Climate Change, Culture, the Economy, and Real Americans

• Paul Krugman on climate change as a culture war issue;
• Florida censors come after Shakespeare, and educators flee the state;
• Robert Reich is confidant that Biden will get credit for an economy “that’s better off than it’s been in decades”;
• Conservatives responses to the loss of the US women’s soccer team, because they were too “woke” (thus not real Americans);
• Brian Eno’s “Another Day on Earth.”

Paul Krugman on climate change as culture war. Is this really new? Haven’t conservatives always had a knee-jerk rejection of science and expertise?

Paul Krugman, NY Times, 7 Aug 2023: Climate Is Now a Culture War Issue

The essay begins with a nice summary here of the story so far.

Understanding climate denial used to seem easy: It was all about greed. Delve into the background of a researcher challenging the scientific consensus, a think tank trying to block climate action or a politician pronouncing climate change a hoax and you would almost always find major financial backing from the fossil fuel industry.

Those were simpler, more innocent times, and I miss them.

True, greed is still a major factor in anti-environmentalism. But climate denial has also become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support.

Krugman then reviews the current situation: “Worldwide, July was the hottest month on record.”

At the same time, technological progress in renewable energy has made it possible to envisage major reductions in emissions at little or no cost in terms of economic growth and living standards.

But now there’s Project 2025, as I’ve mentioned a couple times, most recently in this post last Saturday.

What’s behind this destructive effort? Well, Project 2025 appears to have been largely devised by the usual suspects — fossil-fueled think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute that have been crusading against climate science and climate action for many years.

I have to conclude they’re simply selfish and short-sighted, as I speculated at the end of this post on 31 July.

Krugman notes that attitudes toward science were roughly similar within the two parties in the mid-2000s, but since then “Republican trust has plunged as Democratic trust has risen; there’s now a 30-point gap between the parties.” In the Covid crisis, “Republicans disproportionately refused to get their shots and suffered substantially higher rates of excess deaths — deaths over and above those you would normally have expected — than Democrats.”

(Aside: Should this trend continue, it won’t take very many generations before the science skeptics simply die off. That’s natural selection. That’s how it works.)

Krugman agrees with the recent David Brooks piece on his point that “many Republicans dispute the reality of climate change and push for fossil fuels as a way to ‘offend the elites.'” Krugman concludes,

The fact that the climate war is now part of the culture war worries me, a lot. Special interests can do a great deal of damage, but they can be bought off or counterbalanced with other special interests. Indeed, an important part of President Biden’s climate strategy is the idea that renewable energy investments, which have been soaring since his legislation passed, will give many businesses and communities a stake in continuing the green transition.

But such rational if self-interested considerations won’t do much to persuade people who believe that green energy is a conspiracy against the American way of life. So the culture war has become a major problem for climate action — a problem we really, really don’t need right now.

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Didn’t I predict this? Next, they’ll come for Shakespeare?

Salon, 8 Aug 2023: “There’s some raunchiness”: Florida crackdown on books comes for Shakespeare, subtitled “‘The rest of the nation — no, the world, is laughing us,’ teacher says”

LGBTQNation, 8 Aug 2023: School district censors Shakespeare to comply with Don’t Say Gay law, subtitled “Florida bans teaching about sexuality and gender in all grade levels, so now high school students can’t read entire plays by Shakespeare.”

Also, of course, there’s much raunchiness and despicable behavior in the Bible.

Related:

Boing Boing, Ruben Bolling, 8 Aug 2023: DeSantis’s laws and policies have Florida educators fleeing the state and the profession

Not all of America, but some states in America, are becoming jokes to the world.

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When one political party is unhinged from reality, you can’t expect them to change their minds, about anything. Their minds are already made up. They don’t do evidence. They believe what their tribe believes.

Robert Reich, 8 Aug 2023: Why Biden isn’t getting more credit for everything that’s going right, subtitled “He will. Just be patient.”

It seems like every day, a reporter calls, asking me why Biden isn’t getting more credit for an America that’s better off than it’s been in decades.

After all, inflation has plunged from 9 percent last year to 3 percent now. Real wages are up. Consumer confidence is up. Jobs continue to surge. Unemployment is near a record low. Gas prices are down. Manufacturing is making a comeback.

Other aspects of American life have taken a turn for the better, too. Violent crime is down. Covid deaths are down. Illegal immigration has fallen. Roads and bridges are finally getting repaired.

Yet just 39 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s performance, according to the latest survey by The New York Times and Siena College.

Reich assures us everything will be OK. (I’m not so sure.)

Biden also has to contend with a Republican Party that’s far more vicious and unprincipled than it’s been in modern memory — a party that has no qualms about spewing endless lies about Biden and America. A third of American voters still believe Trump won the 2020 election.

Hardcore MAGA voters will never come around. But the vast majority of our fellow countrymen aren’t in the MAGA cult. They will.

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But at this point I’m not concerned about polls showing Biden isn’t getting credit for all the good news.

Over the next year or so, most Americans will see and experience the positive changes that Biden has wrought. That should help a great deal.

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A follow-up on an earlier story:

MSNBC, Paul Waldman, 8 Aug 2023: ‘Slitting throats’: DeSantis copies Trump’s fantasies of violence, subtitled “The audience for conservative media imbibes the rhetoric of violence every day.”

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And the latest conservative outrage. They are so easily triggered. They are *happy* that the US women’s soccer team lost!

Vox, 7 Aug 2023: The right-wing backlash against the US women’s national soccer team, explained, subtitled “The real reason why the US women’s national soccer team lost.”

In the wake of their defeat, USWNT has become subject to the claim that the US women lost because they were too woke and too progressive.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

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Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 8 Aug 2023: Evangelist Franklin Graham is glad the U.S. women’s soccer team lost the World Cup, subtitled “The Christian Nationalist is no patriot”

If you need more proof that the Christian Right worships Donald Trump instead of Jesus, look no further than evangelist Franklin Graham, who echoed the former president in celebrating the U.S. women’s national soccer team’s loss to Sweden in a World Cup knockout match.

They deserved to fail, Graham argued, because the team was just too woke by peacefully protesting the National Anthem and supporting civil rights.

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And if the team hadn’t lost by a millimeter (as I understand the story), what would they have said then?

It’s hard to know what to say about these people. They think America is the greatest nation in the world, but dislike so much of it, and so many of its people. Real Americans, they assume, are only others like themselves. Their tribe. Not actual America.

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Title track from one of my favorite albums of all time, Brian Eno’s “Another Day On Earth.”