The second view, which has long been common among progressives and now among populist conservatives, is that there is no such thing as neutrality. That view is even more traditional, as it harkens back to the days of kings, potentates and marauders — people who recognized nothing beyond their own power to exert force. Someone has to make that call. Even the most authoritarian Americans recognize the primacy of elections, even if they concoct bogus voter-fraud theories to justify their attempt at stealing them.
Unfortunately, those limits have eroded and now elected and appointed officials especially during the coronavirus grab as much authority as they can. Conservative anti-Americanism is a little like this.
In late July , Ohio Senate candidate J. Earlier that month , South Dakota Gov. The Olympics have brought out this sense of alienation from America on the right. And an America where these values permeate national symbols, like the Olympic team, is an America where those symbols are worthy of scorn. The willingness to attack police officers who defended an attack on the seat of American government gets at the through-the-looking-glass ugliness of contemporary right-wing patriotism.
The hub seems to be the Claremont Institute, a think tank based in Southern California , and affiliated institutions like Hillsdale College. Claremont is undoubtedly the most radically pro-Trump of any major right-wing intellectual institution, its thinkers most willing to defend both his presidency and his false claims of a stolen election. Elmers intimates that violence will be a part of this struggle. This makes them particularly inclined towards a sense of political betrayal — and the same kind of hyper-patriotic anti-Americanism that motivates anti-Olympian, pro-Capitol riot punditry.
A sense that the country has strayed because of liberalism has long been a core part of American conservatism. But this idea has become particularly dominant now due to the influence of both the Trump presidency and longer-term trends — most notably demographic change and defeats on culture war fronts like same-sex marriage.
My conversation with Jared Diamond can also be listened to through the player below. Those big problems would include nuclear risk, climate change, sustainable resource use and inequality around the world. I'm not concerned just about the elites. I'm concerned about the whole spectrum of the United States, the polarization within the electorate as well as geographic polarization, income polarization, political polarization, and the polarization of our legislators.
How does a country's "national character" fit into whether or how a given society survives a time of crisis? Instead of talking about national character, the phrase that I use in my work and thinking is "national identity. Italians have a national identity. But what they are proud about is not what Americans are proud about. Italians are proud about their style, their history of the Roman Empire, their cuisine, their friendliness, their social relationships with other Italians and their great art, of course.
Whereas for people from Finland, their national identity depends upon their unique language and having survived war against the Soviet Union. In the United States, our national identity depends upon our having conquered a continent and our being the most powerful country in the world.
In Germany, national identity used to depend upon military feats which are now regarded as evil. German national identity now depends upon some features of German national character, namely the role of the community where in many cases it takes precedence over the role of the individual in society. Germans have great pride in their art and music.
How do countries respond to a crisis in national identity and meaning? Donald Trump and his movement are one such crisis afflicting the United States in this moment. My new book examines national crises from the perspective of personal crises in identity. When we change our personal identities, we can work through it more quickly because it involves just one person, us.
National identities inevitably get changed more slowly because it requires arriving at a consensus for a whole country. For example, in the book I discuss the slow change in national identity for Australia, which took place over several decades from the time I first visited Australia in Since then, Australians have gradually been discarding what had been their national identity.
This had been based on: "We, Australians being loyal British citizens, we are the British outpost near Asia. This process took decades and decades. Similarly, with the United States we are changing our vision of the country's national identity. It's going to take us time, so it will happen slowly. I do not think it is going to take the country several decades as it did Australia, but it certainly is going to take more than a year or two. In what ways should a country navigate such times of change in order to be successful?
How can the United States manage this in a healthy way? A starting point would be "We need to be honest. A very specific example: a lack of honesty about immigration. There are these arguments about putting up a wall on the Mexican border. Well, the fact is that the great majority of people who are in the United States as so-called illegal immigrants have not come across the Mexican border. Instead, they've come to the United States on legal visas and then they've overstayed them.
Therefore, the discussion about the wall is tangential. In addition, if we are concerned about people coming across the Mexican border, the preferred ways to get across the Mexican border are to wade across the Rio Grande or to go through tunnels.
These proposals about Trump's wall are a prime example of dishonesty and ignoring the facts. What are other examples of things that the United States and its leaders and people are dishonest about?
We need to be honest about what is good about the United States and what needs to be changed. Things that are good include that we are still the most powerful and richest country in the world. America has wonderful geography. American elites took the vast transformation of the economy as a signal to rewrite the rules that used to govern their behaviour: a senator only resorting to the filibuster on rare occasions; a CEO limiting his salary to only 40 times what his average employees made instead of times; a giant corporation paying its share of taxes instead of inventing creative ways to pay next to zero.
There will always be isolated lawbreakers in high places; what destroys morale below is the systematic corner-cutting, the rule-bending, the self-dealing. Never mind that al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, whose oil exports and views of women and minorities make a mockery of the ideas that Gore propounds in a book or film every other year.
Never mind that his Apple stock came with his position on the company's board, a gift to a former presidential contender. Gore used to be a patrician politician whose career seemed inspired by the ideal of public service. Today — not unlike Tony Blair — he has traded on a life in politics to join the rarefied class of the global super-rich. It is no wonder that more and more Americans believe the game is rigged.
It is no wonder that they buy houses they cannot afford and then walk away from the mortgage when they can no longer pay. Once the social contract is shredded, once the deal is off, only suckers still play by the rules.
Decline and fall: how American society unravelled. Thirty years ago, the old deal that held US society together started to unwind, with social cohesion sacrificed to greed.
Was it an inevitable process — or was it engineered by self-interested elites? Youngstown, Ohio, was once a thriving steel centre. Now, the industry has all gone and the city is full of abandoned homes and businesses. Reuse this content.
0コメント