http://www.alternet.org/workplace/64931Paul Krugman: Why Do Right-Wingers Mock Attempts to Care for Other People?By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash. Posted October 12, 2007.
Paul Krugman talks about his new book, Conscience of a Liberal, and the almost lethal refusal among some conservatives to consider the problems of suffering of others. "... (Y)ou can't have gross economic inequality and still have a functional democracy. You can't really have a society with broad equality without having a political democracy. So it is all about having basically a shared society. -- Paul Krugman, Economist, Columnist, Author of The Conscience of a Liberal
In a sea of media transcribers and mediocrity, Paul Krugman has held a longstanding spot as one of the most popular liberal columnists in the media. But actually, although a New York Times columnist, Krugman is not a journalist. In fact, when I spoke with him for this interview, he was preparing a lecture for one of his economics classes at Princeton.
Maybe, that's one of the reasons that he pens such "spot on" commentaries. He's not a professional pundit. He doesn't live in NYC or D.C. He's a professor first. Yet, Krugman is skillful at making his case in cogent columns that are both compelling and accessible.
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Karlin: The right wing has again fostered this connotation among its followers, but it also seeps into the mainstream media, that somehow the "L word" is something that's un-American. Yet, isn't it a basic American value to have a solid middle class where people who work hard can keep up with the rate of inflation, and if there's increased productivity, their wages will increase, not stagnate or fall? You promote a diverse economy that gives people their due and is not tilted as far as it is toward the very wealthy. How does the right-wing get away with making it seem that if you call yourself a liberal, you're somehow un-American? Those seem to me like the American values that we were found on.
Krugman: Yes. There is a funny thing. If you look at the polls that ask if you consider yourself a liberal, it's a relatively small minority. If you ask people do you think that the government should guarantee health insurance to every American, a huge majority says yes. So people think they're not liberals, but they're in favor of quintessentially liberal policies.
A lot of the usual things people say that are identified with cultural liberalism they're identified with. Cultural liberalism, which is supposed to be something we as Americans don't like -- well, that's less and less true. It got identified with being soft on crime and so on. But very, very largely, if you ask how did liberal get to be a bad word, it's the theme that runs through a lot of the book, which is race. Liberal became somebody who was in favor of being permissive towards bad behavior by you-know-who. And that's been a problem. But I think the answer is not to run away from liberal and say, oh, I'm not one of those people. This is being used to distract and exploit working families all across the country of whatever color. So it's both politically impractical and just wrong to run away and say, oh, I'm not one of those liberals, because that's not the problem.
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Karlin: In The Conscience of a Liberal, you give a wonderfully broad historical context on what that means. But is part of what the right wing has such contempt for in so-called liberals like ourselves is that we do have a conscience? In other words, they see something wrong with not being out for your own self-interest. There's a certain contempt, as though this was a football game. Why would you care if a guy is injured on the other team, you know?
Krugman: Yes, that's actually something I touch on in the book, and I've been thinking about doing a column to enlarge on it for The New York Times. In some sense, the meanness is the message. On the right, there's an almost lethal refusal to consider the problems of suffering of others. And it goes right back through time. Ronald Reagan has this line, in the famous speech in 1964 that launched his political career, in which he said, "They told us that 17 million people in America go to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet." The problem of malnutrition in America was and is a serious problem. But to Reagan, from the beginning, it was all a big joke. And Bush remarked, "Well, I mean, everybody's got access to health care in America. You just go to an emergency room." It's just this complete lack of empathy for people who aren't as lucky as yourself.
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