Amerika

How to sell snake oil: tell something that is part truth and mostly lie, that then gives the listener a simplistic answer.

Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash.

“Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.”

In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

NYT

Mr. Krugman thinks himself very slick and very educated. He brings peace and enlightenment and Progress to us all. Either that, or he’s a lying snake oil salesman.

No multicultural nation has lasted. Why is that? Because when internal infighting, a necessary result of pluralism (which includes multiculturalism), divides a nation’s wealth and energy, it no longer operates efficiently. It becomes a party for dividing up the spoils not making new wealth.

The Republicans and libertarians and anarchists are preaching a simple truth: whenever the going gets good, parasites of all kinds show up, and we want independence from them. A lack of independence from them is Soviet style socialism, and we know how well that worked.

I don’t agree with everything the Republicans do — I’m an older form of liberal, and an older form of conservative, combined. But I think in this case Mr. Hipster Krugman is showing us how easily people are misled into thinking The Educated Opinion, when in fact that opinion has nothing to do with reality.