Before I get into the puzzles, let me start by pointing out that the plot against the social safety net isn’t a conspiracy theory. The general shape of the scheme has been widely reported for months. The arithmetic is also clear: Without deep cuts in popular social programs, it isn’t possible to achieve huge reductions in the budget deficit while at the same time depriving the IRS of the resources it needs to go after tax cheats.

And beyond all that, we now have it in black and white — well, blue on blue. CNN has obtained a screenshot of a slide presented at a closed-door Republican meeting Tuesday. The first bullet point calls for balancing the budget within 10 years, which is mathematically impossible without deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The second calls for reforms to “mandatory spending,” which is budget-speak for those same programs. And the final point calls for refusing to raise the debt limit unless these demands are met.

So, the plan isn’t a mystery. I would add only that if Republicans try to assure currently retired Americans that their benefits wouldn’t be affected, this promise isn’t feasible — not if they’re serious about balancing the budget within a decade.

But where is this determination to gut programs that are crucial to well over 100 million Americans coming from? These programs are, after all, extremely popular — even among Republican voters.

It’s true that self-identified Republicans say that they are vehemently opposed to “socialism.” But when an Economist/YouGov poll asked them which programs they considered socialistic, none of the big-ticket items made the cut. Social Security? Not socialism. Medicare — which is, by the way, a single-payer national health insurance program, which we’re often told Americans would never accept — also isn’t socialism.

Unfortunately, that poll didn’t ask about Medicaid, a program targeted at lower-income Americans that many Republicans consider a form of “welfare.” Even so, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found far more Republicans approving of Medicaid than disapproving.

One reason even Republicans support major social programs may be that GOP support comes disproportionately from older voters — and most of America’s social spending goes to seniors. This is obviously true for Social Security and Medicare, which kick in primarily when you reach a minimum age. But it’s even true for Medicaid: Most of Medicaid’s beneficiaries are relatively young, but almost two-thirds of the spending goes to seniors and the disabled, many in nursing homes.

The attitude of the Republican rank and file, then, seems to be that big government is bad — but when we get down to specifics, don’t cut you, don’t cut me, cut that fellow behind the tree. Which means that the priorities of the new House majority are wildly out of line with those of its own voters, let alone those of the electorate as a whole.

And history says that attacks on the safety net come with a heavy political price. George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005 surely played a role in the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006; Donald Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare helped Nancy Pelosi regain the speakership in 2018.

So, where is the push to gut Social Security and Medicare coming from? Ronald Reagan left the White House 34 years ago. The modern GOP seems much less animated by small-government ideology than by the desire to wage culture war.

Put it this way: Advocating a welfare state for white people might well be politically effective. But in America, it’s a road not taken.

Here’s what I think is going on: Even now many, perhaps most Republicans in Congress aren’t culture-war zealots. Instead, they’re careerists who depend, both for campaign contributions and for post-Congress career prospects, on the same billionaires who have supported right-wing economic ideology for decades. They won’t stand up to the crazies and conspiracy theorists, but their own agenda is still tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor and middle class.

And the culture warriors go along because they basically aren’t interested in policy substance.

I’m not completely sure that this analysis is right. But all indications are that at some point this year, the Biden administration will have to deal with a full-scale effort at economic blackmail, a threat to blow up the economy unless the safety net is shredded. And I worry that Democrats still aren’t taking that threat seriously enough.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

But I think I can make one safe prediction about the U.S. political scene: We’re going to spend much of 2023 feeling nostalgic for the good old days of greed and cynicism.

As late as 2015, or so I and many others thought, we had a fairly good idea about how American politics worked. It wasn’t pretty, but it seemed comprehensible.

On one side we had the Democrats, who were and still are basically what people in other advanced nations call social democrats (which isn’t at all the same as what most people call socialism). That is, they favor a fairly strong social safety net, supported by relatively high taxes on the affluent.

On the other side we had the Republicans, whose overriding goal was to keep taxes low and social programs small.

The problem for Republicans was that their economic agenda was inherently unpopular. Voters consistently tell pollsters that corporations and the rich pay too little in taxes; policies that help the poor and the middle class have broad public support. How, then, could the GOP win elections?

The answer, most famously described in Thomas Frank’s 2004 book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” was to win over white working-class voters by appealing to them on cultural issues. His book came in for considerable criticism from political scientists, in part because he underplayed the importance of white racial antagonism, but the general picture still seems right.

As Frank described it, however, the culture war was basically phony — a cynical ploy to win elections, ignored once the votes were counted. “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ,” he wrote, “but they walk corporate. … Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act.”

These days, that sounds quaint — even a bit like a golden era — as many American women lose their reproductive rights, as schools are pressured to stop teaching students about slavery and racism, as even powerful corporations come under fire for being excessively woke. The culture war is no longer just posturing by politicians mainly interested in cutting taxes on the rich; many elected Republicans are now genuine fanatics.

As I said, one can almost feel nostalgic for the good old days of greed and cynicism.

The disconnect between a socially illiberal GOP and an increasingly tolerant public is surely one reason the widely predicted red wave in the midterms fell so far short of expectations.

Yet despite underperforming in what should, given precedents, have been a very good year for the out-party, Republicans will narrowly control the House. And this means that the inmates will be running half the asylum.

True, not all members of the incoming House Republican caucus are fanatical conspiracy theorists. But those who aren’t are clearly terrified by and submissive to those who are. The hands of power in the House will rest in the hands of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And what I don’t understand is how the U.S. government is going to function. How do you deal with people who believe, more or less, that the 2020 election was stolen by a vast conspiracy of pedophiles?

I don’t know the answer, but prospects don’t look good.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

How did this happen? To be honest, I’d love to write a scathing, muckraking column about the destructive effects of corporate greed. But that doesn’t seem to be the main story here.

To be clear, greed surely played some role in the disaster. Most obviously, Southwest hadn’t spent the money needed to upgrade a scheduling system many people inside the airline knew was inadequate.

Let me also add that nothing I say here should be taken as an argument against demanding that Southwest compensate the travelers it failed, not just as a matter of fairness but to create the right incentives. If we want companies that serve the public to spend money to reduce the risks of catastrophic failure, we need to ensure that they pay a high price when they let their customers down.

Yet righteous anger shouldn’t stop us from trying to understand why, exactly, things went so wrong.

The roots of Southwest’s unique meltdown go back all the way to 1978, when the airline industry was deregulated. Until then, interstate carriers were basically forced to offer direct, “point-to-point” service between cities. After deregulation, most major airlines shifted to “hub-and-spoke” systems, which had many passengers changing planes at major centers such as Chicago’s O’Hare or Atlanta.

Hub-and-spoke has some clear advantages over point-to-point. It lets airlines service the same number of cities with fewer routes; connecting 10 cities point-to-point requires 45 routes, but sending everyone via a central hub requires only nine. The system also creates some inherent flexibility because planes and flight crews based at hubs can be reallocated to compensate for, say, equipment breakdowns.

But a hub-and-spoke system has disadvantages, too. It can force passengers to accept long layovers or, alternatively, miss tight connections if anything goes wrong. Hub-and-spoke has also enhanced airlines’ monopoly power, with each big carrier dominating markets served by its hubs.

But point-to-point turns out to be especially vulnerable to extreme disruptions. Snow and bitter cold evidently left most of Southwest’s planes and personnel stranded in scattered locations, unable to resume normal service even when the weather let up.

Antiquated technology that left Southwest unable even to find many of its crew members, plus the absence of agreements that would have made it possible to rebook passengers on other airlines, made it worse.

Some analysts have suggested that Southwest’s debacle reflected a widespread managerial culture that encourages “cheeseparing” — increasing profits by slicing off costs until there’s no margin for error.

I’m sympathetic to that view. We’d probably all be better off if corporations were less focused on their short-term bottom lines and more willing to invest in resilience. And public policy should do what it can to promote such investment.

Beyond that, what happened at Southwest is another reminder that, for all the talk of an information age, we’re still living in a material world. Notably, there’s a clear family resemblance between the Southwest meltdown and the supply chain crisis of 2021-22, when a constellation of unusual events left many of the shipping containers central to modern commerce stranded in the wrong places.

If you’re an affluent American, it can sometimes seem as if you’re already living in the metaverse: Click on your mouse, and whatever you need arrives at your door. But there’s a lot of physical action and real-world labor going on behind the scenes. And we forget that reality at our peril.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

What I do know is that anyone imagining the Florida governor as a more sensible, saner figure than Trump — a right-wing populist without the reality-denying paranoia — is delusional. DeSantis hasn’t gone down all the same rabbit holes as Trump, but he has gone down some of his own, and his descent has been just as deep.

Above all, DeSantis is increasingly making himself the face of vaccine conspiracy theories, which have turned a medical miracle into a source of bitter partisan division and have contributed to thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Let’s back up and talk about the story of COVID-19 vaccines so far.

In spring 2020, the U.S. government initiated Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership intended to develop effective vaccines against the coronavirus as quickly as possible. The effort succeeded: By December 2020, far sooner than almost anyone had imagined possible, vaccinations were underway. (I received my first shot the next month, on Jan. 28, 2021.) And yes, this was a success for the Trump administration.

Have the vaccines worked? And how. There are multiple ways to evaluate their lifesaving effect, but I’m especially taken with a simple approach promoted by analyst Charles Gaba, who looks at the correlation across U.S. counties between vaccination rates and COVID death rates. Between May 2021, when two-dose vaccinations first became widespread, and September, the least-vaccinated 10% of counties suffered a death rate more than three times as high as the most-vaccinated.

Now, you may have heard that at this point, deaths among vaccinated Americans are exceeding those among the unvaccinated, which is true. But that’s partly because most deaths are among the elderly, who are overwhelmingly vaccinated; very few Americans have received no shots; and not enough vaccinated people are getting booster shots.

But why are some U.S. counties so much less vaccinated than others? The answer, as Gaba shows, is partisanship: There’s a startlingly close relationship between the share of a county’s voters who supported Trump in 2020 and the percentage of that county’s residents who haven’t received their shots — and the percentage who have died from COVID.

You can, by the way, see the same patterns at the level of whole states. For example, although New York was hit hard in the first months of the pandemic (before we knew how the coronavirus spread or what precautions to take), since May 2021 more than twice as many people have died of COVID in Florida than in New York. Even taking Florida’s slightly larger and much older population into account, that’s thousands of excess deaths in the Sunshine State.

Yet why should vaccination be a partisan issue?

Right-wing opposition to lockdowns and social distancing in the early stages of the pandemic made at least some sense, since these public health measures involved requiring that people make some sacrifices to protect other people’s lives. Even mask mandates required accepting a bit of inconvenience, at least partly for the sake of others.

But getting vaccinated is mainly about protecting yourself. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

The immediate answer is the widespread belief on the right that the vaccines have terrible side effects. This belief is hard to justify: If it were true, shouldn’t there be a lot of evidence for such claims, given that more than 13 billion doses have been administered worldwide?

Ah, but the usual suspects claim that sinister elites are suppressing the evidence. Which brings us back to DeSantis, who announced Tuesday that he was forming a state committee to counter federal health policy recommendations — and asking for a grand jury investigation into unspecified “crimes and misdemeanors” related to coronavirus vaccines.

OK, I doubt that anyone believes that DeSantis knows or cares about the scientific evidence here. What he’s doing instead is catering to a Republican base that equates listening to experts, on public health or anything else, with “wokeness,” and demonizes anyone saying things it doesn’t want to hear.

As far as I can tell, DeSantis hasn’t joined the likes of Elon Musk in calling for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci, who led America’s COVID response. But he has called Fauci a “little elf” and said that we should “chuck him across the Potomac.” (Presidential!)

Now, will DeSantis’ attempt to position himself as the leader of the anti-vax movement and give at least tacit approval to conspiracy theories actually endear him to the Republican base? Again, I don’t know. Even if it does, I suspect that it will hurt him in the general election if he does become the nominee: Vaccine paranoia and Fauci hatred are still niche positions in the electorate at large.

But anyone who imagines that replacing Trump with DeSantis as the GOP’s leader would signal a party on its way to becoming sane again is in for a rude shock.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

But some of the tariffs Trump imposed are still in place, and on Friday the World Trade Organization, which is supposed to enforce rules for global commerce, declared that the official rationale for these tariffs — that they were needed to protect U.S. national security — was illegitimate.

And the Biden administration, in turn, told the WTO — in startlingly blunt language — to take a hike.

This is a very big deal, much bigger than Trump’s tariff tantrums. The Biden administration has turned remarkably tough on trade, in ways that make sense given the state of the world but also make me very nervous. Trump may have huffed and puffed, but Biden is quietly shifting the basic foundations of the world economic order.

Since 1948, trade among market economies has been governed by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which sets certain ground rules for, um, tariffs and trade. In 1994, the GATT was folded into the rules of the WTO.

The GATT/WTO system doesn’t mandate any particular level of tariffs. It does, however, forbid countries from imposing new tariffs or other restrictions on international trade — in effect, it locks in the results of past trade agreements — except under certain specified conditions. One of these conditions, laid out in Article XXI, says that a nation may take action “which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests.”

If that sounds open-ended, that’s because it is. And Trump clearly abused the privilege, claiming that we needed tariffs on steel and aluminum to protect us from the menacing threat of … imports from Canada.

As it happens, the tariffs on Canadian metals are gone, as are most of the similar tariffs on Europe (although the agreement there stops short of full free trade). But the tariffs on China are still in place. More important, the Biden administration has declared that the WTO has no jurisdiction in the matter: It’s up to America to determine whether its trade actions are necessary for national security, and an international organization has no right to second-guess that judgment.

Wait, what? According to the right, Biden and company are globalists, soft on China and unwilling to stand up for America. Why have they gotten so tough?

Part of the answer is that U.S. policymakers are more aware than ever before of the threats autocratic regimes can pose to the world’s democracies. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown that dictators sometimes resort to military force even when it doesn’t make rational sense, and Vladimir Putin’s attempt to punish Europe by cutting off the flow of natural gas highlights the risk of economic blackmail.

China isn’t Russia, but it’s also an autocracy (and seems to be becoming more, not less, autocratic over time). And the Biden administration is trying to limit China’s ability to do harm, with a special focus on semiconductors, which play such a central role in the modern world.

On one side, America is now subsidizing domestic production of semiconductors, aiming to reduce reliance on China among other suppliers. Even more drastically, the U.S. has imposed new rules intended to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology — that is, we’re deliberately seeking to hobble Chinese technological capacity. That’s pretty draconian; you can see why I’m a bit nervous.

If the United States, which essentially created the postwar trading system, is willing to bend the rules to pursue its strategic goals, doesn’t this run the risk of protectionism growing worldwide? Yes, it does.

Nonetheless, I think the Biden administration is doing the right thing. The GATT is important, but not more important than protecting democracy and saving the planet.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

In particular, although political reporting generally takes it for granted that the economy is in bad shape, the data tells a different story. Yes, we have troublingly high inflation. But other indicators paint a much more favorable picture. If inflation can be brought down without a severe recession — which seems like a real possibility — future historians will consider economic policy in the face of the pandemic a remarkable success story.

So how does the current economy compare with the eve of the pandemic?

First, we’ve had a more or less complete recovery in jobs and production. The unemployment rate, at 3.5%, is right back where it was before the virus struck. So is the percentage of prime-age adults employed. Gross domestic product is close to what the Congressional Budget Office was projecting pre-pandemic.

This good news shouldn’t be taken for granted. In the early months of the pandemic, there were many predictions that it would lead to “scarring,” persistent damage to jobs and growth. The sluggish recovery from the 2007-09 recession was still fresh in economists’ memories. So, the speed with which we’ve returned to full employment is remarkable, so much so that we might dub it the Great Recovery.

Still, although workers may have jobs again, hasn’t their purchasing power taken a big hit from inflation? The answer may surprise you.

In September, consumer prices were 15% higher than they were on the eve of the pandemic. However, average wages were up by 14%, almost matching inflation. Wages of nonsupervisory workers, who make up more than 80% of the workforce, were up 16%. So there wasn’t a large hit to real wages overall, although gas and food — which aren’t much affected by policy but matter a lot to people’s lives — did become less affordable.

But won’t bringing inflation down require an ugly recession? Maybe, and widespread predictions of recession may be taking a toll on public perceptions. But they are predictions, not an established fact — and many economists don’t agree with those predictions.

Still, the public has very negative economic perceptions. Doesn’t that tell us that the economy really is in bad shape?

No, it doesn’t. People know how well they themselves are doing. Their views about the national economy, however, can diverge sharply from their personal experience.

A Federal Reserve survey found that in 2021 there was a huge gap between the rising number of people with a positive view of their own finances and the falling number with a positive view of the economy; perceptions about the local economy, which people can see with their own eyes, were somewhere in between. I suspect that when we get results for 2022, they’ll look similar.

To be fair, the resurgence of inflation after decades of quiescence, combined with fears of possible recession, has unnerved many Americans. The point, however, isn’t that the public is wrong to be concerned; it is that negative public views of the economy don’t refute the proposition that the economy is doing well in many, though not all, dimensions.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Democrats spend their final campaigning days telling voters that the economy is actually just fine. It isn’t.

But Democrats shouldn’t concede that the overall economy is in bad shape, either. Some very good things have happened on their watch, above all a jobs recovery that has exceeded almost everyone’s expectations. And they have every right to point out that while Republicans may denounce inflation, Republicans have no plan whatsoever to reduce it.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

“The fact is the rates of violent crime in Oklahoma are higher under your watch than New York and California,” she declared.

Stitt responded by laughing, and turned to the audience: “Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California?”

But Hofmeister was completely correct. In fact, when it comes to homicide, the most reliably measured form of violent crime, it isn’t even close: In 2020 Oklahoma’s murder rate was almost 50% higher than California’s, almost double New York’s, and this ranking probably hasn’t changed.

Was Stitt unaware of this fact? Or was he just counting on his audience’s ignorance? If it was the latter, he may, alas, have made the right call. Public perceptions about crime are often at odds with reality. And in this election year Republicans are trying to exploit one of the biggest misperceptions: that crime is a big-city, blue-state problem.

Americans aren’t wrong to be concerned about crime. Nationwide, violent crime rose substantially in 2020; we don’t have complete data yet, but murders appear to have risen further in 2021, although they seem to be declining again.

Nobody knows for sure what caused the surge — just as nobody knows for sure what caused the epic decline in crime from 1990 to the mid-2010s, about which more shortly. But given the timing, the social and psychological effects of the pandemic are the most likely culprit, with a possible secondary role for the damage to police-community relations caused by the murder of George Floyd.

While the crime surge was real, however, the perception that it was all about big cities run by Democrats is false. This was a purple crime wave, with murder rates rising at roughly the same rate in Trump-voting red states and Biden-voting blue states. Homicides rose sharply in both urban and rural areas. And if we look at levels rather than rates of change, both homicides and violent crime as a whole are generally higher in red states.

So why do so many people believe otherwise? Before we get to politically motivated disinformation, let’s talk about some other factors that might have skewed perceptions.

One factor may be the human tendency to believe stories that confirm our preconceptions. Many people feel instinctively that getting tough on criminals is an effective anti-crime strategy, so they’re inclined to assume that places that are less tough — for example, those that don’t prosecute some nonviolent offenses — must suffer higher crime as a result. This doesn’t appear to be true, but you can see why people might believe it.

Such misconceptions are made easier by the long-running disconnect between the reality of crime and public perceptions. Violent crime halved between 1991 and 2014, yet for almost that entire period a large majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising.

Which brings us to the efforts by right-wing media and Republicans to weaponize crime as an issue in the midterms — efforts that one has to admit are proving effective, even though the breadth of the crime wave, more or less equally affecting red and blue states, rural and urban areas and so on suggests that it’s nobody’s fault.

It’s possible that these efforts would have gained traction no matter what Democrats did. It’s also true, however, that too few Democrats have responded effectively.

I’m not a politician, but this doesn’t seem as if it should be hard. Why not acknowledge the validity of concerns over the recent crime surge, while also pointing out that right-wingers who talk tough on crime don’t seem to be any good at actually keeping crime low?

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

OK, I know that may sound like a trick question, or a desperate effort to offer a counterintuitive take on recent events. We may say that the Fed has gone to war against inflation, but that’s just a metaphor. Russia’s war on Ukraine, unfortunately, is all too real, leading to tens of thousands of deaths among both soldiers and civilians.

Yet the Fed and the Putin regime have this in common: Both took major policy actions this week. The Fed raised interest rates in an attempt to curb inflation. Putin announced a partial mobilization in an attempt to rescue his failed invasion. Both actions will inflict pain.

One important difference, however — aside from the fact that Powell is not, as far as I know, a war criminal — is that the Fed is acting to maintain its credibility, while Putin seems determined to squander whatever credibility he might still have.

About the Fed: I’m worried about the effects of rate hikes. There is a serious risk that the Fed’s actions will push America and the world into a gratuitously severe recession, especially because it isn’t just the Fed — central banks are raising rates around the world, and there could all too easily be a sort of destructive synergy from this worldwide monetary tightening.

Yet if I were in Powell’s shoes, I would probably have done the same thing. For the Fed is anxious to preserve its credibility on inflation.

Notice that I said “preserve.” The Fed — like yours truly — failed to predict the 2021-22 inflation surge. But neither financial markets nor the public lost faith that inflation would, in fact, come down in the fairly near future.

That’s an important asset. Subdued inflation expectations are the best reason to believe that the Fed can engineer a relatively soft landing — an economic slowdown for sure, maybe a recession, but not the kind of sustained era of extremely high unemployment that it took to end the inflation of the 1970s.

And the Fed is acting to preserve this asset, trying to bring current inflation down soon enough that the public retains its faith in low future inflation. I don’t like it. I’ll be calling for a monetary pivot as soon as we have clear evidence that inflation is, in fact, coming down. But the Powell Fed is, I’m afraid, right to believe that retaining credibility is important.

Putin obviously doesn’t have similar concerns.

His Wednesday speech was full of apocalyptic rhetoric, portraying Russia as a nation under attack by the whole West. But he didn’t announce the kind of full-scale mobilization that rhetoric would seem to imply. Instead, he announced a series of half-measures that defense experts doubt will do much to change Russia’s downward military trajectory. I have no reason to question their judgment.

What struck me, however, was that the new policies amount, in effect, to a betrayal of Russians who believed Putin’s past promises. Notably, contract soldiers — people who volunteered to serve for a limited time — have suddenly found themselves stuck in service for the indefinite future. This may shore up Russian numbers for the next few months; but who, in the future, will be foolish enough to volunteer for Putin’s army?

Putin’s clumsy efforts at economic warfare are, in a way, creating similar credibility issues. Russia has largely cut off the flow of natural gas to Europe, hoping to bully Western democracies into stopping their military and economic aid to Ukraine. He is succeeding in creating a lot of economic pain; energy prices have soared, and a nasty European recession seems highly likely.

In short, Putin is engaged in what we might call a bonfire of the credibilities — his desperate short-run efforts to rescue his war of aggression are undermining Russia’s future, by making it clear that he can’t be trusted. Looking forward, Russian citizens won’t volunteer to serve in the military, lest they end up trapped in a kill zone; European companies won’t sign contracts with Russian suppliers, lest they find their businesses stranded by economic blackmail.

Credibility can seem squishy, and it can be abused as a rationale for objectively bad policies. And being too rigid about obeying rules that have been overtaken by events can do a lot of damage.

But maintaining credibility — demonstrating that you will, in fact, honor your promises within reason — is nonetheless important. Putin apparently doesn’t get that, and his contempt for past promises may be his downfall.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist. 

Carlson’s timing was impeccable. Just a few days later, a large section of the Russian front near Kharkiv was overrun by a Ukrainian attack. It’s important to note that Putin’s forces weren’t just pushed back; they appear to have been routed. As the independent Institute for the Study of War reported, the Russians were driven into a “panicked and disorderly retreat,” leaving behind “large amounts of equipment and supplies that Ukrainian forces can use.”

The Russian collapse seemed to validate analyses by defense experts who have been saying for months that Western weapons have been shifting the military balance in Ukraine’s favor, that Putin’s army is desperately short on quality manpower, and that it has been degraded by attrition and missile attacks on its rear areas.

Many Republicans have admired Putin for a long time — even before Donald Trump took over the GOP. Back in 2014, for example, Rudy Giuliani said of Putin, “That’s what you call a leader.” And Trump continued to praise Putin even after he invaded Ukraine.

So it’s not hard to see where the MAGA right’s admiration for Putinism comes from. After all, Putin’s Russia is autocratic, brutal and homophobic, with a personality cult built around its ruler. What’s not to like?

Yet admiring a regime’s values needn’t mean having faith in its military prowess.

On the right, however, approval of authoritarian regimes is all bound up with assertions about their military prowess. For example, last year Ted Cruz tweeted about a video comparing scenes of a tough-looking Russian soldier with a shaved head with a U.S. Army recruiting video featuring a female corporal raised by two mothers. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea,” opined Cruz.

Actually, the U.S. military is sort of woke, in the sense that it is highly diverse and inclusive, encourages independent thinking and initiative on the part of junior officers and is, at the higher levels, quite intellectual.

The Russian army, on the other hand, definitely isn’t woke. Conscripts face brutal hazing. According to Mark Hertling, a former commander of U.S. forces in Europe, it’s riddled with “mafialike” corruption, and its officers are terrible.

The broader point is that modern wars aren’t won by looking tough. Courage — which the Ukrainians have shown in almost inconceivable abundance — is essential, but it doesn’t have much to do with bulging biceps. And bravery must go hand in hand with being smart and flexible, qualities the Russian army evidently lacks.

Did I mention that women make up more than a fifth of Ukraine’s military?

The import of all these factors should be obvious. Modern war is like the modern economy (with an additional element of sheer terror but still): Success depends more on skill, knowledge and openness to ideas than on muscle power. But the MAGA ethos is all bound up with exaltation of tough talk and denigration of expertise.

The result is that the war, while it is of course overwhelmingly a fight for Ukrainian freedom, has also, weirdly, become a front in America’s cultural and political wars.

There’s growing speculation about what will happen inside Russia if the invasion of Ukraine ends in outright defeat. But you also have to wonder how the U.S. right will handle the revelation that sometimes tough guys finish last.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

Anyway, one of the show’s plot points is that the title character is reluctant to reveal her superpowers. Why? Among other things, she’s worried (correctly, it turns out) that once people know what she can do she’ll have a hard time paying off her student loans.

I don’t think the writers were trying to make a political statement. They were just acknowledging the pervasiveness of student debt — and anxiety about student debt — in modern America. And that pervasiveness is why Republicans’ attacks on President Joe Biden’s debt-relief policy — which they generally portray as a giveaway either to privileged elites or to lazy spendthrifts — are likely to fall flat.

Let’s talk about the numbers. The Biden administration says that its plan will provide relief to as many as 43 million Americans. That’s a lot of people, not a small, cosseted elite. In particular, data from the New York Fed say that more than 12 million Americans in their 30s — more than a quarter of that age group — still have unpaid student debt.

What this means is that you should be aware that some of those guys probably took out loans to attend trade schools or community colleges, all too often getting nothing but debt in return. Even among those who didn’t take out student loans, many probably have children, siblings, cousins or friends who did. So the Biden plan will touch many people.

In short, student debt relief isn’t some kind of niche elite concern; it’s a broad, one might even say populist, issue.

The other prong of the right-wing response involves invoking personal responsibility — in effect, portraying the recipients of debt relief as welfare queens. Republican efforts on that front have, however, been extraordinarily tone-deaf.

Just on general political principles, telling tens of millions of Americans that they’re lazy and irresponsible — that they’re all, as Sen. Ted Cruz put it, like a “slacker barista” who wasted years “studying completely useless things” — seems … not smart. That sort of caricature is likely to backfire when we’re talking about a broad spectrum of Americans who were just trying to move up in the world.

Furthermore, many of the most prominent critics of debt relief are almost comically out of touch, hypocritical, or both. Actually, scratch the “almost.”

For example, Sen. Marco Rubio has proudly declared that he paid off all his student debt — after being elected to the Senate and getting a book contract. Why can’t everyone do that?

On the hypocrisy front, the White House is having a field day mocking Republican members of Congress whose businesses received debt forgiveness under the Paycheck Protection Program. It’s true that debt relief for employers who maintained their workforces in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic was built into that program; it’s also true that later research suggests that only about a quarter of PPP funds supported jobs that would otherwise have disappeared. The rest was, in effect, a giveaway to business owners.

Now, none of this means that the Biden plan should be exempt from criticism. Above all, the plan offers some one-time relief, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem that we live in a society that demands educational credentials for many jobs without making education affordable.

The thing is, Biden tried to address this underlying problem; free community college was part of his original Build Back Better proposal. But he couldn’t get it through Congress. He is, however, offering some real help to millions of Americans — and Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond.

Paul Krugman is a New York Times columnist.