STOP CRYING WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL.

Last week's story of voter discontent in Sheboygan elicited a very different reaction, "Strange things are afoot at the Sheboygan Piggly Wiggly," from Daily Kos diarist Hunter.

I almost love this story. Almost. Published by the Washington Post on Monday, the article is the latest in a long, noble tradition of "political journalist goes to random grocery store or diner to tell us what random passersby are thinking." But it's not often that you find a piece that really brings home the American Gothic tinge to all of it. You can almost hear it: the souls of the damned, crying out from behind the reporter's keyboard. The haunting wails of Americana as it shops for pork at the Piggly Wiggly.

Hunter's snark will likely elicit a few "preach it" responses from his fellow cosmopolitans.  Whether it will change any minds in Sheboygan, or among Cold Spring Shops readers, is another matter.

Aaaaah, that's the stuff. Just good old-fashioned Trump-supporting Americans, voters who don't mind migrant concentration camps or the undoing of democracy itself if it means bringing the price of a bottle of Coca Cola back under three bucks.

There's nothing in his article about Team Biden engaging in lawfare to keep the Greens off state ballots, which looks a lot like undoing democracy, but I digress, and the "migrant concentration camps" are crowding out youth sports in Chicago, but I digress some more.

It is not to the residents of Sheboygan or Woodlawn that Hunter wishes to speak.

Among America's many Trump voters, the rose-colored glasses are tinted to near-opacity when it comes to Trump's actual record. By the time he left office, 400,000 Americans had died in a pandemic, Dawn. There were runs on toilet paper because the pandemic so wrecked worldwide supply chains that Americans feared having to wipe their nether regions with leaves plucked off their neighbors' shrubbery. Pictures of empty store shelves brought comparisons to the old Soviet Union.

No matter. The anecdotes in the Post's latest journey to America's heart of darkness, known more formally as "Wisconsin," are identical to prior iterations of this article. Most Americans know very little about anything, as it turns out, and what they do know doesn't much impact their own political choices. And you won't find many Average Joes willing to tell a big-city journalist that they're going to stick with Trump because of his crimes and racism and attempted coup, but there are plenty who will tell you that they just like how he kept the trains running on time, in the little “Steamboat Willie”-esque cartoon that runs in their mind when someone asks them to remember what the Trump years were actually like.

Condescend much, Hunter?  I suspect, though, his real intended audience will cheer his peroration.

The nation's political journalists are, by and large, terrified of the prospect of having to visibly choose sides between a candidate promising to dismantle American democracy and another who is not promising any of that. The mechanisms of journalism have been so bent into delusions of faux neutrality that pointing out the Republican Party's march toward fascism is, according to many reporters and editors at major outlets, a story that must be balanced by some supposed equivalent disadvantage on the Democratic side—even if the balance must be invented by the press itself.

It's a shameful look for all involved. We don't need to hear the incessant bleating of the least informed Americans in the country over and over and over again. Journalists would do better to focus on informing their readers, rather than taunting them with false equivalencies so tortured as to make Americans even less informed than that.

Even as he writes, scribes of the populist and nationalist right are counting the ways in which the Jarrett regency has been dismantling democracy and making good on their promises to make life in Sheboygan, and anywhere else that doesn't have high rise office towers and rapid transit, miserable.  As Dementia Joe says, "not a joke."  Dip into the comments, there's one arguing pork should become even more expensive, because of sustainability.

Although Paul Krugman is not chiding the residents of Sheboygan directly, he, too, is preaching the same sort of message:  You spoiled Normals, you don't know how good you have it.

Some observers, however, tell us to ignore fancy statistics indicating that America is doing pretty well. Americans’ lived experience, they say, is that it’s still a lousy economy. And isn’t the customer — or in this case the consumer — always right?

Well, I do not think that word, “experience,” means what they think it means. It’s true that most Americans have a negative view of the economy. But people don’t directly experience the economy. What they directly experience are their own financial circumstances — and most Americans are feeling relatively positive about their own finances.

Yes, although they can recall what a dozen bratwursts or a tank of gas cost in 2019, and you know Team Trump will be buying advertisements in the swing states to jog those recollections. And the tent cities full of illegal aliens are new, aren't they?  Those elements don't figure in Professor Krugman's lecture.

So people saying that lived experience contradicts the official data haven’t really done their homework. To the extent we can measure Americans’ personal experiences, as opposed to what they say about the economy, it seems to be quite positive and more or less in line with the macroeconomic indicators.

There may be multiple reasons for this disconnect between personal experience and narratives. Partisanship is clearly a major factor: Supporters of both parties tend to be down on the economy when the opposing party holds the White House, but the effect is much stronger for Republicans. Even though inflation has dropped, the inflation surge of 2021-22 may still be weighing on economic perceptions. And for what it’s worth, news reporting on the economy, as measured by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, was extraordinarily negative last summer, comparable to the depths of the Great Recession, although it has been more positive recently.

Whatever has been going on, it’s important to understand that the political challenge facing Democrats is not that they have to overcome a bad economy. What they need to overcome instead is the false narrative that the economy is doing badly.

How can they do this? I’m not a political strategist, but even I can see that telling voters that their perceptions are skewed would come across as condescending. But reminding them just how bad 2020 was and arguing that President Biden, who inherited an economy and a society badly damaged by the pandemic and has led us through the aftermath to a much better place, just might work.

Macroeconomic indicators don't vote, people do, and there are more dimensions of "better place" than appear in the Beige Book.  Stephen Kruiser takes it from there.

Translation: The rubes just don't know how good they've got it.

Paul Krugman lives in New York, works in Academia, and writes for the largest left-wing propaganda media organization in the United States. The only way he could be more insulated from the lives of everyday Americans is if he covered himself in bubble wrap. There is no real "extent" to how he can measure the experiences of people in flyover country.

One might argue that Krugman is merely writing for the Times's coastal elite audience. I would counter that his columns have a decided "Professor Paul is angry that the kids aren't getting it," vibe to them. Remember, the Coastal Media Bubble denizens think that everyone pays attention to them.

The condescending attitude continues as Krugman attempts to examine the "disconnect between personal experience and narratives." Krugman used to leave a lot of his disdain up to the reader to infer; now he's moving it front and center. Sure, buddy, there are millions of Americans out there whose economic realities are just super peachy, but the idiots are hypnotizing themselves with "narratives."

Then comes the dagger: "Is it really a good idea to remind voters what the spring of 2020 was like?"  Let's see, corona tyranny followed by riots, followed by the Jarrett regency printing money to pay off the rioters.  Buckle in, this could be a long hot summer.