Conspiracy theorists who rave about “made” elections and call climate change a “scam” are bad enough. Equally threatening are Republican “cowards” empowering the intimidating fringe, the economist Paul Krugman argued on Thursday in opinion for The New York Times.
“When we talk about the moral origins of the GOP, we tend to focus on obvious extremists such as conspiracy theorists who argue that climate change is a scam, and Jan. 6 a false flag operation,” Krugman wrote.
“But fools wouldn’t be so fully on the Republican agenda if it weren’t for the coward, Republicans who obviously know better, but reliably swallow their concerns and stick to the party line, ”he added. “And at this point, fools and cowards basically make up the entire elected wing of the party.”
Krugman stressed that this is not a new phenomenon, and wrote that when they both ran for the GOP presidential nomination, George HW Bush rejected Ronald Reagan’s claim that the tax cut would miraculously pay off as “voodoo economy. ” But Bush emerged when he became Reagan’s vice president – as did almost all Republicans at the time Donald Trump set up the same crackpot theory, Krugman noted.
The party’s increasingly unusual claims “begin with cynicism, spread with misinformation, and culminate in capitulation when Republicans who know the truth decide to consent to a lie,” the economist says.
Trump and his supporters have never had any evidence of this Joe BidenHis presidential victory was a fraud. Nevertheless, Krugman, The Wall Street Journal, complained printed Trump’s letter earlier this week in which he repeated his a multitude of obvious lies, which gave him another visible platform to market his lies.
Another Republican debate – equating vaccines and masks against COVID with tyranny – is particularly appalling because it costs lives, he said.
Krugman concluded, “If you want to understand how the GOP has become such a threat to everything America should stand for, cowards are at least as important a factor as fools.”
Read on Krugman’s full essay here.
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