- Paul Krugman, with graphs, wonders why the right rejects progress;
- Robert Reich on why we don’t trust Donald Trump — because he disregards the truth;
- Hemant Mehta on how the “nones” aren’t exactly “godless”;
- How Trump is a Russian asset; how MAGA is rehabilitating Hitler (!); Tom Nichols on how the world no longer takes Trump seriously; and a piece about RFK Jr.’s testimony today before the Senate;
- And a lovely cover of Simon And Garfunkel’s “America.”
Again today the usual batch of items, a sort of “Goings On Around MAGA USA.” Of them, here’s one that digs deepest into fundamental principles.
Paul Krugman, 3 Sep 2025: Why Does the Right Reject Progress?, subtitled “The perverse push to make America miserable again”
He begins by discussing vaccines, and the resistance to them.
What I realized after our conversation is that the problem they discuss, of reactionaries who both refuse to accept progress and try to block it, goes well beyond their specific fields, and even science in general. America is now ruled by people who hate progress of all kinds, economic and social as well as scientific. They refuse to acknowledge the progress we’ve made on multiple fronts and are doing their best to reverse it.
Why? I don’t have a full theory, only some scattered thoughts, which I’ll get to at the end. First, though, let me explain the progress I have in mind.
He discusses progress since the early 1990s, with several charts like the one shown here. That chart shows that things have gotten much better over the past thirty years.
Clearly, something went right — very, very right — in America’s big cities. The truth is that we don’t know exactly what went right, but the progress in public safety and, I would say, the general quality of urban life should be undeniable.
You may say, never mind the statistics, cities don’t feel safer. But they do. Try reading descriptions of urban life from the late 1980s or early 1990s — say, Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” published in 1987, a bit early for my comparison, but close enough. The whole plot centers on how dangerous New York was or was perceived to be. A colleague tells the novel’s protagonist, “If you want to live in New York, you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate” — that is, separate yourself from the “trenches of the urban wars.” Well, I’m writing this from an outdoor café in New York, watching the pedestrians go by, and I don’t see people trying desperately to insulate themselves from city life.
I read THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES and remember it primarily for depicting the Byzantine complications of New York City law.
Then we get to Krugman’s gist, as he concludes:
Why can’t the right accept progress when it happens, and try to build on it? Some of it is special-interest politics, notably fossil fuel interests trying to stop the rise of alternative energy. But a lot of it, I believe, is visceral. I’ve written before that MAGA types see renewable energy as woke and insufficiently masculine: real men burn stuff.
Relatedly, Trump and MAGA see everything in terms of punishment and fear. They can’t accept the idea that America prospered, not by using its power to dominate other nations, but by making and adhering to international agreements that kept world markets open. They can’t accept the idea that we can manage the economy by leaving monetary policy in the hands of technocrats who don’t take Trump’s orders. They can’t accept the idea that cities can be relatively safe, not because armed men are keeping everyone in line, but because most Americans — whatever their national origin or the color of their skin — are decent people more inclined to get along with their neighbors than to hate them.
America isn’t utopia, by a long shot. But we’ve made a lot of progress. Unfortunately, the people now in charge are determined to ruin as much as they can.
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Goings on.
AlterNet, Robert Reich, 3 Sep 2025: Opinion | Here’s why we really don’t trust Donald Trump
This is about Trump defunding museums and accusing them of being corrupt. Attacking universities. Defunding PBS, NPR, the Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe. It should all be pretty obvious. Reich concludes:
We don’t trust Trump because he has shown a brazen disregard for the truth.
But we shouldn’t trust any administration to decide what museums, universities, or the media tell us. It’s not a matter of right or left or “woke.” It’s about the political independence of truth-tellers.
A free people needs to know things that an administration may not want them to know and must be able to trust that the agents of truth — museums, universities, the media — are not compromised.
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The afternoon is late. Just headlines now.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 4 Sep 2025: America’s “Nones” aren’t as godless as you think, subtitled “A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that most U.S. Nones still cling to prayer, spirits, and the supernatural”
This is not a surprise. When the “nones” say that aren’t aligned with any particular religion, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still subject to the biases of human nature — the perception of supernatural agents, and so on.
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Slate, Fred Kaplan, 4 Sept 2025: A European Leader Called Trump a “Russian Asset.” He’s Right.
Hasn’t this been obvious to many of us for years and years?
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What? What?
The Atlantic, Yair Rosenberg, 3 Sept 2025: The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler, subtitled “A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II.”
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Tom Nichols.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 5 Sept 2025: The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously, subtitled “At parades and in the halls of global power, America has been sidelined.”
Again, this has been increasingly obvious. MAGA doesn’t care.
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Many stories the past couple days about RFK Jr. testifying before the Senate. Here’s one.
The Bulwark, Andrew Egger, 5 Sep 2025: RFK Jr. Goes Mask-Off
In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, he scoffed at the deep concerns of Republican senators, issuing a torrent of wild denunciations and ridiculous claims. The CDC, Kennedy said, had been perhaps the most corrupt agency in the entire federal government up until his arrival. It was impossible to know how many people had died during the COVID pandemic, “because there was so much data chaos coming out of the CDC.” He said he was personally ensuring that U.S. vaccine guidance would be “clear, evidence-based, and trustworthy for the first time in history.” Forget about making HHS great again—Kennedy insisted he was making it great for the first time ever.
I can’t begin to explore the depths of this depravity. As one senator asked him, paraphrasing since I don’t have a link: So everyone in the CDC is corrupt except for you? RFK Jr responded, basically, yes. He thinks US health is beholden to the “pharmaceutical industries” without explaining why that is bad or how else it should work. Surely not government sponsored pharmaceutical industries? That would be socialism.
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Courtesy the Paul Krugman post — he’s been posting “musical codas” to his posts as I have been. Here’s a lovely cover of a Simon and Garfunkel song from the 1960s. The great songs survive after 60 years.
