뉴욕타임스(NYT)의 유명 칼럼니스트 폴 크루그먼은 8일 "이제 우리는 어디로 향해야 할 지 모르겠다"고 한탄했다. 그는 이날 도널드 트럼프의 당선이 유력해지자 '우리가 몰랐던 우리나라(Our Unkown Country)'라는 칼럼을 통해 "우리가 알 수 있는 것은, 대다수가 우리가 살고 있는 이 나라를 이해하지 못하고 있다는 점"이라고 지적했다. 그는 "다수의 미국인이 민주적 가치와 법의 지배를 중시한다고 생각했다"며 "그런데 그게 아니었다"고 토로했다.
다음은 칼럼 전문.
Paul Krugman: Our Unknown Country
By PAUL KRUGMAN
COMMENT2016-11-08T22:58:01-05:0010:58 PM ET
We still don’t know who will win the electoral college, although as I write this it looks — incredibly, horribly — as if the odds now favor Donald J. Trump. What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.
We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.
We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.
It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.
I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible. I guess we have to pick ourselves up and try to find a way forward, but this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair.
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