Reaping what we sow. Trump is the consequence of the Cold War and Pax Americana

Poor Paul Krugman.  Always thinking the corporate trade deals represented some sort of ideal that is consistent with promoting the nation's people as a whole.  The trade deals of the 1990s were designed from the start to beggar American workers, with the word that was used among the class representatives promoting it, to "discipline" American workers, as if the wealth generated for the white working class from the late 1940s through late 1960s must not happen again, and not spread to those with darker skins who also lived in the US.  And, globally, the trade deals were designed to create new proletarian classes around the world, moving the masses of peasants from subsistence farming when we were not bombing them into submission.  Michael Harrington called fellows like Cordell Hull, who The Krug lionizes in his little essay, "vulgar Marxists" on behalf of the business class.  See here for Andrew Bacevich, a Cold War general who came in from the "cold" as in Cold War, and look for his reference for Hull.  Bacevich gets what Harrington was saying very well.

There was an alternative way to develop the world without beggaring people who used their hands to earn their living, and without decimating entire communities in the industrial areas of our nation, and rural areas of our nation.  However, having done away with the Socialist and certainly Communist Left after World War II and through the 1950s, we destroyed the language of socialism and exulted the language of capitalism, even as we continued to have policies such as Medicare and Medicaid, and even as we recognized that government should have some role in helping people of limited means.  Eventually, though, those of us Baby Boomers went from hippie to libertarian to fascist as we aged.  Our children, whose first political campaign they followed was, luckily, Bernie Sanders, were taught that it was okay to use socialist language as part of evaluating social problems and public policy analysis.  This may explain, at least in part, why so many of us Baby Boomers are so hostile to  our children, reliving the hostility our oldest Baby Boomers had for our parents, but now inverting that hostility by using the language of our parents, calling our children "self-entitled," "lazy," etc.  

But back to the problem of Krugman.  He never really understood why the trade deals were so bad for our Commonweal, and he is therefore unable to see that Trump's indirect attacks on Pax Americana are long coming.  There are a lot of dead bodies around the world who died needlessly, cruelly, and often with callous bad faith on the part of our leaders,  as every one of our presidents could fit snugly in the dock under the Nuremberg Laws.*  The Cold War destroyed secular Pan-Arabism, more out of fear of their Hamiltonian policies (as opposed to being dictators, as our leaders love dictators who do the bidding of US corporate conglomerates), and promoted the very Islamic Fundamentalism that breeds more terror and more despair--and the same sort of often religious-based anti-intellectualism that breeds Trump and similar candidates here and in Europe.  

Krugman will never recognize the neo-liberal policies he so often endorsed were part of the same immediate post-WWII Cold War attacks on the New Deal, and, finally, we are now beginning to reap what was long sowed.  We white Baby Boomers need to see our politics are two sides of the same coin: Clintonoids with their elitist, globalist tendencies, who still do not understand the utility of labor unions, even as they promote transgender rights, and right wing, racist, and fascistic folks, who long for days when they had the white privilege they so often deny exists.  It is the combination that gives the Republicans their majorities in Congress and handed Trump the presidency, and drives the discourse on immigrant rights, gun rights, and nostrums that make the Koch Bros. smile in their insatiable greed.  As I said at various points in the 2016 election, Baby Boomers chose the two candidates, Clinton and Trump.  Clinton represented the winners in the global economy and Trump the losers, with Clinton's campaign summed up as "I've got mine" and Trump's as "Get off my lawn." There is a distinction still to be drawn, largely on cultural issues, between Clinton and Trump, and Clinton, as she ran for the presidency, was beginning to recognize it was not 1992 anymore, and that she really had to start listening to people she did not respect, i.e. progressives.  A vote for her over Trump made sense then, and still makes sense in retrospect, though certainly it remains true that a vote for Sanders over Clinton was the right choice to have made--a choice too many otherwise progressive or liberal white Baby Boomers failed to make in that primary.

Oh, to my fellow, again, largely white Baby Boomers, we better start making plans to protect ourselves from our children.  We will reap what we sowed in about 15 or 20 years, when we are most in need of their support.  Self-entitled, lazy, etc. works in multiple ways.  And we have taught our children and their children well, and we Baby Boomers, white ones especially, may likely experience a Twilight Zone ending for ourselves--where we ask for what we want, and get what we deserve.

* I cracked up at The Krug's mention of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where it installed dictators to oppress people.  I think if The Krug could speak with a fellow NY Times alum, Stephen Kinzer, and compare how the US has treated Central and Latin America, systemically, I mean, he may realize that the US Empire is far more cruel and murderous to that region than the Soviet Union was to Eastern Europe.  The Marshall Plan in Europe represented an exception to the policies of cruelty, imperial aggrandizement, and outright mass murder the US dished out to people in Central and Latin America, and in Asia--oh wait, those folks iN Europe were white people. I forgot.  Sorry.  Cue sarcasm alert here.