For decades now, Americans seemed to take for granted their belief that the rest of the world looked to Americans for leadership, and often did so with envy. A lot has changed in the decades since my childhood, when this belief was widely shared among Americans, and when it was still largely true.
But things have changed, and quite a lot. While change came to the rest of the world, with the end of the Cold War and the coming down of the Iron Curtain figuratively, and the Berlin Wall literally, in eastern Europe. The Soviet Union fell, and the United States was left at the time as the world's leading, and really only, superpower. This reinforced even more in the minds of Americans the unique and privileged status of their nation.
Indeed, at the time, it seemed sometimes like the whole rest of the world was changing, while everything stayed exactly the same here in the United States. Apartheid was ended first in a newly independent Namibia, and then in South Africa itself. There was that largely peaceful revolution that ended communism in most of eastern Europe, and then eventually dissolved the Soviet Union. There were huge events that greatly altered the course of Chinese history, with the events in Beijing in 1989. Europe continued to grow closer and more unified (at least at first), as the European Union became more of a unified force, and many countries finally obtained the Euro as the official currency. Eventually, there were movements that originated as youth movements desiring more democracy during the Arab Spring. It all felt sometimes like the only place where things were not changing was right here in the United States.
Meanwhile, something else was happening under the surface. The living standard in the United States was on the decline. Other nations began to catch us, and then surpass us, in terms of standard of living. These included some of the northern European nations in Scandinavia, as well as Switzerland, Australia, and our northern neighbors, Canada. Also, a lot of other countries began to enjoy a higher ranking in some key areas, particularly education and healthcare, when the United States sank close to the bottom in both areas among advanced nations.
Yet, it seemed that the more the standard of living slipped here in the United States, the more blindly proud and aggressively nationalistic many Americans became.
At precisely the moment that Americans began losing some of the very things that much of the rest of the world admired and even envied, many Americans embraced a very ugly, and decidedly undemocratic, spirit, which they mistook as patriotism, but which really was nationalistic and often borderline xenophobic.
Paradoxically, it is many of these same people, who proudly and without any sense of irony will claim that the United States is the most free nation in the world, who have contributed to the decline of democracy. And there was never a time when the decline of American democracy was as clear to many Americans, and indeed to the rest of the world, as with the political rise of Donald J. Trump.
This is a sentiment that was recently shared by White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, when she had the gall to suggest about the American example regarding Covid-19:
"The world is looking at us as a leader."
Right.
In fact, the United States is serving as an example to the world, but not in the way that McEnany suggested. As Ryan Cooper wrote in a recent article in The Week (see link below),
"Around the world, it is beginning to sink in how profoundly rotten the United States is. Unless America manages to turn things around, it will slide from the center of the international order to a peripheral, mistrusted basketcase, and it will deserve it."
Ryan uses the example of the coronavirus, as an example, suggesting with reason that our collective approach has yielded frankly predictable results:
"Around the world, it is beginning to sink in how profoundly rotten the United States is. Unless America manages to turn things around, it will slide from the center of the international order to a peripheral, mistrusted basketcase, and it will deserve it."
Ryan uses the example of the coronavirus, as an example, suggesting with reason that our collective approach has yielded frankly predictable results:
“It is plainly obvious why the U.S. is experiencing a second wave. The point of coronavirus lockdowns…was to buy time for the government to set up more fine-grained containment protocols that could contain the virus more effectively.”
Indeed, Ryan argues, this is for this reason that the world has effectively put the United States under quarantine. The list of countries that Americans specifically cannot travel to currently numbers well over 100.
Why? Well, when you pay attention to what people are saying about simple measures designed to contain Covid-19, it becomes a lot more apparent.
Listening to many Americans, you would think that the masks that many stores and public places are requiring for anyone wanting to go in would be a massive violation of their civil rights. They talk about it as if it were the modern equivalent of how Nazis forced Jews to wear the yellow Star of David as identifying markers. Many Americans refuse to wear masks, just as many Americans view the coronavirus as some kind of overblown conspiracy. Meanwhile, the necessity of masks has been underscored by the rise in Covid-19 cases all across the country, but particularly in those regions where the coronavirus was not taken especially seriously. In states all across the interior and the south, especially Texas and Florida, where Trump's passive aggressive approach to Covid-19 and mask wearing were embraced, Covid cases have absolutely skyrocketed. And yes, the entire world is watching.
Why? Well, when you pay attention to what people are saying about simple measures designed to contain Covid-19, it becomes a lot more apparent.
Listening to many Americans, you would think that the masks that many stores and public places are requiring for anyone wanting to go in would be a massive violation of their civil rights. They talk about it as if it were the modern equivalent of how Nazis forced Jews to wear the yellow Star of David as identifying markers. Many Americans refuse to wear masks, just as many Americans view the coronavirus as some kind of overblown conspiracy. Meanwhile, the necessity of masks has been underscored by the rise in Covid-19 cases all across the country, but particularly in those regions where the coronavirus was not taken especially seriously. In states all across the interior and the south, especially Texas and Florida, where Trump's passive aggressive approach to Covid-19 and mask wearing were embraced, Covid cases have absolutely skyrocketed. And yes, the entire world is watching.
Heading into the Covid-19 pandemic, much of the world still seemed to feel that the United States was at least a serious nation. This, despite having elected Donald Trump - frankly a clownish figure - into the nation's highest and allegedly most serious, even sacred, office. But it is clear that collectively, as a nation, we have lost that privileged status as a serious leader in world politics. That in fact, we are now viewed as pretty much a basket case, with people in other countries simply unable to wrap their heads around the thinking that seems to prevail here. And given the results of our collective way of thinking, which has resulted in the absurdity of the Trump presidency, where a global pandemic has now thrown different parts of the country into quarantine at different times, and where racial tensions are only too apparent, and where now we have secret police arresting protesters off the streets of American cities and into unmarked vehicles, you have to concede that the world is not wrong to view what is happening here in the United States as a warning of what not to do.
Below are the links to articles that I used in writing this particular blog entry, and from which I obtained the quotes used above:
https://www.newsweek.com/america-lost-leadership-reclaim-it-1519127?fbclid=IwAR1f0b6i5AMb9-1fBAX39iAjzsYKqs1XvSjA2vn9EcgJuWq8dSlp1tyu4rQ
The world is putting America in quarantine by Ryan Cooper, June 25, 2020:
WH's McEnany: 'The world is looking at us as a leader' on pandemic July 7, 2020, by Steve Benen:
In a way, the world is looking at the U.S. "as a leader" on the pandemic, but probably not in the way Kayleigh McEnany intended.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/wh-s-mcenany-world-looking-us-leader-pandemic-n1233063
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