I think I have to go line by line on Krugman's article, Fall of the American Empire...
The appeal to Trump versus immigrant children...
Americans adopted, adopted, for better or worse, I say for the worse worse big picture and in the long run, thousands and thousands of Chinese girl infants, whom their Chinese parents and government and the Chinese people would otherwise have exposed.
But enough is enough latinos, having them all just pour over the border helter skelter. I say they are using bringing kids to get the kind of stupid sympathy they have gotten through deeply cynical pundits like Krugman.
What if the Chinese now said, observing carefully how we are handling the latinos, "Why not just send large boatloads of excess Chinese girls to America. Say 5 or 10 million, just for a start! They can't even stop us, baby! We can heavily destabilize, and Sinify, those motherfuckers, at the same time!"
You want to try to adopt some of them, even though they have a latino parent or parents? Knock yourselves out trying, and then good luck, with our stupid adoption laws favoring the latino parents over you, baby....
How bout adopting a Muslim female infant?
Lots of luck, if you are foolish and disoriented enough to want to do something like that, say to convert it to Christianity to save its soul!
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/mostlymuslim/2017/06/first-muslim-adoption-agency/
But let's move on. This is a work in progress, call it an improvisation...
According to Krugman, All Trump's diverse irrational and seemingly improvisational foibles somehow end up amounting to a systematic rejection of longstanding American values.
Now, just stop, for a moment, and think about that assertion, true or false.
Krugman is claiming that Trump is a systematic unAmerican.
Why would a supposedly smart guy like Krugman blunder into acknowledging Trump as a systematic right wing radical revolutionary? Why?
To build a radical left opposition out of more or less nothing? What is the point of this?
Krugman doesn't believe in a radical left opposition either!
But let's move on. Krugman's American values: freedom, human rights, and the rule of law.
About this assertion, Krugman and I disagree about one fundamental thing: There was nothing distinctively American about these principles.
We disagree on two more critical points he has conveniently overlooked: American values were based originally on equality, and it was global equality, not just equality among Americans.
The other principle he has left out is that Americans believed in what they called the brotherhood of man, all men everywhere, not just Americans. He says they stood for something larger than themselves. In fact it was very much larger than themselves, not just a little larger.
These principles were the common currency of radical Whig and European jacobin, leftist, and liberal political thought, from the late 18th Century onward. They are a cornerstone of economic thought.
They were not distinctively American values because they explicitly rejected the nation state, and embraced the universal globalist brotherhood of man, the liberty and equality of all so called classes, rejection of any established religion whatsoever including Christianity, and opposition to any social or economic hierarchy based on ancien regime Old European Order principles.
He even calls them universal principles. When you hear the term universal principle, watch out. Why? Not that there might not be such things, but they are not these. Had they been, all men would have held them as such, from the beginning. The original position, we hold these truths to be self evident, Locke, Rawls, etc etc etc. The so called Enlightenment...
But let's move on. Krugman asserts that it was these principles that made us great. My own view is that these principles undermined any real longterm chance we ever might have had for greatness, not least because they repudiated, ab initio, the very concept of nation state or imperial greatness itself.
But let's move on, Gunnar Myrdal and American flavor of enlightenment marred by American black white racism, the only kind folks like Krugman want to talk about, other than anti semitism (which they don't think is racism), so they miss most of the meaning of the term.
Their concept of racism is the Whig interpretation of racism. As if racism were as it were black and white. As if there were whites (people of no color), and all others, ranged against them: people of color.
I am going to tell you something shocking to the Whig conscience: the very concept of race and racialism, of eugenics, of selection by race, of the natural and medical science of so called racial distinctions, many of which are quite real, these are things that grew out of the enlightenment itself.
Call it the darkie side of the enlightenment! The enlightenment in spades. The side whose name no Whig pundit or historian will whisper, baby.
Eugenics, human or animal, and genetic modification, animal and plant, comparative characteristics, are enlightenment progressive notions, in spades.
Greatness and goodness, power and world trade. Both were both. As Krugman phrases it, hand in hand. This is a highly simplified fairy tale. What does he mean? For the last 70 years the US used its greatness, its power to promote good world trade.
We were a different kind of great power, one that inspired trust. What we most inspired were greed, theft, and bitter rivalry. Krugman paints a rather different picture. Certainly we intended for the liberal international system to benefit us more than others. That has not been at all how it has worked out.
Krugman wants desperately to distance himself and his profession from what I have been hammering home here for years: economics as the doomsday machine for the West.
How does he try to do it here? He ascribes the LIEO to others, to non economists, to Cordell Hull, a state department head. He mentions only the Marshall Plan, NATO, and GATT. He leaves out the rest of the overtly economics driven aspects of the LIEO.
But he lets slip that Hull believed that prosperous trade among nations was essential to building an enduring peace.
That of course is rather an economists' notion, isn't it, though mouthed by Hull, apparently.
He had been coached, shall we say. Where did the notion come from? It came from economists, such as Cobden, peace through free trade.
Remember what I said recently about certain very clever pundits, like Brooks and Krugman, who would never ever come clean, get caught dead to rights, confess that they had been wrong once or all along? Niall Ferguson actually affirmed this point about Krugman in a televised interview I watched recently... See also recent post:
