you, Paul. One other thing that we seem to be plagued by is various commentators pumping up their image through Biden-blaming, etc. The problems go a lot deeper than any supposed stumbles and faults of the Dems. We've been on this path for decades. I hope we can pull out of it.
Fuck yes, Krugman! Never, ever give in to lies and bullshit. 100%!
You have no idea (or maybe you do) how helpful it is to hear stuff like this. People: YOU ARE NOT CRAZY AND YOU ARE NOT ALONE!
I honestly don’t think we’re gonna win. So what? Seriously: so…what?
These people are monsters: Trumpers and those who have given up alike. I, for one, refuse to curl up into the fetal position, hoping fascists will leave me alone (they probably would, too), selling out any decent impulse, belief, or commitment I ever made—including my own kids (if I had any). If they’re going to destroy everything, I ain’t helping on any fucking level including silently in my own mind.
I’m no angel but I’m definitely better than that. And so are all of you!
Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
As a European with close ties to the US, I am saddened, appalled, and angry at those Americans who sold out their moral rectitude to a man who tried to foment a coup, a liar, a racist and rapist to boot. I hope those who still believe in democracy and equal rights for all quickly organise at the grassroots level to counter the abject policies of this felon and his coterie of incompetent ass-kissers, and defeat them in the upcoming 2026 elections. I personally will not set foot on American soil whilst this despicable human being is in the White House. Good luck to you all.
Another excellent post. The important thing to remember is that the incessant lying of powerful GOP elites and influencers are only made possible by FOX News, where 85% of Trump voters get their news. RW media is the tail that wags the dog.
Various pundits and authors have been predicting this for decades, and I don't just mean Orwell. Neil Howe and the late William Strauss laid out a scenario similar to this one (a 9/11-type event precipitating the rise of a fascist state) in their volume "The Fourth Turning" (1997); Howe followed it up with "The Fourth Turning is Here" (2023). James Dale Davidson and the late Lord William Rees-Mogg published a book (also in 1997) called "The Sovereign Individual" describing a situation in which nation-states eventually collapse and are supplanted by essentially a feudal system revolving around oligarchs and those who serve them. It's happening now. Those of us who value freedom are in for the fight of our lives.
I am so glad you left the NYT. We finally get to see an unfiltered Krugman, and it makes this day a little better (update: please see the discussion below, this was a somewhat trite sigh of relief and does not so much reflect distrust toward the NYT as a relief that Krugman does not do self-censorship. Difficult times sometimes lead to me saying silly things).
"Buckle up. But by god, enjoy the fight and get in some licks! Trust me, it’s fun to fight, especially when the bad guys are expecting you to lie down. And trust me on this too: courage is literally the only thing the bad guys respect. The only thing." — Chris Jones, "A Democracy Runs Through It," https://riverraccoon.substack.com/p/a-democracy-runs-through-it, written shortly after the election.
I am tired of what seems to be a false assumption being repeated after all of Krugman's posts.
Krugman says he simply retired and has not claimed to have left due to any NYT censorship.
He has always been "unfettered" from what I recall.
No. See my reply above. I do not accuse the NYT of censorship, I think a newspaper has more tame standards for language. Also whatever the NYT was in the past, it is not that anymore.
umm... the Judith Miller fiasco on the run up to the Iraq war has never been fully addressed. I have never trusted them since the Oops we did not find weapons of mass destruction report. When do you think they reclaimed their legitimacy?
Ah, I had completely forgotten this. Somehow I guess I had blocked that fiasco but never fully trusted them since then. Decided to completely cut ties leading up to last year's election. I'm done with NYT, WaPo, and the Atlantic. I thought they were all decent, but... damn.
Did you ever hear Krugman complain that NYT editorial staff "toned down" some of his words/wording? I never did, either in the past or in the present before Krugman left. So, I have no reason to think anything like that had anything to do with his leaving the NYT.
In this format Krugman can run off what he's thinking about without going through a process. I suspect it will also be financially lucrative. If people pay a $50 subscription times say 50K, that's not bad.
off topic gibberish ASSumptions based on nothing.
OK, sorry. I will take you art your word. I get what you are saying.
It has simply been a pattern here every single day and I worry it is creating a false narrative or myth about why Krugman left.
If he left because he was constrained, he should say so, I think.
I changed my original comment. ... (edit feature)
Frankly I think many people are in the same situation as me that they are disappointed by some publication and then are relieved that someone is still upright. Everybody new at a place thinks they are saying something original I guess, and do not realize how this sounds to the ones who have been around for a while.
Dude, columnists at every print publication have proscribed column lengths. Krugman can ramble in this format if he chooses, although I don’t see him as”rambling.” You know, like what Trump does.
Gibberish: K's language has always been his own.
Right, let's fight each other over trivia. I know there was a reason the right is winning everywhere.
People here are claiming K left the Times because he couldn't say what he wanted. That's a lie and hardly trivia. It also equates the Times with WAPO and the L.A. Times, both of which failed to endorse Harris, unlike the NYT.
I sincerely apologize. Like I said, Krugman sounds sharper because everyone, including the NYT, is changing for the worse (e.g. I understand Doughat interviewing Andreesen even though I think both are crazy, because they are at least somewhat relevant, but there is no need to drag in random Nazis and give them a stage). This does not mean I think he has been censored, or that I think the NYT is on the level of the Wapo (as for "transfering my subscription", that is not because sudden distrust for the NYT, it is because I cannot afford everything at once).
While I feel a need to justify myself (this was just a sigh of relief, and maybe he just sounds sharper now because everyone else suddenly is dull) this also not something I need to fight over, so in a short while I will delete the comment (I am not sure how substack works and hope this will delete the whole thread). However you should not be running around and accuse everyone you disagree with of working for the enemy, because that kind of paranoia is really more damaging than me saying something that is at least unnecessary, and quite probably as you point out stupid.
Sorry, but every single article he has written here has been immediately followed by a post implying he was held back by the NYT. Others who have come here from WaPo and LAT, did flee due to censorship over Harris's endorsement, but not Krugman. Sorry for the accusation, I will remove that part and reword my comment, maybe you should too. There are tree tiny dots above our own posts with and edit feature.
Yes, I get your point and I guess you are right. Like it said, brighter not in absolute terms, but at least in comparison.
Today might be the day to start curbing the impulse to distract from the important work.
Point taken.
You are clearly a thoughtful person - maybe just having a bad moment. And gee- today of all days maybe we can cut a thoughtful person a little slack if they should have an off moment or two. Rock on!
That is at least debatable: https://bsky.app/profile/jc-econ.bsky.social/post/3ldqz2yh6bs2r (look at the reposts list). Even more so as much of the sanewashing he's talking about is being conducted by NYT journalists.
K was not censored by NYT. He stayed there for 25 years.
I do not think he was censored (his column was the reason I had a subscription, and I will gladly transfer this here once this is becomes a paid offer). I think he was a bit more circumspect, and in the NYT would have refrained from strong language and being overtly direct even when it would have been appropriate for the circumstances. I do not think the content has changed (I would be disappointed if it had tbh), it's more that I like the new tone of voice, especially given how most most newspapers immediately went downhill (NYT discussed with some crazy person if slavery was okay for gods sake).
OK - I see you had no added intent - my bad.
Frankly, probably my bad. I just made some unnecessary noise without thinking a lot about how this would sound to other people. Thank you for believing me that I meant no harm.
I don’t know if this will help you, but I never read your comment as referring to anything but tone. Perhaps because I see it that way myself, lol! Prof Krugman is gently funny, for example. What a joy to discover that! But at the Times he had to stick to a more formal analysis. Now he has room to be the prof you wish you had in college–warm and nice to be around, while still covering the material completely. Everyone here is okay, no bad feelings. In the written word we can’t always tell how it will land for others.
"But at the Times he had to stick to a more formal analysis."
Gibberish.
Hi, thank you. I am not really worried if people disagree with me for whatever understandable reason, but I was worried because I was apparently sounding like I was ascribing motives to Paul Krugman beyond the things he told us himself. I very much try not to do that (I am speaking only for myself), so I was embarrassed enough that I felt I had to explain myself. It is my second language after all, so bear with me (great vocabulary, no ear for subtleties alas).
Hear, hear!
Yes on Krugman. Entirely TOO NICE to the NYT - they ALSO are culpable, among "corporate media" at its most ... deplorable!
The NYT “crime”, apart from its pomposity as the “newspaper of record”, is its insistence on airing both sides’ point of view. When people, starting with but not limited to Trump, are mendacious from the outset, there should be no obligation to provide them with the “oxygen of publicity”, in Thatcher’s memorable phrase. And the NYT’s excuse, that “we’re just reporting the news”, is chickenshit.
I feel the NYT is doing a lot of normalizing - e.g. when they report on how people feel "more united" now without pointing out that, more or less, this is whites and males united against minorities and women. I blame them for still feeling they need to do "balanced" reporting when in times like this the only way to get a resemblance of balance would be to provide a solid counterweight. But personally I would not want to declare them the enemy, not in the least because fighting people with whom I have something in common would detract from the real issue (and I have just seen Elon Musk doing a Hitler salute during the inauguration, so I am sure there is a bigger problem than lackluster reporting).
Yes, absolutely! I'm glad too!
Couldn’t agree more!!!
What his election says about us as a nation saddens me to the point of depression. How did we get here? Will we ever find our way home again?
Maybe you missed Nixon, Reagan, and the Bush Klan?
They were terrible leaders, but Trump is much, much worse. I'm afraid I find no comfort in those comparisons and worry they might normalise Trump who intends to be a dictator.
Yes, you are right. Comparing Trump to anyone is pointless, when he represents such a new depth of corruption and decay.
Trump is sui generis. There is no comparison since the traitors of the Civil War.
Yes, and like the Civil War traitors, Trump (a convicted felon) and his acolytes have no trouble living with themselves. They are proud of their most deeply held “values” (racism, misogyny, and related hatreds).
It has been a decades-long spiral downwards from Nixon to Reagan to Bush to Trump. A downward spiral accomplished by the same tactics: white supremacy, economic privilege, otherisation, racism, and lies. Think of it as a play with four acts. At least, I hope we are near the denouement and that there will not be a fifth act.
I think that's true, but as with falling, there is acceleration. The US public needs to slam the brakes on fast.
I find the comparison with Andrew Jackson more useful & relevant. Racist genocide? ✅ Poor decision making based on poor understanding of economics? ✅ Elected to enact a jingoist nationalist policy? ✅
I've been reading more 18th Cent US history lately, and the 1830s to 1890s were really difficult times for the nation. In retrospect, post-WW2 US has been a period of relative calm *governance* that was accompanied by numerous economic shocks.
Have you read “Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz? I highly recommend it for a sweeping historical foundation for the current situation.
I have not, thanks for the recommendation. I just finished American Nations and found it offered some powerful insights into cultural threads that have persisted across space and time.
I also consider David Graeber as offering a great "big picture" view of modern industrial society writ large - TL;DR: historically speaking, things haven't been great for most people around the world for modt of the last 500-odd years.
Thanks for sharing. I will look into these as well.
Just the book title alone tells me all I need to know. I’ll pass.
I agree. From a Canadian point of you, Trump seems much worst. I'm turning into a fan of Dick Cheney these days !
Then you know nothing about Cheney.
It makes me kinda wish Cheney actually was a Sith Lord. The Dark Side of the Force would be a lot more human than what is being shit into the White House today.
Oh no.
Better read some history: each broke new ground in corruption: Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9-11/Iraq
Yeah. And 'Happy Sadist' to boot.
They were bad -I lived through all three - this is above and beyond anything I could have imagined. My disappointment in my fellow Americans can’t be accurately put into words.
I'm 77 and also lived through all of those years. This is those years turbocharged. It's going to be a rough day. I'm going to listen to music and learn to paint today.
Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes made a pretense of being nice people. When people connected to George W's campaign swift boated John Kerry, Bush pretended to know nothing about it.
Donald makes no pretense. He just puts the hate and divisiveness out there and is proud of it. He or his associates are openly selling everything that they can put a price on.
Note that the same team that swiftboated Kerry were also the campaign leads for the incoming president. There’s your through line.
Trump makes no pretense and thus has the rabid support of 77 million voters who can see exactly who he is with eyes wide open. That is the most terrifying part. Wait till the maga police and military have their ways with us.
I don't actually agree with the sentence "Trump makes no pretense and thus has the rabid support of 77 million voters who can see exactly who he is with eyes wide open."
I think the 77 million see different things in Trump. MAGA is a canvas where people can paint their own picture. The lies and hyperbole are so constant they can dismiss what they don't like.
An example is a Puerto Rican Trump supporter who was disturbed after hearing MAGA call Puerto Rico a garbage dump. He was truly shaken, so he researched and found that Puerto Rico has a problem with garbage collection and disposal. So, in his mind, it wasn't a bigoted comments, it was addressing an infrastructure problem. (I'm sure he didn't know that Trump more or less ignored Puerto Rico after it was hit by a devastating hurricane.)
I think the biggest factor is right wing media. It's often been said that lies heard long enough become truth. Their eyes may be wide open, but they're watching a constant stream of lies. I bet 90% of the 77 million consume right wing media.
Similar comment about RW media I read somewhere:
Most people who lived through Watergate got a reminder not to trust any politician too much. But a handful took the lesson that more media control helps you get away with anything. Eventually that led to Fox, Rush and grew to what we see today.
Watergate had a direct influence on the formation of Fox propaganda channel. Roger Ailes was Nixon's media guy. When Nixon stepped down, he resolved to start a right-wing slanted Tv show (posing as News) so no republican president would ever have to step down, like his beloved Nixon did. He got Murdoch to finance it, and Reagan expedited Murdoch's citizenship so he could own the station.
https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created
Aaaaaaaaaand that is how we got here. GOP gave voters cover for years. Decades. Here we are. This is not just a 1-story building of lies, it is a skyscraper, built, sure, from pre-Civil War white supremacy, but also, very very deliberately, beginning with Nixon. And, again, here we are. They might not have literally predicted THIS, but they built it. And that includes Cheney, Kinzinger--who I respect for their courage and perspicacity, but who nonetheless supported the party--and 'moderate'/'centrist' Repubs going back that far.
Good reminders. Thank you. John Kerry wasn't perfect but what was done to him should have not have been tacitly approved bt bush.
The result was the same for all the GOP fascists, so "pretense" means nothing.
You can take Bush, Reagan, and Nixon and put them in the one side of the crap scale, then put just Trump in the other side. The scale would not only tip to the Trump side, it would fall over.
Bill knows no history, and he's proud too.
I’ve lived through the whole bunch of those dirty dogs. I know my history; I read and watched news reports before political organizations and big monied interests got their grubby hands on the news organizations and took “fair and balanced” out of the picture to the extent they now have. I do know my history, Lewis.
The point with Trump is gratuitous, narcistic, cruelty. He wants to affirm his supremacy and debase his betters. Once we understand that, there is understanding. Unfortunately, he is a magnet for an army of malicious and amoral trollls who will bend to his will and will wreak revenge and havoc on our country.
Watch the Netflix documentary Mr. McMahon. I never really cared for wrestling, so dismissed it, but many, many people love it. Trump is the first wrestling president. "Kayfabe" started in wrestling, evolved into reality TV, and took control of the world with social media. Society and our sense of self have always been built on stories. It's an attention economy now. There is no going back, the younger generations are hollow. Whatever comes next will not be anything we remember. It's time to surf the Churn.
It’s time to fight the fuck back.
Yes we will. YEs we must. Remembering Ronald Reagan's decisive sweep of 525 electoral votes helps us as we also remember that two years later his party lost the senate and the house. Krugman helps us to stop sanewashing and truthwashing--that is allowing things that are really insane be treated as sane, and things that are really untruths, be treated as truth.
Wait, Reagan never had the House. But apparently he and Tip O’Neil were able to make deals…they preserved Social Security and mostly left programs for the poor alone, and Reagan got to spend like crazy on the military. The House didn’t go Republican until 1994, and it was an epochal event at the time.
I confess to being an optimist. America has gone through ups and downs in the past and survived. I believe it will be challenging but we’ll survive again and the pendulum will swing towards normalcy.
I think of Andrew Johnson and his lecturing Frederick Douglass and the other civil rights leaders, telling them that Lincoln and his policies were dead, in the grave, and that the nation would revive its supremacy policies, reconstruction was over. This is that moment reprised
Get angry. We might not find our way home. Carbon, fascism, emergent diseases, nukes.
You’ll come around. And you’ll get angry. Our rage will blow past the fake outrage of these everything-destroying MAGAts.
I understand your feelings although I'm doing my best not to share them completely. Small steps right now. Reading Krugman is one for me.
As Paul says, you have to stay in the fight, and I hope that those of us in the fight get some help. P aul mentions the media. It would be great if our faith leaders would develop a spine and speak out about what is happening in the name of religion, too.
Too many of them are part of this debacle and want a Theocracy.
Whether we like it or not, the Democrats and liberal MSM helped us get here. Although I did not vote for Trump, there were very good reasons for me and others not to vote for Biden or Harris.
May you get what you voted for.
So tell me what I voted for.
Yesterday I heard CNN implying that Trump is responsible for the Gaza ceasefire. Why? Because Trump said he was responsible. It is reprehensible that that was reported without comment. But how do we fight that? Not everyone is going to come over to Bluesky and substack and I fear we have blue information silos.
Reporting things without fact checking or analysis has been a mainstream media failing from the beginning. You’re absolutely right.
CNN wasn't the only place where Trump's appointees were given the credit for pushing the ceasefire over the finish line.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/18/biden-trump-witkoff-ceasefire-israel-gaza/
I've already canceled my WP subscription.
Me too!
👍🏻👍🏻💥
I cancelled mine last week. I was sorry to do so, but they tipped me over the brink with cancellation of cartoons.
Bezos hired Will Lewis, Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloid hatchet man to take them further right. They have always had far too many tired, old, right-wingers spouting nonsensical opinions. It's like a wingnut welfare retirement home.
Biden is responsible for the Gaza ceasefire!!! Trump had nothing to do with it. I really wish that the CNN and other news sources would stop reporting a lot of what Trump says. Since crazy Americans elected him President again, I am not watching much news anymore. The shit show will happen, but I won't be watching.
To the extent that Trump got Netanyahu to agree to Biden's deal he was partially responsible. I imagine Netanyahu got something in return. A freer hand in the West Bank? A green light for an attack on Iran? We'll see.
By the way, come over to Blue Sky if you haven't already. I'm done with FacePuke.
Two thoughts. 1. Biden, Blinken and Burns spent 15 months negotiating this deal and if you look at the details. This is pretty much the same deal so Netanyahu could have gotten this deal a year ago but given his own corruption trial, the certainty of investigations into the failures of Israeli intelligence, his own policies that allowed transfers of wealth to Hamas as, and/or the possibility that the religious right would desert him and bring his government down, not to mention Biden’s resurrection of the two-state solution - - all gave him reason to temporize. Moreover, he had already placed a bet that Trump would win and give him a free hand. 2. I have much the same suspicion that Trump promised him something. The man is transactional. Both men are so this would be natural. I’m just worried that Trump has promised him a free-er hand than Biden would have allowed
Theodore: you can depend on it. It will not surprise me if Trump sits on his hands if Israel annexes the West Bank, even though that would make Israel a global pariah and an apartheid state (he might not too; he very much wants the Nobel Peace Prize and the road to that lies through a two-state solution). Trump has no idea how difficult and complex this is; son-in-law Kushner sold him a pup with the Abraham Accords, thinking he could do a deal over the heads of the Palestinians. Hamas’s brutal reply was a reminder: “Remember us? We’re still here and we’re not going anywhere.” It also reminded the Saudis that they too cannot ignore their own man in the street, and ignore the Palestinians. The key to this whole mess is not Hamas; it’s the fanatical ultra orthodox settler movement who will have to be confronted and if necessary suppressed by force along with the fanatical Islamist movement. Bibi will not even try, and Trump won’t (can’t) make him any more than any of the last five presidents could. Bill Clinton got close in 2001 and that venal fool Arafat turned him down. Imagine this: if he’d said Yes (and survived assassination unlike Sadat and Rabin), today the State of Palestine would be 24 years old and prospering. So sad.
There's a lot of criticism of Substack because of right wing nazi's who are on this platform.
I do think the Israeli's did the ceasefire because they support Trump and want to make him look good. They also want to openly stab Biden and the Democrats in the guts. Trump won't complain as they...incentivize the Arabs to "voluntarily" leave Samaria and Judea.
To be fair, the deal that was made was what Biden was trying to get all year—but Netanyahu always found an excuse not to agree until Trump was about the enter the White House. In a way, Trump seems to have gotten it done without lifting a finger—sometimes things happen that way.
Heather Cox Richardson wrote a column about today, about true heroes
<i>When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.<i>
There's more:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-19-2025
Keep the faith. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
I think Anne Frank was wrong. Not all are good at heart. I believe she would have written a different line after her imprisonment and death. Sadly, she learned that many of her beliefs were illusory as truly evil people tortured and murdered this child and countless others. NO GOODNESS IN THEM OR MAGA!! —89-year-old granny’s diary
It was the hope that kept her alive. But I agree with you. Not all people are good at heart. The dangers of radicalizing hate and normalizing violence are inherent advantages in Facebook. We need new laws and just eliminate political advertising from social media until we figure out a better way foward. Follow Australia too, outlaw social media until children are at least 16.
Correct: This is the corollary of Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.
Spare me the 'lord'. Keep yer ammunition. Just stand up and face them down.
Praise the Lord and pass the Ammunition is an historical reference to a chaplain helping to manually pass ammo from its magazine up to the guns during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The ship was in maintenance, without power, and the ammo lifts were down. We do what we can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praise_the_Lord_and_Pass_the_Ammunition
Today is another day of infamy.
I'm hip. And I've heard it attributed elsewhere as well.
I am a conscientious objector because I am compelled. And I try to witness what the hell is going on in real time in the real world. When I moved to DC some years ago I realized I owe it to my friends and family to see what happens here (even if most of the real stuff is done behind many layers of closed doors). It's why I was at the Capitol on Jan 6 2021 – I wanted to see American nazis in action. It's why I will be downtown in DC today – if only to see how dead the city is.
If my prime focus was to bring pain down upon people I would not be a good witness (a difficult enough thing on its own).
Trump's election has given these "good at heart" (really?) people license to be racists, mysogynist, xenophobes and act accordingly. That is the underlying tragedy of it all.
And many many examples of humility and graciousness from Abraham Lincoln's presidency. Anger and kindness?
Professor Krugman: although i do agree with your comments, i also recognize that MAGA and their ilk have deluded themselves so thoroughly with their lies and with the lies of those around them that they have no clue what is reality anymore. they're a cult. no, really, they ARE A CULT. and like any cultist, they are in deep need of deprogramming. i've no clue how can we deprogram half of the country, do you? speaking truth to cultists will have NO EFFECT on their beliefs or actions at all, as anyone who has/had a family member who ended up in a cult can tell you.
speaking truth to lies is GOO D FOR OUR SOULS, but will have little effect on the souls of those in the cult.
Yes, they are a cult. You won’t stop them until you use your power.
Those of us in blue states pay most of the taxes and have more purchasing power. We need to use our power to deprive them of the federal subsidies we give them. It may sound harsh, but they are already planning to block disaster aid to our states, even though we pay most of the taxes.
Unless we defund this movement, it will become entrenched and subjugate us with our own tax money. Kill it now, while you still have the chance.
I am copying here a comment which I posted in the main discussion, but will be probably swamped out. As it is concerned with the topic you raised ("deprogramming"), I think it merits repeating here.
The lies presented by TRUMP are NOT to deceive his followers. The lies are to DEFINE his followers, as a social group, defining through acknowledgement or rejection who is "us", and who is "them". Think this through.
If you try to explain (before Trump's ascension to the throne) to a MAGA nation (!) member that the economy is actually quite good, you are not helping this person to come out of deception. You are attacking this person's identity.
This constituting definition ensures that any sane politician will be automatically rejected by the MAGA nation as a "them" (foreign=hostile). Because no sane politician will acknowledge those lies, which is, to MAGA, a giveaway of being "not us, but the other".
I think this is precisely on target, Mr. Szafranski. It is a symptom of the cult nature of MAGA. This is how cults work, and groups that don't include these features are better not called cults.
It is beyond the power of those not in a cult to detach a committed cult member through argument. But opportunities to free people from their commitment to the cult ideology, leader, and social membership do occur when either external or internal circumstances create fissures within the cult, or tensions in the personal lives of an individual cult members. (The Bannon/Musk fissure may become an example on the macro scale.)
Political opposition to MAGA is going to need to figure out how to detect and seize those opportunities on individual and group levels over the coming years. The only advantage we have now is that we've seen what does not work (mostly, what we've been doing and the manner in which we've done it).
The best way to break this cult is to use the greed of the collaborators and others. Much of the MAGA base is living on federal transfers from states that don’t support them.
Americans, including much of MAGA, would love to get rid of the income tax and the IRS. Greedy billionaires would too. Democrats should propose to move it all back to the states and kill the income tax.
This would push all of the politics back to the states and we are free of their lunacy. The resulting pain will break their cult.
The masses are just one of the symptoms. FB and Twitter artificially amplifying Donnie are the problem. Fear, anger, outrage, and lies, with rewards (likes and shares) have an inherent advantage and are eventually believed due to the scale of that advantage.
P Szafranski's repost and yours resonate here. MAGA's - generalizing - have been pissed off for some time. Mostly brought on by The Great Displacement (of wealth) - hollowing out of once quite-viable/stable communities. The racist clown - ever sensitive to leverage and as dumb as a rock - just kept throwing back to them what they were saying. Over and over, over and over - the core narrative became "them". The oligarchs - a whole other devious crowd, some who fostered this cult from the early days - took advantage. They want wayyyy more freedom globally. The clown is always for sale so they bought him his MAGA - as Szafranski puts it - webs to define and capture these followers. Keep all that out front, meanwhile behind the curtain = plans to dissolve all guardrails.
The "Bannon/Musk fissure" is - it seems to me - to be the kind of openings we need to take advantage of. Ask what would the current Republicans do if they saw this break? They would go hard after both sides - fomenting divisions, hyper-media bombs and trolling, total confusion in the narrative. Oh, and with a wrestling twist of course to sustain attention from the rogantypes.
Beyond my creativity level but certainly worth trying: hitting them with their own tactics.
I wish I could see clearly "what/how to do". But certainly a chaos affecting ALSO the Trumpverse will even things out, at least. So far it is the sane people who were getting lost in the apparent wreckage of all things they believed in, like facts, science, ethics, you name it.
Just we somehow have to be careful that the chaos does not become physical.
"People fear their social death, much more than their physical death." Piotr, you are spot on. Identity politics redefined. Thank you!
You are exactly right. It is tribal & they are members of the tribe. To disagree is to be cast out into the cold dangerous wilderness -- inside is safe & warm. So anciently human, & so regrettably primitive. No way to by - pass the cerebellum & speak to the cerebral cortex.
"Cult" is a cliché.
The GOP has voted in lockstep since Joe McCarthy and Nixon.
Lewis, I appreciate the perspective you bring to these strings but I think you are overcorrecting. I lived through McCarthy and Nixon (perhaps you did too)--the Trump era is not like those, and the term "cult" is actually apt, not a cliché. It denotes group behavior organized around a personality or set of beliefs in which followers have faith beyond the ability of evidence to shake, perpetually reinforced by social rewards of membership.
I think Trump is not a cult figure to most leading GOP politicians--most reveal inadvertently that they can see through him. But they recognize that he is a cult figure to an enormous base and with few exceptions they have no career in politics without the support of that base. The personal devotion of that cult membership is as visible you could ask. It is inconceivable that any US politician in the last hundred years, with the possible exception of Huey Long, could have demonstrated that more convincingly than Trump just did by launching his meme coin into which followers poured billions of assets overnight (literally). The evidence is overwhelming. Compare any of his rallies and the activity surrounding them to normal politics; note the statues, comics, billboards that people create; analyze the scale of the apophenic conspiracy theories his followers accept; calculate the income he absorbs from marketing scams and the inability of those who give him their money to perceive the most visible con in history--that meme coin has just made Trump one of the two dozen richest men in the world *over the weekend* (that figure's from Axios and I don't really have much faith in its specifics, but that's the scale).
As for the GOP voting in lockstep, political parties in Congress generally do that more or less, but the unity of the GOP in this regard did not exist in the McCarthy and Nixon eras. The watershed is the Gingrich Contract With America Congress of 1994. But that is not related to the cult nature of MAGA, and the room for dissent within the GOP has become dramatically narrower, especially since Trump's reemergence after 2022.
I hope you continue usefully annoying all of us on these strings with your contrarian responses that point away from hair-on-fire hot takes toward measured perspective. But the usefulness of your comments will be much greater if your urge to check distortions doesn't introduce its own brand of them.
What do you think about the divisions within MAGA? They had a hard time choosing a speaker of the house. I wonder what will happen as the various factions start to fight among themselves. I can imagine the Tech Bro MAGAs against the numerically superior working class MAGAs. The Evangelical MAGAs against the Barstool Republicans and Tech Bro MAGAs.
They all seem to like deportation but that's predicated on the deportation of "criminal gangs", not the hard-working meat packing workers who keep food prices down. Tariffs sound great until again, prices go up.
I love your description "the most visible con in history"
I think we can only hope that those divisions provide Democrats and their allies leverage points to turn the ship, Sharon. I don't think the House Speaker fights have provided those sorts of opportunities, at least so far, but some other splits may. We've seen that the Evangelical/Barstool division can be accommodated within MAGA. I don't know whether the Barstool/TechBros split can be: we'll see. One caution is that Democrats have demonstrated that they do not know how to influence MAGA base voters. I worry that liberal/progressive attempts to build on MAGA splits may be so clumsy that they help them heal rather than let MAGA self-destruct.
I do think that the negative consequences of MAGA policy may be a less error prone target. But I worry that combinations of PR misinformation and manipulated government reports may make it harder to show what the consequences are.
And thanks for the kind words!
👏👏👏👏👏Thank you, you have explained it perfectly. It is not a cliche if it ticks all the definitive boxes.
But, it’s not just Taylor Swift-like celebrity cult. There is real anger and grievance at the establishment they believe has caused their failure.
Both parties have kissed up to the money. Trump and the tech bros are exploiting the anger double down on the extraction and blaming the “establishment” for it.
The scapegoating will get worse from here because it will satisfy the anger and mask the kleptocratic takeover. We’re fucked unless the remaining establishment gets very serious and very stern.
Rule-of-law has been broken by Trump. Force will be necessary, now!
Taylor Swift does not lead a cult, JazzPaw. We need the word to have meaning. No one needs an intervention to remove them from the grip of Taylor Swift fan clubs.
I don't think it's helpful to say there is "real" anger at "the establishment" they believed caused "their failure." "The establishment" is a cult slogan, not a real thing (which is why Bernie doesn't speak this way), and many--most--people committed to MAGA (apart from some of the preexisting extremist groups that have latched onto it) are doing as well as anyone else.
You're right that we're seeing key actors among the super-wealthy join MAGA to mine it as they do any rent-seeking opportunity. I think you're a little out over your skis in calling for force. You do know who controls the military now, right, and the greater part of the civilian arsenal?
I think no one has an effective strategy to overcome the political momentum of the moment and it's not a good idea to man the barricades just to present a clear target for the firing squad. Contexts are going to change rapidly and unpredictably, starting this afternoon, and those who are not gripped in the cult need to learn from what we see, keep looking for emergent opportunities, and develop tools that we can deploy--bearing in mind that the tools we've been using to date (outrage, snark, argument, marches) have not worked.
About "using force". I wonder if one of the reasons why Biden did not push the limits (are there any now, BTW?) of legality to counter Trump was the quite real possibility of Trump inciting violence in response
.
It is debatable if this new version of "Better Red than dead" is justified. I lean that yes, this version is justified, but I did not think this through enough, yet.
The tools haven’t worked because Democrats are assuming that they can buy off MAGA voters with more offers of “help”. All they succeed in doing is angering their own natural constituents. They tax people in their own states and to send the money to red states. It’s a loser on two fronts.
Voters assume Democrats will save their programs from Trump, so they feel free to bite their so-called values and scoop up the money.
The proper strategy in a democracy is to connect up help with votes. No votes, no help. I just saw a couple of Trump voting educators who don’t want their education budget cut, but they voted Trump. They say that’s not what they want. Well, they seem fine with denying my state residents disaster aid. They need to get what they voted for and Democrats shouldn’t save them from it.
"The tools haven’t worked because Democrats are assuming that they can buy off MAGA voters with more offers of help."
This seems to me a one-dimensional reduction of a deeply entrenched and complex political and cultural context, and a misdiagnosis of where the core problems lie. It is based on a misunderstanding: Blue states do not send locally collected tax dollars to Red states. Blue states contribute high percentages of federally collected taxes because their economies produce more federally taxed wealth. That money is controlled and reallocated by the federal government, which will not in any way be controlled by Democrats.
"but the unity of the GOP in this regard did not exist in the McCarthy and Nixon eras. "
Better read the history.
Lewis, I don't know what history you're reading. I was too young to follow McCarthy with understanding, but I remember when the Republicans (including the party leader) abandoned him, and I tracked every step of the Watergate process. The degree of unity in the political GOP through Trump 45 could fall on that scale, and the initial reaction post-January 6 suggested that it would. But the resurrection of Trump has demonstrated that we are beyond those dynamics now and that we already were four years ago, if "the GOP" is understood to be MAGA.
" I remember when the Republicans (including the party leader) abandoned him..."
Only after incredible damage had been done to innocent people. Some committed suicide. And only after he was exposed on TV and by Murrow.
You don't know much about Watergate either. Only after the tapes were revealed did the GOP stopped defending Nixon.
Yes, my family knew some of those who committed suicide in the McCarthy era; I am not arguing that the complicit behavior of the GOP was benign. And you are not teaching me new information about Watergate--you're missing the fact that the existence of the tapes emerged from Butterfield's testimony relatively early and that individual GOP leaders began a gradual distancing process that cascaded a year later after the SCOTUS verdict.
Let me point out the way in which I think you are making an error. When you wrote, "Only after the tapes were revealed did the GOP stop defending Nixon," I think it should have occurred to you that the comparable situation should have been, "Only after he led an insurrection did the GOP stop defending Trump"--and although it started to for a brief moment, in the end it did not. The insurrection was a far, far greater demonstration of danger than Nixon's tapes and lies about them. If we were in a steady state where GOP behavior was a recurring constant Trump would have been convicted upon the second impeachment or consigned to permanent retirement by party rejection. Instead, Liz Cheney was.
It’s true that Republicans were in lockstep in the McCarthy Era. They were in a similar state of fear of being accused and blacklisted. They also saw that they could use it against Democrats and the New Deal.
Watergate was different. Nixon was abandoned relatively quickly. They put up a small fight for him, but they weren’t afraid of Nixon then the way they feared McCarthy, Cohn and Hoover.
The current situation is much more dangerous. This is really a kind of civil war and a retribution for grievances that go back to the Civil War.
The South and much of rural America has lost economically on a grand scale and lives on blue state welfare. The discrepancy keeps getting larger. They want to use the political system to restack the deck on their terms. They will try to extract our wealth and prosperity and disenfranchise us to hold onto that power.
We really need to kill this in the nursery!
Eisenhower was a reluctant candidate. He was an outlier. Without him, it’s just the party of the 1% since the TR. Both those presidents warned the public of the dangers, as Biden did in his farewell address. The mass followers are cult like, believing the lies, propaganda, and the myths.
100% a cult. Dr. Bandy Lee has some solid research on deprogramming. It starts with leadership, remove the cult leader from the population and the healing can begin. But I would go further. We need new laws regulating social media. Biden discussed this but Silicon Valley execs took that as an attack and switched parties en masse. Now with Elon, they see themselves as Viceroy's, Gods of Mass Communications of what is real and what is not.
The tech bros want to be feudal lords.
I’m not into calling them that. They are oligarchs pure and simple. “Be kind to the language” -On Tyranny. Using words like bros sounds less threatening, even endearing.
For now, we still have the right to vote, so I’m more concerned about the stupidity and gullibility of the average voter than I am the oligarchs. Once they have the power to rule by decree it will be a different story. Maybe I’ll be dead before that.
If MAGA is a cult, it's a damn big one. It's a majority of the country.
Hard to believe for some, but maybe because they don’t realize the effect of the new tooled propaganda of Facebook and Twitter, the speed and the scale for identification through profile analytics for manipulation that presents like persuasion, but as addictive as opioids and gambling.
Continued increases in the price of eggs (read cost of living) may cause a few of the voters to think for the first time…
No, they'll continue to blame Biden and the Democrats. And believe Trump when he says he will fix the problem in "two weeks."
Just. Fight. Them. Punishment: nonstop punishment.
Or step aside and let them destroy your posterity.
Continued increases in the cost of living plus growing shortages are the real reason voters went for Trump. The Democrats had nothing to offer except endless propaganda about how great the economy was doing, something which was obviously seen as a lie by the voters who were experiencing gradual and unending impoverishment.
Those voters ain't seen nothin' yet.
Thank you again, Dear Sir. Your thoughts really matter to me and to all people who love truth. Please continue to share them.
Thank you! This blog is helping me stay relatively sane right now.
I feel particularly abandoned by NPR— yes, are still usually adding “without evidence” when they repeat a lie (for now) but a couple of days ago I heard them use the phrase “the MAGA reform movement”— is that what we’re calling it now?!— and Steve Inskeep’s bright-eyed-boy-bubbling-with-mirth voice is making me want to throttle my smart speaker.
They’re straight up cowards.
Led by His Magasty HIMSELF!
Thank you for your work: I really fear for our country.
Thank you, Paul. One other thing that we seem to be plagued by is various commentators pumping up their image through Biden-blaming, etc. The problems go a lot deeper than any supposed stumbles and faults of the Dems. We've been on this path for decades. I hope we can pull out of it.
Well said! If we don't stand for something, we fall for anything.
The American Grifter is the central character of our national story. No grift without rubes.
Reading Twain's Gilded Age for the first time. The pathological striver is another one of these characters.
Huck Finn has extended laugh-riots about the travelin' grifters of the Wild Midwest. Twain loved that stuff.
Fuck yes, Krugman! Never, ever give in to lies and bullshit. 100%!
You have no idea (or maybe you do) how helpful it is to hear stuff like this. People: YOU ARE NOT CRAZY AND YOU ARE NOT ALONE!
I honestly don’t think we’re gonna win. So what? Seriously: so…what?
These people are monsters: Trumpers and those who have given up alike. I, for one, refuse to curl up into the fetal position, hoping fascists will leave me alone (they probably would, too), selling out any decent impulse, belief, or commitment I ever made—including my own kids (if I had any). If they’re going to destroy everything, I ain’t helping on any fucking level including silently in my own mind.
I’m no angel but I’m definitely better than that. And so are all of you!
Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Let’s roll, motherfuckers!
As a European with close ties to the US, I am saddened, appalled, and angry at those Americans who sold out their moral rectitude to a man who tried to foment a coup, a liar, a racist and rapist to boot. I hope those who still believe in democracy and equal rights for all quickly organise at the grassroots level to counter the abject policies of this felon and his coterie of incompetent ass-kissers, and defeat them in the upcoming 2026 elections. I personally will not set foot on American soil whilst this despicable human being is in the White House. Good luck to you all.
Another excellent post. The important thing to remember is that the incessant lying of powerful GOP elites and influencers are only made possible by FOX News, where 85% of Trump voters get their news. RW media is the tail that wags the dog.
Complaining about FOX at this late stage is just lazy thinking.
So you complain about someone complaining about Fox News, but yet you give no suggestion on how to counter a major propaganda machine.
Try thinking
"Try Thinking": the refuge of the troll.
If you have suggestions about Fox, which remains a problem and will do its best to derail anything Democrats do/say/try, let's hear them.
Or keep blaming those who are vexed by accusing them of not thinking.
You’re a yawn.
You’re a pawn.
"Lasy thinking?"
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Fox News is a problem to be solved, no matter how banal the problem seems to you.
Want to censor FOX? Then what makes you different from the GOP fascists?
Truth matteres!
And as Jon Meacham reminded us this morning quoting John Balushi: WE DIDN'T QUIT WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR.
and we can't quit now.
🤣
Various pundits and authors have been predicting this for decades, and I don't just mean Orwell. Neil Howe and the late William Strauss laid out a scenario similar to this one (a 9/11-type event precipitating the rise of a fascist state) in their volume "The Fourth Turning" (1997); Howe followed it up with "The Fourth Turning is Here" (2023). James Dale Davidson and the late Lord William Rees-Mogg published a book (also in 1997) called "The Sovereign Individual" describing a situation in which nation-states eventually collapse and are supplanted by essentially a feudal system revolving around oligarchs and those who serve them. It's happening now. Those of us who value freedom are in for the fight of our lives.
& Margaret Atwood
Reese-Mogg seems like an upper-class twit to this American; does anyone there actually listen to him?