Paul Krugman wrote what many have been thinking for some time. He pulls no punches as he undresses the Republican failed ideology. Krugman makes the case that Republicans are no different than the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s. They follow the same bigoted, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant modals.
Krugman hits the Republicans in his recent article “Know-Nothings for the 21st Century” hard as he articulates the unfortunate truth about why there are not many conservatives in Academia.
But today’s Republicans — for this isn’t just about Donald Trump, it’s about a whole party — aren’t just Know-Nothings, they’re also know-nothings. The range of issues on which conservatives insist that the facts have a well-known liberal bias just keeps widening.
One result of this embrace of ignorance is a remarkable estrangement between modern conservatives and highly educated Americans, especially but not only college faculty. The right insists that the scarcity of self-identified conservatives in the academy is evidence of discrimination against their views, of political correctness run wild.
Yet conservative professors are rare even in hard sciences like physics and biology, and it’s not difficult to see why. When the more or less official position of your party is that climate change is a hoax and evolution never happened, you won’t get much support from people who take evidence seriously.
But conservatives don’t see the rejection of their orthodoxies by people who know what they’re talking about as a sign that they might need to rethink. Instead, they’ve soured on scholarship and education in general. Remarkably, a clear majority of Republicans now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on America.
Krugman closes by explaining why Republicans are doing everything to ensure America isn’t great.
So will our modern know-nothings prevail? I have no idea. What’s clear, however, is that if they do, they won’t make America great again — they’ll kill the very things that made it great.
Americans have the opportunity to correct our country’s mistake. One hopes the reversal begins with the 2018 election. So far the generic poll is looking very good. But it is still early.