Looking To America Is Fraught
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Unfortunately, many in the world still look to America as the leading example of humanity in the current era. The superpower in military and economic terms remains a showcase for much of the world. In 2024, however, we have reached a nadir via Trump and his influence on American political and cultural life. The anti-elite mood of that nation now glorifies what is stupid, nasty, and brutish about the USA. Fascism is making a cyclical return to the political spectrum via the GOP in its current form. White supremacy and the shadow of America’s slaver past seems to be infecting the future of this once great country. Looking to America is fraught with illustrations of what is worst about humanity.
American Democracy Under Attack
The rule of law does not apply to those in the Trump cult, apparently, as they seek to overthrow democracy and centuries of adherence to the American Constitution. Those on the red side refuse to see January 6th as anything but political shenanigans, despite police dying on duty defending the Capital from the violent insurrectionists. These same folk who want to instigate cruel and harsh laws around women seeking abortions for unwanted pregnancies are immune from the current rule of law in their own eyes. These same folk want to ban the rights of LGBTQIA folk to go about their business. These predominantly white Americans want to terminate all those ‘evening up’ measures designed to assist African Americans who have been discriminated against over many generations. Only 6% of doctors in America are black. Of the nearly one million Americans who died from Covid-19 under President Trump many of them were African Americans. The cracks and divides in America are giant fissures established from decades of Jim Crow apartheid laws and segregation – which still exists in education and housing across the nation.
Der Amerika Spiegel
Hollywood has always promoted America as a great place to live and work. You cannot believe everything you see in the movies, however. Hollywood was originally the rose coloured vision of eastern European Jewish emigres, who wanted to paint a picture of the best of America in the hope it would encourage its development in that direction. Prior to the rise of Hollywood the nascent movie business was a white supremacist vision involving luminaries like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. These giants of the business world were arch white supremacists and funded the making of telling movies about the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan doing heroic things. The WASP version of America remains like an undercurrent of toxicity running through the veins of white America. Trump has tapped into this and the GOP runs on its fumes in 2024.
Donald J Frankenstein & The White Monster
We cannot, however, just blame Trump, because this poison lives within too many Americans. Donald J Trump is the Dr Frankenstein giving the spark of life to the monster – he is giving it arms and legs in the 21C. The toxic attitudes and beliefs, however, still reside within a section of the American population today. They are too willing to believe in the BS fed to them by neocons within the GOP. Downward envy is almost an Olympic sport for white folk in some parts of the country. I was watching a movie about Jesse Owens winning gold medals at the Berlin Games in 1936. On his return they held a big party for him at some swanky hotel in New York City and they made him and his wife enter through the service door because no blacks were allowed. The White House never formerly recognised his swag of gold medals (4) at the time in fear of the political backlash in a racist nation. The Nazis borrowed plenty from the US in terms of eugenic programs and examples of apartheid laws.
“Nearly half of those in the US want to see Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case resolved before the former president runs for the White House again in November, according to a poll published on Monday.
Meanwhile, a quarter of Americans do not think Trump will ever concede if he loses a second time to Joe Biden, said the survey, commissioned by CNN.
The survey in question found that 48% of those polled believed it was “essential” for there to be a verdict before November’s election. Another 16% said that they would at least prefer to see one.”
_ (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/05/trump-election-subversion-verdict-november-voting)
Blaming ‘the other’ is the Fox News mantra. Liberal lefties and perverted progressives are the bane of America, according to the right wing media. Looking to America is fraught with contradictions for those watching on from afar. President Joe Biden is a most unlikely mastermind bad guy. The predilection for conspiracy theories among Americans borders on insanity. The reality is that Biden has steered the economy through a challenging time and come out the other side in good shape. The politics of grievance are so caught up in the culture wars and social identity crap. Somehow lots of folk don’t want to share a nation anymore, it seems. They want to turn the clock back and live in 1950. I call this the politics of nostalgia and it is another BS stratagem. There is no time machine and no turning back. Life is essentially about progress and evolution.
‘Your laws do not apply to me!’ This is the GOP cult of Trump ethos. The fascist state storm troopers are arming themselves with their AR-15’s. These folk are threatening the government and all who stand in their way. Bully boys and a bully pulpit. Right wing terrorists and their militias. Christian Nationalists intolerant of everybody else. The Trump modus operandi is to warn of the dangers of electoral interference and then go out and commit it. When they are caught red-handed they deny, obfuscate, and downplay. They claim the high moral ground and then go around smashing things up. Definitely behaviour out of the Nazi playbook of the 1930’s. Anti-elitism has delivered a bunch of GOP politicians who can barely read and write. They make a lot of noise, however, about ‘draining the swamp’ and other such inane sloganeering. The political heroes on the right all turn out to be crooks and scumbags. Nixon. Bush. Now Trump. The GOP is the home of the swamp. These folk are not going to clean anything up, but they will clean us out given half a chance.
In the end it is always a battle between public good and private wealth. America has been in a see saw struggle on this score for centuries. Abraham Lincoln rescued the nation from slavery back in 1865. America repaid him by killing him in a cowardly assassination. Hoover and the Gilded age took the US into the Great Depression through their corporate greed and stupidity. Teddy Roosevelt brought in those anti-trust laws to break things up. It has always been a battle between wealth and power vs opportunity for the working poor. FDR saved the nation and the world with the New Deal. Eventually, the neocons got control again after the assassination of JFK. Reagan the bought and paid for B grade actor, the spokesman for General Electric, brought the neoliberal economic polices to bear. These would usher in decades of corporate greed and dismantling of union power. The ‘trickledown effect’ was promised and most of us are still waiting some 40 years later for our share of the wealth. The divide between rich and the working poor has never been greater across the globe. Obscene amounts of money are paid to CEO’s. Oligopolies and duopolies have killed competition and produced price setting for corporate price gouging and record profits during a time of high inflation. Capitalism is a rigged game in 2024. The free market is a bad joke and the rentier economy places fees, fines, and charges on every aspect of living. Ordinary citizens cannot afford to buy a home. We all are worse off than our parent’s generation. Despite all this, non-college educated Trump voters cannot see the conman and grifter before their eyes. They buy all this baloney about cultural values and the dangers of woke, whilst they are getting their pockets picked by the GOP big business policies. Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom.
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