[Peace-discuss] Krugman, "Virginia is for Haters"

[Carl G. Estabrook]

<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/opinion/columnists/virginia-is-for-haters.html>

[In ambiguous defense of the home of my youth.] 

I’ve never been a great fan of Krugman’s, but he used to be the source of reliably liberal (if boring) opinions.
But he’s been driven nuts in the last year, like some other establishment pundits (e.g., Robert Reich), by the defeat of the neoliberal champions (Obama/Clinton).

He asks a good question: "Why is America the only wealthy nation that doesn’t guarantee essential health care for all? ... Why do we have much higher poverty than our economic peers … We are uniquely unwilling to take care of our fellow citizens.” But his answer is propagandistic and wrong: “...behind that political difference lies one overwhelming fact: the legacy of slavery.”

No; it’s the legacy of capitalism. It comes from ‘slavery' only in the sense that the Civil War was the substitution of one method of exploiting labor (wage slavery) for another (chattel slavery). In the post-bellum US, the Southern states (including Virginia) were subjected to Northern capitalism as internal, largely agricultural, colonies - generally exempt from the subsequent social progress of the industrial north.

Krugman follows the mythology of the Clinton campaign - that that splendid example of neoliberalism was defeated by racism. It’s nonsense. She was defeated by war and immiseration: <http://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/clinton-because-communities/>.

In order to avoid serious criticism of the our capitalist order, liberals like Krugman are desperate to see Trump’s victory and subsequent politics as fundamentally a matter of race relations. It’s not: it’s a matter of class relations.

It’s a given among such people that "political difference” comes from "one overwhelming fact: the legacy of slavery” - our political and historical mythology agree. But serious US historians know better:

"Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the
United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the
chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy
rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco. One
historian has gone so far as to call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator’.7
He does not ask why Europeans seeking the ‘ultimate’ method of segregating
Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting
them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved
the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa.
No one dreams of analysing the struggle of the English against the
Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the
English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served
nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and
indigenous American Indians.8 Nor does anyone dream of analysing
serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem of race relations, even
though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural
superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American
racists.” 
—Barbara Jeanne Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the 
United States of America,” NLR I/181, May-June 1990

Krugman and his ilk are desperate to have us talk about race relations - in Virginia and elsewhere - and not look at class relations, after 40 years of increasing (and accelerating) inequality - the real reason Trump was elected, and the continuing chasm in US society - which the government, working for the 1%, covers over with war and rumors of war.

—CGE