The dysfunctional US economic system doesn’t work for ordinary people – making it ripe for exploitation by a demagogue such as Trump, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones
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The country is a gerontocracy led by ailing leaders and with a crisis of confidence in its dominant ideology; it is a flailing superpower suffering foreign humiliation (not least in Afghanistan); and its economic system struggles to meet the needs of many of its people.
The US is a democracy, albeit one severely compromised by wealthy vested interests and concerted rightwing efforts to weaken voting rights, and it is a racially diverse union of states, rather than an unstable federation of nations.
The US was drunk on its recent cold war triumph, and the political and economic order it extolled was described as the final stage of human development by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History?
The image of an at-ease, amiable US was projected to the world in cultural exports ranging from Friends to The West Wing, or as humanity’s benign protector in Independence Day.
Yet nine decades after the publication of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel about a fictional fascist dictator seizing power in the US, the scenario it imagines seems less far-fetched than at any other point in the 250-year existence of the American republic.
The foreign military ventures of Democratic elites such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden – principally in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Libya – were also characterised by bloody turmoil and international humiliation.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
The country is a gerontocracy led by ailing leaders and with a crisis of confidence in its dominant ideology; it is a flailing superpower suffering foreign humiliation (not least in Afghanistan); and its economic system struggles to meet the needs of many of its people.
The US is a democracy, albeit one severely compromised by wealthy vested interests and concerted rightwing efforts to weaken voting rights, and it is a racially diverse union of states, rather than an unstable federation of nations.
The US was drunk on its recent cold war triumph, and the political and economic order it extolled was described as the final stage of human development by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History?
The image of an at-ease, amiable US was projected to the world in cultural exports ranging from Friends to The West Wing, or as humanity’s benign protector in Independence Day.
Yet nine decades after the publication of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian novel about a fictional fascist dictator seizing power in the US, the scenario it imagines seems less far-fetched than at any other point in the 250-year existence of the American republic.
The foreign military ventures of Democratic elites such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden – principally in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Libya – were also characterised by bloody turmoil and international humiliation.
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