Great article by John Alexander.
“If there is one crisis that shows national populism and race realism were needed, this should have been it.
The coronavirus emerged from strange, disgusting foreign folkways. (Even Bill Maher is with me on wet markets.) Economic globalization allowed the virus’s spread. American intelligence is seriously investigating whether the virus started in a Chinese lab and not a wet market. I’m unsure which possibility is worse. There are also good reasons to believe China has not “defeated” the virus and there are secondary infections and new hotspots.
A multi-racial, multicultural, self-hating society is incapable of grappling with a pandemic or other national challenge. Pursuing a “common good,” even survival, is impossible when we can’t agree on who to trust or even who constitutes “we.” Many Americans know they are being lied to. They know they are being oppressed. They know there is a hostile governing class. However, they don’t agree on who is oppressing, ruling, and lying to them. Without agreement on basic principles, no collective action is possible.
Sadly, the coronavirus pandemic didn’t reveal the futility of globalism. It exposed the futility of American nationalism. There is no American nation anymore, just squabbling tribes. I’d like to think President Trump could have reforged our identity with strong action, including America First trade policies, an immigration moratorium, and stringent social distancing policies. He’d still have faced opposition, but it would have been marginalized. But he didn’t do this. Instead, he obeyed the braindead neoliberalist dogma of the so-called conservative movement.”
The COVID-19 pandemic was bungled and transformed into just another culture war shitshow by the liberal Right. Americans can no longer agree on even the most basic facts even about natural phenomena like pandemics. We’ve experienced one of the greatest losses of life in American history and even that hasn’t been enough to temporarily break us out of our national malaise.
Suppose that Trump had managed to overcome his own massive defects as a leader and had reacted like Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Australia:
“There are, there are no blues teams or red teams or, there are no more unions or bosses. There are just Australians now, that’s all that matters. An Australian national interest and all Australians working together. And I thank all of those that are coming together in that spirit. …
But we now need to make the changes that have been made, work. That is so important. There is a new normal here in Australia and it is one that we now need to get used to and settle into for that haul over the next 6 months. That is something that will go against the grain for so many, but we adapt. We can change the way we live, but it doesn’t change who we are and what I have seen from Australians in so many cases is exactly that sort of attitude.”
The borders were closed.
The lockdown was done early.
102 people died in Australia from COVID-19.
Scott Morrison now has a record 66% approval rating.
All he had to do was to be the nationalist he pretended to be in 2016 for one month in his presidency and he would be coasting to reelection after consolidating “National Populism.”
I doubt that The United States’ is going to make a fundamental change from anywhere else than the bottom up, and, for that to happen, a lot of people are going to need an epiphany, followed by a desire to act on that.
What stands in the way of that is a habit of looking the other way that is already many decades formed and ingrained in The America Psyche.
That other countries are doing things better than us is something I doubt will have little effect, because most Americans still insist on saying that we are are greatest country in the world – in all things.
Such a mindset is prohibitive to reform, of any sort.
The genius of the Trump Campaign in 2016 was to get Americans to admit that America is no longer a good place, and, if it be not a bad place, then at best a mediocre place that is on it’s way to worse.
They achieved this with, ‘Make America Great Again’; that a campaign slogan which allowed harness the anger of The Average Joe American, without scaring him off by forcing him to admit the truth of his circumstance.
And so now we have, ‘Keep America Great Again’, that the ultimate test to indicate whether we still have a mindset prohibitive to fundamental reform.
What would be a sign that Americans are ready for a serious change?
When Left & Right begin to collaborate together, even if, albeit, it is only to separate.
That I assert because, so long as The Left & The Right believe each has the other to blame, those who really are to blame shall carry on – business as per usual.
Chances are your county Republican Committee is composed of one Puerto Rican/Mexican/Latino and one race mixing White. Lots of luck this November. The GOP is going to need it.
I agree with that article. There is no more America: just “squabbling tribes.” This was brought home to me when George W. Bush, in 2002 when he was defending the massive waves of Mexicans coming in from Mexico. Bush said, “These are good people, family people, they’re just here to work.”
I thought about what he said a number of times. How do you assimilate a people or tribe, when they don’t see themselves as part of your nation? “We’re just here to work.” I have heard that a number of times when I used to live in Phoenix. Some of my Mexican co-workers would bluntly tell me: “We don’t see ourselves as Americans: we are just here for the paycheck.”
No reverence for Jefferson and Washington. No tears or feelings of belonging and patriotism when the flag is flying: Just a paycheck, that’s all. No more citizens: just workers, working for a global corporation that just happens to be in the US.
When it sinks in I expect the US suidice rate to spike. Capitalism will have to be strategically rethought. Or its a planned economy.
We already have a controlled economy, via the federal reserve manipulating interest rates. Our economy is such a hodgepodge of incoherent systems, it is bound to rip apart. All the cracks are plastered over with money printing, that too will end.
All economies are planned. It is simply a question as to who is doing the planning and for what purpose.
Conservatards revile the term “new normal”. They want to go back to “normal”. They want to bury their heads in the sand, just as they have done for the past 60 years.
Pretty much
CC saying American Nationalism is dead is golden. lol
Re: “American intelligence is seriously investigating whether the virus started in a Chinese lab and not a wet market. I’m unsure which possibility is worse”:
Neither possibility is possible, and the U.S.’s “Wuhangate” investigation will be like the Russiagate investigation, a total sham. China has recently stated that it NEVER had the SARS CoV2 virus in its collection of bat coronaviruses, and that SARS CoV2 did NOT come from the research laboratory at Wuhan. Furthermore, many of the earliest cases had NO connection whatsoever, direct or indirect, to the central farmers market in Wuhan, which is not dirty or unhealthy but has a good health record.
But if the U.S. government and its attendant, presstitute mainstream media (including Fox News and Epoch Times) keep repeating these lies often enough, they will become “truths” in the minds of the Sheeple.
Mr. Alexander is disinformed or worse, and that warmongering Neo-lib-con Australian prime minister and his warmongering Neo-lib-con regime were only right about the pandemic like a broken clock.
The Chinese people buy most of their fresh food at so-called “wet” markets. We can wish that we had farmers markets like these, instead of Walmarts and Dollar stores, but they would not be allowed to exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whbyuy2nHBg