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I’m
a little behind the curve here, but it’s still Thanksgiving weekend,
and it occurred to me that I should make a list of things for which I am
personally thankful.
First
of all, I’m thankful to have had the privileges that went with being a
white male, growing up and building a career during an era — perhaps
temporary — in which open anti-Semitism had become socially
unacceptable. To my shame, until recently I didn’t fully appreciate just
how big those privileges were (and at a deep level I probably still
don’t). I knew that racism and sexism were real and continuing, but was
oblivious to just how vicious they were (and are).
I’m
thankful to have been born to a middle-class family in a wealthy
nation, during an era when the middle class still shared fully in the
nation’s wealth and social mobility was still high.
I’m
thankful to have witnessed a huge improvement in America’s environment.
This is a much bigger deal, and has made much more difference to the
quality of life, than most people realize. But I remember what the air in major U.S. cities
was like before environmental protection cleaned them up; the air in
New York is still far from perfect, but I’ve spent time in modern
Beijing and New Delhi, and believe me, it’s infinitely better than it
could have been.
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I’m
also thankful to have spent my adult life during an era of growing
social tolerance. As I said, there’s still a lot of racism and sexism
out there — far more than, in my obliviousness, I realized. But we’re
still much more open to diversity of all kinds than we were. Look at the
long-term polling on interracial marriage
— an issue on which I have a personal stake — and be astonished at how
much raw racism still flourished when, say, Ronald Reagan was elected
president. Look at the polling on gay marriage and you see a revolution
of rising tolerance just since the Bush years.
Or
if you prefer pop culture to polling statistics, think about it this
way: God used to look like Charlton Heston, but now He looks like Morgan
Freeman, and I think this matters.
As
someone with an academic turn of mind, I’m thankful to have built a
career in a society that valued intellectual pursuits. By the time I
entered the work force, the great plunge in working-class wages and
economic prospects was getting underway, but wages for the highly educated were still heading up.
And
as someone who specialized in a social science that’s supposed to be
relevant to policy, I’m thankful for the years during which it seemed as
if logic and evidence actually mattered, at least a bit, to people in
power.
O.K.,
I’m sure you can guess where I’m going with this. I’ve had much to be
thankful for — but every one of those good things is now very much under
assault.
It’s
true that we’re having a moment of awakening on sexual harassment, and
it’s possible that this will turn out to have been a turning point. But
with a self-admitted sexual predator in the White House, it’s hard to
feel confident.
Meanwhile,
everything this president and this Congress are doing on economic
policy seems designed, not just to widen the gap between the wealthy and
everyone else, but to lock in plutocrats’ advantages, making it easier
to ensure that their heirs remain on top and the rest stay down.
It’s
unclear whether the terrible tax bills being advanced by Trump and his
allies will go through Congress; but environmental policy is largely set
by administrative action, and this administration has been moving with
stunning speed to get poisons back into our air and water. Not to
mention the growing odds of climate catastrophe.
White supremacists are, of course, making a big comeback thanks to encouragement from the top. (They are, after all, “very fine people.”) So are anti-Semites, which is really no surprise to those who remember their history.
Even
as old prejudices return, we’ve clearly entered a new age of
politically potent anti-intellectualism. America built its world
pre-eminence largely on the strength of its educational system. But
according to Pew, 58 percent of Republicans now say that colleges and
universities have a negative effect on the country, versus only 36 percent who see a positive effect.
And
I don’t believe for a minute that this turn against education is a
reaction to political correctness. It’s about the nasty habit
scholarship has of telling you things you don’t want to hear, like the
fact that climate change is real.
Finally,
we’re now ruled by people who have no interest in letting hard thinking
get in the way of whatever policies they want to follow. When Congress
gets back from its break, Republicans will try to ram through major tax
legislation without a single hearing, without giving anyone time for a
careful assessment. The result, if they succeed, will be a law riddled
with loopholes and perverse incentives, doing nothing for growth but adding hugely to debt. But they don’t care.
In
other words, America has given me a lot to be thankful for. But it
looks, more and more, as if that was a different country from the one we
live in now.
Read my blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and follow me on Twitter (@PaulKrugman) and Facebook.
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Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: On Feeling Thankful but Fearful. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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