On Tuesday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman – fresh off his newfound enthusiasm for curbing the national debt, which he downplayed or ignored for eight years under President Obama – took to Twitter to defend Meryl Streep for her ridiculous anti-Trump attack at the Golden Globes.
Here’s Krugman:
The whole Streep-Trump thing reminds me of a theme that has been running through my thoughts a lot lately — namely, the death of honor 1/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
What do I mean? Well, I probably wouldn’t have used that word if I hadn’t once had a conversation with a young former Marine 2/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
He had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and been badly wounded (fully recovered). You might think this would make him glad to be done 3/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
But he was finding it hard; “There’s no honor in civilian life,” he said. And I think I know what he meant. It’s not just lack of heroism 4/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
None of us can know how we’d behave facing what he faced. But even the ordinary rules of taking responsibility for your actions — 5/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
what my parents called “being a mensch” — seem to have vanished. Of course many people weren’t mensches even in the old days, but it was 6/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
at least an aspiration, and there was some backlash against anyone obvious lack of honor. But now we’re about to install a man who 7/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
is clearly incapable of taking responsibility for anything, of ever admitting to a mistake or a personal fault. He mocks the disabled 8/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
then cravenly denies having done so. Time was when such a man would have been utterly shunned. Now, it’s hard to avoid the sense that 9/ pic.twitter.com/YFirRBgYEz
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
his lack of honor and menschhood, his cowardly-bully persona, is part of what his supporters like — it makes him one of them 10/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
For all the economic and social analysis I like to engage in, at some level I really don’t get it. What happened to us? 11/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 10, 2017
Now, Trump is certainly no embodiment of class and dignity. But Krugman’s lament for political class falls on deaf ears after nearly two decades of Democrats ripping Republicans as advocates for slavery and impoverishment and literally throwing grandma off a cliff. Where was the civility then?
And Krugman himself has been a large part of the problem. On November 1, Krugman essentially compared Trump to Hitler. Krugman said that Mitt Romney wanted the poor to die, called him “completely amoral” and a “dangerous fool.” In the past month, he’s suggested that the FBI “appears to have become a highly partisan institution, with distinct alt-right sympathies.” What the actual hell?
Two weeks ago, Krugman implied that Trump might engage in some sort of false flag operation in order to dispel doubts about his legitimacy:
Thought: There was (rightly) a cloud of illegitimacy over Bush, dispelled (wrongly) by 9/11. Creates some interesting incentives for Trump
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 16, 2016
Yet, there’s good ol’ Krugman, talking about the wonders of civility and honor.
It’s this sort of blindness that drove Trump to new heights. If the left had acknowledged their role in destroying political rhetoric, the right might have had more tolerance for lectures about decency and civility in politics. But a party that humors Black Lives Matter, slanders Mitt Romney, and declares George W. Bush a war criminal can’t exactly take the lead on being a mentsch.
And certainly Krugman can’t.