Paul Krugman: "The Minneapolis Crucible"

 

 

Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for January 15, entitled "The Minneapolis Crucible," subtitled "Will we forge democracy anew?"

His article starts out in pretty apocalyptic fashion:

When Trump won the 2024 election, I feared — rightly — that our democracy would soon be in great peril. Between gerrymandering, a corrupt Supreme Court, a compliant Republican Party, and a tsunami of political donations from the tech broligarchy, I thought American democracy might soon perish. 

He goes on to say that he expected events to unfold the way they did in Viktor Orban's Hungary -- "a slow, ineluctable descent as institutions and people resigned themselves to the seemingly inevitable"; suppression of independent media, co-opting of business by crony capitalism, rigging of electoral and judicial systems.

But what's happened in the U.S. is different. "Trump and his minions aren’t patient. They want retribution and subjugation. Threats and dominance displays are how they operate. They burn with racism, misogyny, and performative cruelty."

So now we have Minneapolis, America’s laboratory of democratic destruction, where ICE agents have gone full Sturmabteilung, terrorizing and even killing not only people with brown skin, but anyone who protests or gets in their way. 

This may be for the better, Krugman says. He feels the way people are mobilizing against the ICE thugs is extremely encouraging:

While our institutions and our elites have failed us, ordinary Americans are rising to the occasion. If Minneapolis is a laboratory of democratic destruction, it has also become a laboratory of civil resistance — organized civil resistance, of a kind we haven’t seen since the civil rights movement. When ICE is on the rampage, crowds of brave Americans, summoned by texts and whistles, quickly gather to stand against the masked men with guns. As the outrage grows, people of common decency — like the federal prosecutors in Minnesota who chose to resign rather than pervert justice by going after Renee Nicole Good’s wife — are taking a stand.

So what’s happening now is both horrifying and inspiring. How will it all end? I don’t know, but maybe, just maybe, our democracy isn’t being destroyed — it’s being forged anew in the hands of the American people.

I hope Krugman's optimism is warranted.