Paul Krugman's Attack on Sanders and on His Supporters As Being Naive

A Response to Paul Krugman’s Opinion on Sanders’ Supporters

Paul Krugman, a well respected Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times recently wrote in his Opinion column dated January 22, 2016, How Change Happens, in which the venerable Mr. Krugman tries to teach us that change is incremental in politics.  Four days later, John Avignone, writing for Salon, details the response of Jedediah Purdy, a professor at Duke Law School, to Krugman’s column.  Avignone uses Purdy’s opinions to not only actually attack Sanders’ position, but also Sanders’ followers:

“In any democratic system of government, progress is incremental. Only one time in our history as a nation have we seen such sweeping ideological change at a fundamental level happen in a brief span of time, and that change came at the price of five years of bloody civil war and some 500,000 deaths.”

What this says is that sweeping change can come about but only after great sacrifice. And Avignone and Krugman insist that incremental change is our current lot based our country’s experience since the Civil War and on other democracies’ experiences. That’s like saying our democratic politics is like playing football where the President is the quarterback and is only allowed to mount an offensive with no receivers and not running backs.  Bernie Sanders is bringing more than linebackers to the game, he’s also bringing more and better educated young people who are not afraid to jump into activism.  He’s bringing Ideas. Ideas that more people on both sides of our political divide can get behind. The great sacrifice has already been started - witness the Occupy movements. Any intelligent person would see that our democracy is already in the hands of lobbyists, politicians who take lucrative positions in corporate America to craft laws friendly to their employers, corporations hiring the spouses of Supreme Court Justices, and, on and on and on.  All this has been bubbling up for years in the psyche of younger Americans and, in the concerns and thoughts of friends, neighbors, and, my family. I know from my own personal experience that since 1990 I have been more cognizant of the rising tide of political shenanigans. After a decade of reading, talking, and, thinking about all this I started becoming more of an activist.

Activist organizations, like GreenPeace and The American Civil Liberties Union are making a difference because of an idea.  They and others have effected change through actively doing something.  This same level of doing something in our country will be the wide receivers, tight ends, and, running backs that Bernie’s leadership will bring against the implacable opposition precisely because of his Ideas.

Other readings on this subject:

• Salon’s Conor Lynch January 28 piece in Salon - What Paul Krugman Gets Wrong About Bernie Sanders is a good counterpoint.
• A Glenn Greenwald article dated January 21 in The Intercept in which Greenwald gives an ever increasing set of backlash from politicians and journalist against Bernie - The Seven Stages of Establishment Backlash: Corbyn/Sanders Edition.  

“...there is a direct correlation between the strength of Sanders and the intensity of the bitter and ugly attacks unleashed at him by the D.C. and Democratic political and media establishment.”

Right now I’d say that Bernie is being subjected to the late Stage Five / early Stage Six backlash. (You’ll have to scroll down somewhat to read this.)  You can get the entire article on Common Dreams here without scrolling.

  

A Comment On The Bullsh*t Coming Out Of Politics

Could this be an accurate state of affairs in our political methodogy: the Author published this in 1994. And, Okay this is not *exactly* a political post but more of a viewpoint on the unending bullsh*t that is politics.

"When is Learning Not Indoctrination?
Indoctrination may be called ‘the instilling of attitudes without the saving grace of digesting them’. Indoctrination is not what some people claim, that is to say the more rapid accomplishment of something which ordinarily takes a culture many years to achieve.
What makes a ‘digested’ system more acceptable than an imposed one?
Two things. First, a greater time-scale and conditions of freedom give an opportunity for rejection. Second, where there is a time-scale measured in years – and where there is opportunity for dissent and discussion, there is room for modification.
Inducing people to believe things – and then, usually, turning around and saying that this belief, because it is belief, is sacred or even inevitable – is the hallmark of indoctrination.
Putting ideas forward, and giving people information which enables them to test these (including testing them against other ideas) spells freedom and education, both of which are distorted or abolished by indoctrinators.
Two things prevent the foregoing being widely known at the present time:-
1. The discovery, certainly in the ‘West’ and the modern world, is recent. It will take time to percolate.
2. When the facts are presented, they are an embarrassment to those who, examining their own attitudes, realise that, in certain areas, they are themselves victims of indoctrination.
The Commanding Self
Read the book, online, for free:
http://idriesshahfoundation.org/books/the-commanding-self/

Clearly, with all the bullsh*t coming out of both sides of our poitical parties, we see that most of it is an attempt to indoctrinate with it.  Our immediate emotional response is the target of this attempt, not our reasoning mind, it's our fears that are being played with, our underlying unreasoning anger at the injustices levied against us, and, a teaching that it is okay to hate.
But the effort to stop, think, reason, look for the falsity of that indoctrination has been washed out of the minds and hearts of many, many of us.  Can it be that only those fresh out of college/university still retain some of this ability and somehow learned in spite of the 'party, party' atmosphere that seems to have choked our institutions of higher learning?  Witness the various 'Occupy' movements that sprang up from our educated youth - they started shouting back with digested thought and pushed back with real activity.  This is not the sheepishness of those who were satisfied with being indoctrinated into a corporate/religious/two party political belief system, no this seems to me to be an accelerated system of questioning and rejecting commercialed beliefs.  It's an ability to recognize bullshit when you see it and shouting it out.

The Boston Globe Attack On Bernie Sanders

Most politicians are lawyers by trade and lawyers have made politics confounding, just like ancient priesthoods kept the ability to read and write only to themselves - to keep their power from the rest of the people.
But Bernie Sanders has never been a lawyer. From his bio page on Biography.com : " Bernie Sanders became involved in the civil rights movement during his time at university and served as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After finishing college in 1964, Sanders lived on a kibbutz in Israel before settling in Vermont. He worked a number of jobs, including filmmaker and freelance writer, while his interest in politics grew."
I think that a more diverse cross-section of professions including housewives and househusbands, with at least a BA or BS degree, should be our Congressional Representatives; this would naturally lead to more diverse solutions to problems than what we currently get from Washington.
I also think that Bernie likes to 'unconfound' our American Government as much as possible by speaking as plainly as possible.

A Brief Statement of my Current Philosophical Position

At some point lately I read a post by a facebook friend, Michael Rectenwald, an author and professor at NYU, which was a short video of a short talk given by Michio Kaku, an American futurist, theoretical physicist, and popularizer of science. The gist of the video was that the human mind controls the physical reality. This 'new discovery' has actually been around during the great esoteric period from the mid-to-late-1850s to approximately the mid-1900s.

There have been many investigators and investigations, most lasting lifetimes, during that period, starting primarily with Helena Blavatsky and her great work 'The Secret Doctrine - the Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (1888).' This work was based on her reading and understanding of the Stanzas of Dzyan, a very ancient group of stanzas based on what is thought to be deep meditations. She had many detractors but also very many admirers of her work which included physicists like Einstein, mathematicians, philosophers, journalists, etc...

Other investigators into human consciousness and/or physics include:

• the Russians G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky (it was in Ouspensky, that I was introduced for the first time to the idea that each dimension was perpendicular to each element of all preceding dimensions. So I then 'grokked' time as the fourth dimension and then saw that the 5th dimension, travelling through time, at least mentally, was a possibility - think deja vu as an example. So all the recent theories, by recent I mean starting in the early 20th century (physicists and mathematicians even pre-dating Einstein and Einstein himself) have been working their way to the present state of physics, which, to me, is a more mathematical way of expressing ideas first postulated in a set of ancient stanzas and clarified for western minds by Blavatsky.
• Rodney Collin, student of both the Russians and writer of such books as, for example, 'The Theory Of Celestial Influence - Man, The Universe, and Cosmic Mystery.’
• Alice Bailey, student of Blavatsky and author of a series of books based on her relationship with one of the planetary masters - consciousnesses that have broken the cycle reincarnation that, according to her and others, are still among us, attempting to bring out the best in humanity (to put is simply.)
• Idries Shah, a Sufi and author that came to the west to promulgate his understanding of the truth that starts and ends with the human and our efforts toward right thinking/actions/understandings in order to perfect ourselves. His Sufism, while based on early esoteric islamic teachings, also has close echoes to the teachings Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha.

My studies in the late 60s and early 70s and as recently as the last few decades had led me to understand that there is no 'matter' but what has been called matter are really focal points of energy tied together in interesting ways (we all live physically in the 3rd dimension and our instruments have been useful in detecting the 3 dimensional world, until recently, when we've been developing much more sensitive tools like The Large Hadron Collider at Cern, and the electron microscope that have expanded our consciousness way beyond the material world. And we are energy as well, with consciousness to boot, being much higher on the evolutionary chain than mere ‘matter.’ Are we at the top? Why would be we presume so? The majority of us still kill one another of any reason - religion, resources, jealousy, fear, a mere liking of killing, any thing really, and any combination thereof (The Seven Deadly Sins being an attempt to simplify the many into a few.) But there are consicousnesses that teach that Love - Right Feeling, along with Right Action and Right thought, is the only way out of this cycle of reincarnation brought on by the bad karma we accumulate.

My investigations into meditation, especially during the late 60s - late 70s, were, I felt, a much more direct and immediate approach to the meaning of all this than all the reading of what others thought - at least it was certainly more humane and useful in living my life. But the studies in both meditations and the works of others, were and are only as good as they make me and only as useful as I am, changed for the better by them. Early on, I came to the conclusion that modern religions are way down the path of 'someone who interpreted what someone earlier had interpreted, what someone earlier interpreted, etc… what the originator really talked about - The Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad as originators for starters with Lao Tzu, Confucius, and others thrown in, Poets being chief among them.

I came to the conclusion that there is only one truth to reality but many paths to that truth - some spiritual, some scientific, and some philosophical. Blavatsky said it succinctly as ‘There is no religion higher than Truth.’  One may substitute science or philosophy for the word religion just as well.