Courtesy of Pam Martens
New York Times Columnist, Paul Krugman
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is raising a question in the pages of the New York Times this morning that has been on the minds of Europeans since Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election on November 8: has America fallen?
Krugman’s column came two days after we had heard the following story from a friend: a few days after the November 8 election, a young man in his twenties got into a cab in New York City heading for John F. Kennedy International Airport. The cabbie asks why the young man is leaving. The student explains that he has been attending a university in New York City but his parents in Germany had called and ordered him to come home immediately. Their exact statement to him was: “leave immediately, America has fallen.”
What could cause this kind of reaction from parents in Germany? Prior to Trump’s election win, he had promised the following: to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico; to launch mass deportations of millions of illegal immigrants; to put Muslims living in America on a registry list and ban other Muslims from entry into the country. Just a month before the election, Trump had to admit and apologize for a video showing he had said the following about his treatment of women: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything — grab them by the p—-.”
To many Europeans, it felt like Americans had just elected a xenophobic man on a power trip with no respect for human rights to be Commander-in-Chief of a powerful military. It brought an instant, anxiety-producing reminder of how fascism became unbridled in Europe in the leadup to World War II.
In Krugman’s column this morning, titled “How Republics End,” he writes as follows:
“Many people are reacting to the rise of Trumpism and nativist movements in Europe by reading history — specifically, the history of the 1930s. And they are right to do so. It takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare.
“But the ’30s isn’t the only era with lessons to teach us. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the ancient world. Initially, I have to admit, I was doing it for entertainment and as a refuge from news that gets worse with each passing day. But I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.”
