- Paul Krugman on why MAGA supports Putin rather than Ukraine;
- An essay on why Americans increasingly distrust science;
- And in tribute the late Larry Kramer, the greatest track I heard when he introduced me to the rock band U2.
NY Times, Paul Krugman, 2 Oct 2023: Why MAGA Wants to Betray Ukraine
This is a good question I’ve had no understanding of. The US, over the past century, has gone through cycles of isolationism — let us not get involved with those wars over in Europe! — to wanting to be the policemen of the world, a presumption of a nation that feels itself superior to all others. Sure MAGA believes this superiority; so why do they not want to support Ukraine?
First, Krugman addresses the mis-impression that the US is spending vast amounts of money on Ukraine. Again and again, conservatives can’t seem to get their numbers right. (I have other examples that I probably won’t get around to posting.)
Right-wing hard-liners, both in Congress and outside, claim to be upset about the amount we’re spending supporting Ukraine. But if they really cared about the financial burden of aid, they’d make the minimal effort required to get the numbers right. No, aid to Ukraine isn’t undermining the future of Social Security or making it impossible to secure our border or consuming 40 percent of America’s G.D.P.
How much are we actually spending supporting Ukraine? In the 18 months after the Russian invasion, U.S. aid totaled $77 billion. That may sound like a lot. It is a lot compared with the tiny sums we usually allocate to foreign aid. But total federal outlays are currently running at more than $6 trillion a year, or more than $9 trillion every 18 months, so Ukraine aid accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending (and less than 0.3 percent of G.D.P.). The military portion of that spending is equal to less than 5 percent of America’s defense budget.
And then, as Krugman concludes:
Those are big payoffs for outlays that are a small fraction of what we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, and let’s not forget that Ukrainians are doing the fighting and dying. Why, then, do MAGA politicians want to cut Ukraine off?
The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.
So pay no attention to all those complaints about how much we’re spending in Ukraine. They aren’t justified by the actual cost of aid, and the people claiming to be worried about the cost don’t really care about the money. What they are, basically, is enemies of democracy, both abroad and at home.
\\\
NY Times, guest essay by M. Anthony Mills, 3 Oct 2023: Why So Many Americans Are Losing Trust in Science
About surveys over the years.
How did we get here? Many see Americans’ anti-vaccine and anti-mask attitudes as only the latest expression of a longstanding science denialism prevalent among Republicans. This anti-science mentality, the argument goes, stems from an anti-government ideology that took root in the Republican Party during the 1980s and has matured into antipathy toward not just government but science as well. Basically, the populist skepticism unleashed by Donald Trump is the logical successor to Ronald Reagan’s small-government conservatism.
Followed by many observations about issues of the past decade. Is there a core reason? Maybe this.
The English sociologist Anthony Giddens once observed that modern societies are uniquely dependent on trust, particularly trust in what he termed “abstract systems.” Members of smaller traditional societies are embedded in face-to-face relationships with neighbors, friends and family members. By contrast, we are dependent on a vast array of interconnected social institutions, especially expert institutions, which involve “faceless commitments” to those we do not (and usually cannot) know personally.
It is characteristic of these abstract systems that we cannot opt out, at least not entirely. Sustaining trust in them therefore becomes a basic requirement for the functioning of modern societies. Essential to this process is what Mr. Giddens calls “access points”: interactions between lay citizens and individual members (or representatives) of abstract systems; think of experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci or even your family physician.
This aligns with what I’ve read about how to challenge conspiracy theorists: you can’t do it through evidence; you can only challenge their beliefs by becoming a trustworthy source to urge them to reconsider why they fell into such beliefs in the first place. It’s not about evidence; it’s about trust.
The piece ends:
Restoring public trust — as Dr. Cohen of the C.D.C. aims to do — is therefore necessary for not only expert institutions but arguably also democratic society itself. But trust is a two-way street. Restoring it will require careful and perhaps even painful self-scrutiny on the part of those institutions to learn why they lost the confidence of so many Americans during the past four years.
\\\\
Larry Kramer introduced me to the rock band U2, back in the early 1980s, beginning with the album The Unforgettable Fire, with this unforgettable opening track, “A Sort of Homecoming.”
“And the Earth moves beneath your own dream landscape.”
“For tonight at last, I am coming home.”
