Paul Krugman, in one column, highlights the Democratic Party’s failure with rural voters

There is a great line from the Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall, where Alvie Singer (Allen) says, “It’s one thing about intellectuals. They prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what’s going on.”

No personifies that more than the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. It is fair to say he is a terrific economist by all measures (Nobel Prize winner). Still, it is also fair to say that he is a clueless partisan when writing about politics. It’s as if the portion of his brain that can explain in layperson’s terms the formula for quantitive easing switches off, and the Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez portion takes over — the one that sounds somewhat intelligent, but when you look past the veneer, is mind-bogglingly daft.

In Krugman’s latest column, entitled, ‘Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?’ (pleasant start), he haughtily takes aim at research by political scientist Katherine Cramer, who did a study about rural resentment and the perceptions that drive it.

Without a hint of self-awareness, Krugman writes, “As it happens, all three perceptions are largely wrong.”

It is almost as if he doesn’t understand what perception means.

Still, his attempt to reveal the “facts” does more to undermine his rejoinder than it does to help it. In the first “wrong” perception — feeling ignored by policymakers — Krugman points to farm subsidies and rural America subsidy programs, one of which dates back to 1936. He’s serious even though it takes zero effort to think, “Is he serious?”

First, farm subsidies primarily benefit large, corporate “farms” not type one would envision in Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic. Second, the programs Krugman points to might have had a positive impact for rural residents… 60-80 years ago. Imagine trying to explain to someone in their 30s or 40s in rural Ohio or West Virginia why they should count their blessings about the Rural Utilities Service.

Krugman hilariously pushes back on the lack of resources perception, by pointing to the “major federal programs” of Social Security and Medicare and how rural areas disproportionately benefit from them since “such areas have a disproportionate number of seniors…” So? Social Security and Medicare are entitlements — offered to all American individuals, not something that benefits a particular geographic demographic. And when has Krugman ever identified those entitlements as “federal programs?”

Finally, Krugman points the fact that people in rural areas are more likely to receive government largesse such as Medicaid and other welfare programs. Ironically, what Krugman managed to do here is push back on the widely held misperception (typically held by Democrats and the left) that poverty is something that only afflicts racial minorities in urban areas (not ethnic minorities because another misperception is that poor Asians do not exist).

The Democratic Party’s hyper-focus on identity politics and recent embrace of silly concepts such as intersectionality, anti-racism (where there is no neutrality), and equity, have disengaged themselves from a populace that offered them more electoral support. Democrats have primarily become the party of the upper-crust echelon personified by those who look down upon the “uneducated” (i.e., stupid) in flyover country as a bunch of rubes whose less-than-good situation is entirely of their making.

Krugman complains that Chuck Schumer couldn’t get away with making jokes about the hinterlands the way JD Vance does about New York City. But the politicians don’t have to do it because the press and mainstream pop culture figures are there to do it for them.

The first paragraph of Krugman’s column personifies it:

Rural resentment has become a central fact of American politics — in particular, a pillar of support for the rise of right-wing extremism. As the Republican Party has moved ever further into MAGAland, it has lost votes among educated suburban voters; but this has been offset by a drastic rightward shift in rural areas, which in some places has gone so far that the Democrats who remain face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.

“Right-wing extremism,” “MAGAland,” “educate suburban voters” (see what I mean about how they substitute educate and its forms as a subtle replacement for stupid or dumb?) and the classic, “It’s so skeery around here that I won’t tell people I am a Democrat” trope. You’ll find similar language at the Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, MSNBC, CNN, as well as The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live, the list goes on. Why do something yourself, when you can have people do it for you?

Krugman finally acknowledges that part of why people in rural America feel left behind by the government is because of the economic conditions that have plagued these areas for the last 25-30 years:

The economic forces that have been hollowing out rural America are deep and not easily countered.

Of course, that is the damned point. Losing manufacturing facilities, watching as politicians denigrate the industries that have provided jobs for generations (coal, oil and gas, etc.) and promising to put them out of business, as well as the plague of opioid addiction have created a mass of people who thought, “Does the Democratic Party care about us anymore?”

Granted, the notion that a reality show huckster like Donald Trump, implementing counter-productive policies such as tariffs and other trade restrictions that only make the situation worse, is the answer, proved a massive mistake. But when the other side spends more time talking about equity, diversity and inclusion, the so-called plight of the transgender community, calling Republicans a “threat to democracy,” and cutting more checks as opposed to serious policy changes, it’s easy to see why people reject it and only dig in further to their position.

If Krugman and his ilk (the Democratic Party) think dismissing the concerns of rural voters by telling to count their blessings because of government spending and calling them a bunch of moochers who don’t contribute in kind, the rural “rage” as he mockingly puts it, will only continue. And that will cause more people to get elected who aren’t serious about doing the work to fix it, but to build platforms for themselves by echoing that “rage.” But as long as Democrats can rely on an urban area population that votes for them in large numbers, why should they bother to concern themselves with the “basket of deplorables?”