Your Brain on Hyper-Partisanship

When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge -- and I don’t mean the pandemic.… I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous. – Paul Krugman, New York Times, Dec. 1, 2020.

In 1987, at a time when Paul Krugman was raising questions about global trade that would eventually win him a Nobel Prize in economics, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America launched an evocative ad campaign titled “This is your brain on drugs.”