Posts Tagged ‘US exceptionalism’
revisiting US ‘exceptionalism’, Trumpism and justice delayed
Canto: We’ve been watching US politics with a kind of painful obsessiveness, I suppose because it’s more colourful, but not in a particularly good way, than anything we experience in Australia. The Presidential system is largely a shocker, and should be best jettisoned altogether, IMHO, but that’ll never happen. The USA is exceptional only in its jingoism and its religiosity, as I’ve said many times and oft, and that is best seen in its attitude to its political system and its Dear Leader…
Jacinta: Well the thing is, before the advent of Trump we paid scant attention to the details of the US political system, but since the election of someone so obviously incapable of running a public toilet let alone a barely inhabited country, to the position of President of the most militarily and economically powerful nation on the planet, we’ve set ourselves on a steep learning curve.
Canto: Or we’re just watching like ghouls at a smouldering train wreck. By the way, I should point out that Russia has slightly more nuclear warheads than the USA (though as to the comparative cumulative power of those sets of warheads I’m not sure), though doubtless their non-nuclear materiel and personnel are far superior. And as for their economy, yes they have the world’s largest GDP, collectively (though I’m sure that’s an over-simplifying measure), but Ireland’s per capita GDP is quite a bit higher!
Jacinta: Yes I think per capita GDP is a better measure of economic success, but then you’d have to realise that’s just total GDP divided by population – doesn’t tell us about how the wealth is distributed. But it’s interesting to compare the USA with Australia, which has a similar land mass, especially if you exclude Alaska. The population of the USA is about 14 times that of Australia, and it’s not because the superiority of the USA’s ingenious people and political system has made it a magnet for immigrants. Most of Australia has infamously poor soil and climate for agriculture, as white colonists soon discovered, and it’s much further from Europe than the so-called New World is. We call ourselves ‘the lucky country’, dog knows why – presumably because every nation has to find or invent something positive to sing about itself, aka nationalism, but the fact is that Europeans found it very difficult to establish themselves here. We don’t have any records about the Aboriginal population that arrived here some 50,000 years ago, but my guess is that it was a slow, painstaking learning process, even if the climate was very different then.
Canto: So getting back to that steep learning curve, what the advent of Trump taught us was that, indeed, anyone can become the USA’s Dear Leader, even a tantrumming man-child who’s likely never read a book in his life and has spent the last fifty-odd years grifting, bullshitting and fucking people around. And what does that say about the USA?
Jacinta: And can it happen here? The reason that it’s unlikely to happen in Westminster-style countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and of course Britain is that a political leader first has to win his own local seat, then has to win over her political colleagues with her abilities – her understanding of policy, her articulacy, her charisma or je ne sais quoi, and so forth – which isn’t to say that a bunch of reasonably sophisticated pollies can’t be taken in by a pig-ignorant narcissist posing as one of their own – it’s just a lot less likely.
Canto: Yes, your point is that we don’t have a system where a wannabe demagogue can go straight to the people, bypassing parties, policies and local elections in an effort to be king for a few years. And we certainly don’t have a system which gives that demagogue/king massive pardoning powers, wholesale immunity, a White Palace to live in, and hand-picked courtiers in charge of foreign affairs, federal law, the treasury, the defence of the realm and dog knows what else.
Jacinta: And yet… with all the leeway given to Trump, I’m still amazed that someone so obviously a charlatan to us could have fooled so many into thinking he, of all people, would make a good leader, would somehow improve their lives, make their country ‘great’ in some vague way. Admittedly those people were never in the majority, he has never won an election on the numbers alone, but still a very substantial number were taken in by him. And still are.
Jacinta: There were probably some who thought him a useful idiot for their purposes – for example, libertarians who saw him as the sort of wrecker of government they were looking for – but their numbers wouldn’t have been that great. It’s a worry, but again it’s the US political system that’s largely at fault. As I said, the reason it’s unlikely to happen here isn’t because our population is smarter or less easily swayed by demagogues – it’s because of the checks and balances of our system. A Trump-like figure would have to persuade his political peers long before he tried to persuade the people. And if he couldn’t do that, he wouldn’t be in a position to go ‘to the people’. And of course we don’t do political rallies like United Staters do.
Canto: In any case, the Trump saga is becoming increasingly entertaining for us here in the peanut gallery, with a number of indictments converging upon him. Let me see – there’s the hush payments that Cohen was sentenced to three years’ jail for, and ‘individual one’, Trump, was regularly mentioned in the paperwork. It was obvious that Cohen only did it for Trump, so Trump should’ve gotten a much stiffer sentence than three years – at the time. Immunity for political leaders is total shite, and justice delayed is justice denied. I mean, duh!!!
Jacinta: Okay, calme-toi, better late than never. So that’s a biggie, and pretty much an open-and-shut case. Then there’s the classified docs case, which also looks straightforward, and looks even worse for him after recent revelations that he was personally involved in obstructing those trying to recover the documents. Again this is a jailable offence even without the obstruction, and Jack Smith, the DoJ’s Special Counsel, has himself handled lesser cases involving this crime, which have resulted in prison sentences. He’s also faced with a rape case brought against him by E Jean Carroll – in fact, now two cases involving rape and defamation, as the presiding judge refused to put them under one umbrella. You’ll be pleased to know that the defamation matter seems to hinge on whether the Dear Leader had immunity about what he said while holding office.
Canto: Yeah, despicable. So we’ve mentioned three, and there are at least two more – or no, three. There’s the investigation into Trump.org, which he can hardly be said to be innocent of. And then there’s the Fulton County case of election interference, which again looks open-and-shut, and of course the whole January 6 insurrection, resulting in well over 1000 people being charged thus far. And how involved was he in the fake electors scheme? It all makes me feel quite dizzy, in a pleasant way.
Jacinta: Meanwhile, there seems to be no appetite for diluting Presidential power or changing their system, or any realisation that it’s the screamingly obvious problem that outsiders see it as being.
Canto: And most of the current Republican leadership seem to be supporting Trump! How can that nation ever recover from this disaster? My view has long been that Biden (now 80 years old) should have declared himself a one-term President ages ago. They need renewal, to get over all this…
Jacinta: Yes, age limits might be a good idea. But I don’t want to be ageist – Biden has a lot of experience, and he’s surrounded himself with a very competent team, to be fair. Still, limiting all Presidential terms to four years would be an excellent reform, methinks.
Canto: The good thing, re Trump, is that they’re much more prepared now against his shenanigans. Let the court cases begin! The next year or so will be most memorable for Trumpworld.
References
https://www.worlddata.info/largest-economies.php
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/02/trump-mar-a-lago-obstruction-classified/
19: the USA – an anti-bonobo state?
Of course it would be ridiculous to compare the complex, diverse collection of human apes – some 330 million of them – who call the USA home, to the few thousand bonobos who make their home in the forests of the Congo. So call me ridiculous.
Bonobos appear to be an egalitarian lot. They have fun together, sexually and otherwise, they share responsibilities, they look after each other’s kids, and they generally nip disagreements, which do occur, in the bud, either with sexual healing or with female group force. Unfortunately they don’t read, write or do much in the way of science, but you can’t have everything.
They don’t kill each other, which their close rellies the chimps occasionally do. And it’s the male chimps who tend to do this, just like male human apes.
Now, Americans. They like to think they’re exceptional, many of them, but to an outsider like me they seem exceptional in only two respects – their religiosity and their jingoism, neither of which I have much time for. The nation’s foundational religiosity has been well dealt with by Sam Harris and many others, and the backlash to their writings, as well the more recent kowtowing by so-called evangelical Christians to the mendacious messianic misanthrope whose presidency has effectively destroyed the nation’s reputation for the foreseeable, indicates that they still have a lot of growing up to do. Their jingoism seems another form of infantilism, and I suspect they get it drummed into them from kindergarten on up. That’s why even their best cable news pundits and politicians carried on a ‘how has the mighty fallen’ narrative over the four years of the misanthrope’s reign, without seeming to realise that the problem wasn’t Trump but their massively flawed federal political (and legal) system. It’s also why they’ll never engage in the root and branch reform of that system, the failings of which Trump has done them the great favour of exposing.
However, in comparing Americans unfavourably to bonobos, it’s not their lack of modesty and self-awareness that I want to focus on, but their violence. The violence of the state, and states, towards individuals, the violence, or violent feelings, of individuals towards the state, the violence of partisanship, and ordinary violence between individuals. And of course the gun culture.
Incarceration is a form of violence, let’s be blunt. The USA, with less than 5% of the world’s population, has some 22% of the world’s prisoners, making the nation’s incarceration rate the highest in the world. It was up at nearly 25% twelve years ago, and declined slightly during the Obama administration, but no doubt has been rising again under Trump. State authorities have also played a role in rising or declining rates of course.
The nation tries to delude itself by calling their prisons correctional institutions, but very little in the way of formal correction is attempted. The tragedy is exacerbated by prison privatisation, which first occurred under Reagan in the eighties. A for-profit prison system, fairly obviously, benefits from a high prison population, and from skimping on counselling, training, facilities, and even basic needs, covering all of Maslow’s hierarchy.
As is well known, US prisons are top-heavy with those people designated as black (I’ve always been uncomfortable with black-white terminology). So much so that a 2004 study reported that ‘almost one-third of black men in their twenties are either on parole, on probation, or in prison’. So it would surely be correct to say that every person ‘of colour’ is touched by the prison system, either personally or via friends and family. I won’t go into the reasons why here, except to mention the obvious issues of poverty, disadvantage and endemic despair, exacerbated by the imbecilic war on drugs, but clearly imprisonment is itself violently punitive and rarely leads to human betterment. It appears to be a ‘sweeping under the carpet’ response to all these issues. People are free to do whatever they like, but if they make a nuisance of themselves in the street, and make the place look bad, best to put them out of the way for a while, until such time as they clean themselves up. But the sad fact is that very few if any of those incarcerated blacks have done anywhere near as much damage to the nation as has their outgoing President.
As to a sense of violence towards the state, this is evidenced by paramilitary anti-government groups and the strange sense amongst a huge swathe of the population that if governments try to do anything interventional or ameliorative that in any way affects their lives they’re engaging in socialism, thus leaving the path open for white-collar crime (especially the gleefully celebrated crime of tax evasion), bank banditry and the like, and for real minimum wages to fall well below those of comparable countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Japan etc. And so, while their fellow-citizens are struggling in poorly paid jobs with inadequate conditions, people placard the streets screaming about their constitutional right to be protected from their Great Enemy, government in all its despicable forms. Ronald Reagan, who seems to have become a doyen of the moderate right, is now celebrated for saying that government is the problem, not the solution, surely one of the most imbecilic utterances of the pre-Trump era.
So with this eschewing of government oversight and guidance, the USA has devolved into a war of all against all, with rights eclipsing responsibilities, and with parts of the country resembling the worst of so-called third world countries in terms of entrapment, suffering and despair. But of course it’s different for the rich, who protect their own.
Finally I want to explore another form of violence, which relates to the US military. It’s amusing to note that there are arguments raging online about whether or not the US military is a socialist organisation, since it’s run and massively funded by by the federal government, with congress never delaying and rarely debating such unaudited funding. This is all fun to read since so many Americans become apoplectic when the word socialism comes up, but the fact remains that the Pentagon is, to most outsiders, something like a supermassive black hole sucking in funds that are never to be seen again.
US military spending is estimated to be close to one trillion dollars over the 2020-21 year, with something like 85% described as discretionary spending, which means essentially that they can spend it any way they choose. Three attempts have been made in the past three years to audit the Pentagon, and they have all ended in failure, but it’s unclear whether the auditor or the Pentagon is the responsible party. Needless, to say, conducting such as audit would be a largely thankless task. Of course defenders of all this expenditure claim that vast sums of money are required to keep safe this exceptional beacon of liberty to the world. Yet much of US military personnel and materiel are deployed outside of the country, and the USA has never been under serious attack from any other nation since its foundation. The fact is that the US uses its military as has every other powerful military state in history, dating back to the Egyptians and before, and including the Romans, the Brits, the Germans and the Japanese, that’s to say, to enhance its power and influence in the world. And the US certainly is exceptional in its military. Its defence budget is ‘more….than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined’.
Every powerful nation in history has fallen for the same fallacy, that their economic and military superiority somehow infers moral superiority. Might is right, essentially, and this translates to non-human ape societies too, as they all have their power hierarchies. Bonobos, however, less so than any of the others. In bonobo society, it seems, group power is used to stifle individual power-mongering, so that the group can get back as quickly as it can to the main purpose of their lives, surviving and thriving, exploring and foraging, looking out for each other and having fun. If we could have all this, in our more mind-expanded, scientific, with-knowledge-comes-responsibility sort of way, what a wonderful world this would be.
References
https://ussromantics.com/category/identity-politics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=RMW#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States