Systemic racism is embedded into the structure of the Constitution, our laws, society and history. It still operates today in Republican attempts to limit voting by minorities.
Critical Race Theory is an academic concept that racism is systemic in our laws and is worthy of study. If statues and military bases named to honor white supremacists are found to be offensive by those whose ancestors were enslaved, then we should respect those who are offended. Removing statues of those who fought and killed to maintain a racist America is not hating America. It is not hating America when you are asked to stop discrimination and to respect those who are different.
Throughout our history racists have demonized those who were different to justify discrimination and the cruelty done to them. American racists have always been willing to use violence to maintain American racism.
The vision of America that Republicans gave us for the past five years, which builds on threads from their past, is one of American cruelty. It was the tone, rather than the music, which alienated him. As the world watches the United States, is it the tone or the music that is causing such a visceral response? Is it an aesthetic thing, in other words, an instinctive reaction to all that Trump represents, rather than the content of his foreign policy or the scale of the injustice?
If this is true, is the revulsion against the U. The world has, after all, opposed the music of American policy before: over Vietnam and Iraq, world trade, and climate change. Bush, who was widely mocked, reviled, and opposed abroad. Put bluntly, Trump is unique. At the most basic level, Bush never recoiled from the core idea that there was a Western song, and that the lyrics should be composed in Washington. Trump today hears no unifying music—only the dull beat of self-interest.
Yet if America no longer believes in its moral superiority, what is left but moral equivalence? It is as if Trump were confirming some of the accusations leveled at America by its most fervent critics—even when those claims are not true.
Anne Applebaum: The false romance of Russia. As my colleague Anne Applebaum has shown, the Soviet Union oversaw famine, terror, and the mass murder of millions. Today, with Beijing overseeing the mass surveillance of its citizens and incarcerating one ethnic-minority group almost en masse, the same can be said of China.
And yet this claim of moral equivalence is no longer the smear of a foreign cynic but the view of the president of the United States himself. What, do you think our country is so innocent? Such cynicism—that all societies are as corrupt and self-serving as the next—had previously been wholly rejected by the U.
Today, international relations is little more than a transactional bargain for the United States, and power—not ideals, history, or alliances—is the currency. Demonstrators have marched in Australia and New Zealand, both of which have their own distinct racial divides and history of abuse, as well as in Britain and France, each with histories of colonialism and continuing race and class divisions.
It is remarkable, as Ishaan Tharoor of The Washington Post has pointed out , that it took the death of a black man in Minneapolis for Belgian authorities to pull down a statue of the person responsible for some of the most heinous colonial crimes in history.
For Europe, in particular, continued domination by the U. In London and Paris, however, there is an increasing acknowledgment that this cannot be the case—that there has been a fundamental and permanent shift. Those that I spoke with divided their concerns, implicitly or explicitly, into ones caused by Trump and ones exacerbated by him—between the specific problems of his presidency that, in their view, can be rectified, and those that are structural and much more difficult to solve.
Almost everyone I spoke with agreed that the Trump presidency has been a watershed not just for the U. Words once said cannot be unsaid; images that are seen are unable to be unseen. The immediate concern for many of those I interviewed was the apparent hollowing out of American capacity. Take the confusion over the coming G7 summit in September. Trump sought to broaden the group, notably including Russia and India, with the aim, I was told, of building an anti-China concert of powers. But this was rejected by Britain and Canada, and Merkel refused to show up in person during the pandemic.
Behind the scenes, France has been trying to mend fences—this is not how a superpower is supposed to be treated. Read: How did we get here?
A European ambassador told me Trump himself is an expression of American decline. It is a sign of the United States following other great powers downward, something Biden—a septuagenarian who must be shielded from crowds because he is among the most vulnerable populations for the novel coronavirus—only illustrates further. Today, they are a successful country, but they have simply lost their power. To some extent, the U. N ot everyone is convinced. With the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and its aftermath within the first week of January, this line of attack is ramping up again.
A recent survey by the Pew Research Centre a non-partisan American think tank based in Washington DC found that more than 60 per cent of Republicans believed Democrats were less patriotic than other Americans, while more than 70 per cent who identified as Republicans saw themselves as more patriotic than most others.
Or those who criticise certain aspects of American life, like the absurdly high rate of gun-related deaths or the high percentage of people by international standards without access to health care. While Democrats have many criticisms of Republicans, being un-American or hating America is not one of them. In the Pew survey, Democrats tended to see members of both parties as similar in terms of patriotism. They even disparage entire groups of Americans, such as Muslim-Americans and Mexican immigrants.
But despite all that vitriol aimed at Americans and parts of America, they are almost never accused of being unpatriotic. The killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani has led to increased rhetoric about unpatriotic liberals. Consider the basic principles that distinguish right and left — not just in the US, but more widely. In broad terms, people on the right side of the political spectrum tend to value social hierarchy, order and tradition.
Those on the left are more likely to value equality and change — especially change that advances equality. So, at any point in history, the left is much more likely to be seen as criticising the status quo — meaning the country as it stands or its traditions — than is the right.
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