Tucker Carlson, the face of US’ ‘downer’ problem
What was most startling about Tucker Carlson’s recent trip to Russia wasn’t his obsequious interview with Vladimir Putin but his gushing days afterward over how wonderful a place Moscow is. But then again, he was a special guest of the country that invented Potemkin villages, and making sure he saw only good stuff must have been easy.
Imagine that you brought people to New York and made sure all they saw was the Upper East Side near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They’d come away with the impression that New York is a very clean city. The truth is that while parts of Moscow offer a small elite an opulent lifestyle, Russia as a whole is more than a bit ramshackle. For many Russians, life is poor, nasty, brutish and short: Life expectancy is substantially lower than in the United States, even though America’s life expectancy has fallen and lags behind that of other advanced countries.
Anyway, while praising Moscow, Carlson trashed U.S. cities, especially New York, where, he said, “you can’t use your subway” because “it’s too dangerous.” No doubt, there are some New Yorkers afraid to take the subway. Somehow, however, there were around 1.7 billion riders each year before the pandemic, and ridership, although still depressed by the rise of working from home, has been recovering rapidly. It’s possible, of course, that Carlson has never ridden the New York subway, or at least not since the days when New York had about six times as many homicides each year as it does now. He might be like Donald Trump, who probably hasn’t flown commercial in decades, declaring the other day that America’s airports make us look like a “third-world nation.”
Oh, and while New York’s subway stations don’t have chandeliers like Moscow’s, and sometimes do have rats, the system does its job and plays a hugely positive role in the life of the city. But right-wingers seem immovable in their conviction that New York is an urban hellscape — only 22% of Republicans consider it a safe place to live in or visit — despite the fact that it’s one of the safest cities in America.
This is part of a broader phenomenon. America has become a country in which, for many people, believing is seeing. Perceptions on issues from immigration to crime to the state of the economy are driven by political positions rather than the other way around.
During the Biden years, most measures of consumer sentiment have been much lower than you might have expected, given standard measures of the economy’s performance. This is still true, even though sentiment has risen substantially over the past few months. There’s practically a whole genre of analysis devoted to arguing that people are actually right to feel bad about the economy because of something or other.
So here’s a tip: Ignore anyone who says that Americans are down on the economy without noting that the reality is that Republicans are down on the economy. The widely cited Michigan survey of consumers provides data on sentiment broken down by partisan affiliation. Let me make the point again using slightly different data. Democrats appear to feel that the economy now is about as good as it was in late 2019, which is what you might expect, given that the unemployment rate is about the same and inflation only slightly higher. Republicans, however, have gone from euphoria under Trump to a very jaundiced view under President Joe Biden. What about independents? Never mind: For the most part, they lean toward one party or the other and behave like partisans.
Now, this comparison doesn’t prove that negative perceptions of the economy are all about partisanship — maybe things really are somewhat bad and Democratic partisanship is holding the numbers up — although Democrats don’t seem to experience the kind of mood swings when the White House changes hands that Republicans do. But at the very least, any discussion of economic sentiment that doesn’t take partisanship into account is missing a key part of the story.
As I wrote last week, the believingis-seeing nature of public opinion may mean that perceptions of the economy, and perhaps crime, won’t matter very much for this year’s election: Americans who believe that things are terrible probably wouldn’t have voted Democratic, no matter what. But to take a longer view: How are we going to function as a country when large numbers of people just see a different reality from the rest of us?
Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.
Alexei Navalny didn’t simply die. He wasn’t just murdered. He was tortured to death. It didn’t happen on the rack or mid-beating, but Vladimir Putin — who had tried to eliminate him earlier — slowly killed Navalny all the same.
Putin sent the Russian dissident and anti-corruption activist to the gulag with the aim of grinding him down with hard labor, isolation, hunger and shabby medical care until he died. Russia’s claims he died from “sudden death syndrome,” even if true, change nothing, given that being poisoned with a nerve agent and thrown into an Arctic labor camp presumably increases one’s chances of falling prey to SDS.
The question of whether the timing of Navalny’s death was deliberate matters geopolitically but not morally.
If Putin ordered Navalny’s death Friday, it might shed light on his state of mind. Was Putin sending a message in advance of next month’s “election” in Russia? Does that message reflect confidence or insecurity? Was Putin buoyed by his recent military successes in Ukraine or his related political victories in the U.S. Congress? Perhaps Navalny’s death was a thumb in the eye of the West timed to coincide with the Munich Security Conference?
Or, was he, as some Russian propogandists have speculated, somehow motivated by the insidiously insipid comments of Tucker Carlson? On his way back from interviewing Putin and celebrating Russia’s superiority to America in a series of embarrassing videos about Moscow supermarkets and subways, Carlson appeared at a forum in Dubai. Asked why he hadn’t questioned Putin about the then-stillalive Navalny, Carlson shrugged and said: “Every leader kills people. Some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people.” No doubt Putin agrees.
What Navalny’s death — and his life — say about Putin’s Russia should be obvious to anyone who doesn’t believe “leadership requires killing.” What it says about the moral rot on parts of the American right is another matter. For numerous right-wing and Republican figures, the real lesson of Navalny’s killing is that “Navalny equals Trump,” in the words of Trump-pardoned writer Dinesh D’Souza. “The plan of the Biden