Kendall Stanley: What planet are we living on?

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked a fair question in a column recently — Why does the Right Hate America?

If you have the opportunity, read Damon Linker’s essay in the Times on the conservatives that view America as a catastrophe. But Krugman summed it up nicely by quoting from Linker’s piece.

“Is America beyond the political realm also in crisis? Are the very foundations of society eroding? Many people on the right apparently think so. A recent essay by Damon Linker in The Times profiled conservative intellectuals whose writing, he argued, helps explain where the MAGA right is coming from. What struck me, reading some of their work, is the dire portrait they paint of the state of our nation.

“For example, Patrick Deneen’s “Regime Change” describes America thus: “Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Cratering rates of childbirth, rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair,’ widespread addictions to pharmaceuticals and electronic distractions testify to the prevalence of a dull ennui and psychic despair.” And he attributes all of this to the malign effects of liberalism.

“When I read such things, I always wonder, do these people ever go outside and look around? Do they have any sense, from personal memory or reading, of what America was like 30 or 50 years ago?”

It’s a feeling that I’ve had for quite some time that MAGA Republicans, especially, live in a world that is unrecognizable to me. Of course, Donald Trump continues to promote the idea that America is in decline, its cities hell holes, dark forces ready to take over life in the U.S. as we know it, the “them” who are out to get you.

It’s a dystopian view that doesn’t match real life. Society has changed, obviously, but Krugman strikes the right note when he opines, “Social change is never an unalloyed good thing. I look at how America has changed over my adult lifetime and see some things I don’t like, especially the return to extreme economic inequality. But I also see a society that offers much more individual freedom, especially for women and minorities but for the rest of us too.

“Not everyone considers this a positive change. Indeed, some people on the right clearly hate the America we actually live in, a complex, diverse nation, as opposed to the simpler, purer nation of their imaginations.

“And if you would prefer a society with more traditional social relationships, more people practicing traditional forms of religion and so on, that’s your right. But don’t claim, falsely, that society is collapsing because it doesn’t match your preferences or blame liberalism for every social problem.”

Amen to that!

Linker tries to answer the question of why the catastrophists have gotten to this point.

“The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.

“None of which is meant to imply that liberalism is flawless or that it doesn’t deserve criticism. But the proper arena in which to take advantage of liberalism’s protean character — its historical flexibility in response to cultural, social and economic changes over time — remains ordinary democratic politics, in which clashing parties compete for support and accept the outcome of free and fair elections.

“Those on different sides of these conflicts need to be willing to accept the possibility of losing. That’s the democratic deal: No election is ever the final election.

“In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.

“There may be little the rest of us can do about it besides resisting the temptation to respond in kind. In that refusal, we give the lie to claims that the liberal center has tyrannical aims of its own — and demonstrate that the right’s intellectual catastrophists are really just anticipatory sore losers.”

And if you don’t believe that just play this scenario in your mind – the day after the election of 2024 and Donald Trump has just lost — again.

How do you think America will respond to that? Stay tuned.

Some thoughts on Halloween

There were a couple of things that came to mind as Halloween came and went.

First, when did trunk or treat become a thing? Organizations and some churches offered a chance for trick-or-treaters to get some treats from an untapped source of candy. But it was all new to me!

We had 185 trick-or-treaters, an average year for the East Lake Street neighborhood.

Second, say what you want about kids being tied to their phones, but here is a thought of what has happened since that has become the case.

Remember Devil’s Night? That was the night before Halloween when all the kiddos with nothing else to do would go around smashing pumpkins, soaping windows, TP-ing houses and basically being just a pain.

Reporting on the antics used to be a prime job of the cop reporter on Halloween — what happened last night?

Nowadays you can seriously say, nothing.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Kendall Stanley: What planet are we living on?