Discussion
If, as Chrystia Freeland (FT) argues, US business leaders have tired of the Tangerine Tyrant's 'plutopopulism' *and* the Republicans do badly in the mid-terms (as many expect they will), they may well seek to reverse the shift away from global institutions & economic relations of the last couple of years.
But the Q. as Freeland puts it is: 'whether America’s allies are ready to take the country back'; a parallel to the UK's EU 'reset' problem?
Populist leaders can poison the well!
Plus, we won't ever forgive the RACIST WALL spread across the southern border: we get it you racist piece of shit you hate latinamerican people and Mexicans specially so go fuck yourselves hard.
I wonder why there is no WALL on the NORTHERN border.. Oh I know: WHITE PEOPLE THEY WANTO TO ANNEX.
That feels right, but in that case the system is far bigger than just the US, even if the US is its most blatant exponent, because Europe has followed the US down the same path.
I wouldn't underestimate the extent to which Europe generally differs from the US (or the extent to which this difference is disguised by the view from the UK).
It's true of course that neoliberalism and the oligarchy it ultimately implies have made inroads into the European Social Model - due in no small part precisely to it's entanglement with the US system.
But the scale of state ownership and interventions, of private sector regulation and social protections, of the social economy in general, of controls on private sector funding of politics, media ownership, etc, etc, is still almost the reverse of the US - and Europeans generally are, in my experience, very deeply attached to this model, and sceptical about the free-market-free-for-all they see in the US.
@GeofCox @ReggieHere @ChrisMayLA6
Few people in Europe have any concept of the level of precariousness that is day-to-day life in America.
It’s not so much that you might get shot at random going out to lunch or that a minor knee injury means you lose your house and live under a bridge in a shopping cart.
It’s that Americans are numb to this and it’s totally normalized, tempered with the faint and desperate hope that you might get to be the next person who strikes it rich with fuck-you money, as long as you keep buying into the lie and pulling yourself up by your boot straps.
@GeofCox @ReggieHere @ChrisMayLA6
Few people in Europe have any concept of the level of precariousness that is day-to-day life in America.
It’s not so much that you might get shot at random going out to lunch or that a minor knee injury means you lose your house and live under a bridge in a shopping cart.
It’s that Americans are numb to this and it’s totally normalized, tempered with the faint and desperate hope that you might get to be the next person who strikes it rich with fuck-you money, as long as you keep buying into the lie and pulling yourself up by your boot straps.
Yes, that's certainly true, although it appears that the UK was far quicker to discard its social democratic infrastructure than mainland Europe.
Is the UK something of a halfway house in this scenario?
Yes, I think that's right; in a sense Trump made the political class' plausible deniability of the deeper processes at work in US politics unsustainable.
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@ChrisMayLA6
I hope none of 'America’s allies' are naive enough to think there's anything worth taking back.
Here, surely, is a fundamental misunderstanding of political and economic processes ? Trump is not an anomaly, but the inevitable result of allowing an oligarchic system to take hold. Go back to what ? The pre-Trump world that led to Trump in the first place ?
Trump is a symptom, not an anomaly. Trump's have not been the first US stupid foreign interventions, or wars, the first violent oppresions of its own people, the first McCarthyism - and the lesson 'America's allies' (if such still exist) should be drawing is the need to distance and disentangle themselves from a deeply corrupt economic and political system - until decent Americans can change, not just the President, but that system.