SEBASTIAN MALLABY is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan. This is from an article assessing Krugman's new book, where everything, hyperbole and straw men, is taken seriously. It's like watching an elderly woman be polite to a vandal.
Krugman is basically right that “almost all prominent climate deniers are on the fossil-fuel take.” To state the matter plainly, conservatives lie about this issue because they are paid to lie. Or, in Krugman’s broad and snarling formulation: “Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.”
Go back to the example of climate change—a topic chosen, remember, because it fits relatively easily into Krugman’s Manichaean worldview. Contrary to Krugman’s assumption, not all Republicans have the same outlook. President Trump has mocked climate science, but Republican senators such as Lamar Alexander and Lisa Murkowski are at least willing to acknowledge global warming and to call for extra research into renewable energy sources. Senator Lindsey Graham, usually an abject Trump defender, recently urged the president “to look at the science, admit that climate change is real, and come up with solutions.” In April, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, another Trumpy Republican, tweeted, “I didn’t come to Congress to argue with a thermometer, and I think that more of my colleagues need to realize that the science of global warming is irrefutable.”
Yet what’s revealing about Graham’s and Gaetz’s statements is that the men’s consciences are still flickering. Writing the lawmakers off as “bad people” is too simple. Some part of them does respect science. And even if Krugman concludes that congressional Republicans are evil anyway, does he really want to imply the same about the broad mass of Republican voters? At one point Krugman writes that the Republican Party is “completely dominated by climate deniers.” But the Pew Research Center reports that 19 percent of conservative Republicans, and fully 43 percent of moderate and liberal Republicans, regard climate change as a major threat. They are not all the demons that Krugman imagines.
On other issues, Krugman’s caricature of Republicans is even further off the mark. He accuses the party, with reason, of catering to racial animosity—only to then go too far. It isn’t just some Republicans who take this position, in his telling. Rather, the vast majority do. He dismisses the idea that many Republicans might favor small government while rejecting racial intolerance, writing that this combination “is logically coherent, but doesn’t seem to have any supporters beyond a few dozen guys in bow ties.” Yet Pew tells a more mixed story: 53 percent of white Republicans say that America’s efforts to extend equal rights to black people have been about sufficient, and an additional 15 percent say that these efforts have not gone far enough. On taxes, Pew reports that 42 percent of Republicans say that some corporations don’t pay their fair share. And despite Krugman’s assertion that “Republicans almost universally advocate low taxes on the wealthy,” 37 percent of Republicans believe that some of the wealthy should pay more.
The modern G.O.P. doesn’t do policy analysis,” he pronounces. Yet the reality is subtler. Republicans are more open to reason than Krugman allows.
In the end, one’s judgment about Krugman the columnist depends on the test that he applies to economic models: Their assumptions are allowed to be reductive, but they must yield a persuasive story. If you accept that almost all conservatives are impervious to reason, you will celebrate Krugman’s writings for laying bare reality. But the evidence from the Pew surveys counsels more charity and caution. Most people cannot be pigeonholed as purely good or purely evil. Their motives are mixed, confused, and mutable. Sometimes conservatives will be venal, but other times they will respond to evidence; like Representative Gaetz, they do not want to argue with thermometers. Krugman’s “ridiculous simplicity” produces writing that is fluent, compelling, and yet profoundly wrong in its understanding of human nature. And the mistake is consequential. For the sake of our democracy, a supremely gifted commentator should at least try to unite citizens around common understandings. Merely demonizing adversaries is the sort of thing that Trump does.
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