Reality bites

What I appreciate about Paul Krugman is that the Nobel Prize winner in economics is willing to go out ahead of the consensus of the wise and important. Today's contribution is a humdinger:

Reality is a Communist Plot: Of MAGA and the totalitarian mindset 

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election. ...

Such is the wisdom of Trump, MAGA, and dimwits like Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley. If you want to control people, keep 'em stupid and uninformed as all good authoritarians have attempted to do.

... What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

... I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

... Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.  ... If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

... [Republican pols] behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping. ...

Read it all.  

What I would add that Krugman does not: he instinctively believes that knowing the truth of difficult things -- like why masses of New Yorkers were dying of an unknown illness in spring of 2020 -- requires intellectual work. He also believes that there are people who are equipped by training to figure mysteries out. And that those people work for all of us.

MAGA is for people who want or maybe need answers for life's mysteries without work. For many, perhaps there is no space in their lives for the intellectual work of discerning what's true. But for some, there's a comfortable indolence which outsources judgment to glitzy influencers and charlatans like the Orange Toddler.

By the way, this isn't about educational attainment. Lots of people without fancy degrees can see what is in front of their faces. They looked at things.

Historically, the mass cure for this debilitated condition occurs when unanticipated realities intrude on daily life -- kind of like when you bark your shins on a low end table you didn't notice. Oops, there's a hazard. Maybe I ought to move it out of here? Maybe I should figure out why ICE wants to kidnap my nanny? Maybe bombing Iran without a plan might lead to more war?

If representative democracy withstands the Trump onslaught, maybe we can bring some of these willing know-nothings back to consensus reality. On to November ...