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American democracy just staved off Trumpism. Will it last?
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American democracy just staved off Trumpism. Will it last?
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Andrew Bacevich: The Unasked Questions of 2022
Admittedly, it’s dangerous to quote yourself. Still, I wrote this line in June of election season 2016, a moment when only one politician in America, sporting an acronymic MAGA he had trademarked in the wake of Mitt Romney’s election loss in 2012, seemed to think that this country was no longer “great.” His winning fantasy was that he and he alone could make it great again. “Perhaps it would be better,” I said then, “to see Donald Trump as a symptom, not the problem itself, to think of him not as the Zika Virus but as the first infectious mosquito to hit the shores of this country.”
More than six years later, in the wake of another disastrous election, the Trumpification of America is indeed an eerie reality, leaving our country somewhere in the weeds (as is our planet, which has just experienced its hottest eight years on record). And count on one thing, there’s much more to come on every imaginable score. Our political system is in chaos and guaranteed, with the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, to remain there or worse for at least the next two years and possibly much longer; our judicial system, thanks to the Trumpification (or perhaps McConnellization) of the Supreme Court, is increasingly a menace, not a solace; and our national security state, which eats our taxpayer dollars alive, is triumphant in every way except the one for which it was built. After all, war in this increasingly un-American century has proven a global disaster for this country and — as Vladimir Putin is proving right now — for whatever country has launched one, not to speak of the planet as well. As Peter Maass pointed out recently, increasing violence here at home has been fed, in part, by the unnerved and disturbed veterans of our disastrous foreign conflicts of this century.
TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of the must-read new book On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century suggests today that the very questions we’ve been asking about this country and the world are at best thoroughly out of date. It’s even possible that the very language we use is lacking when it comes to the crisis our country and world is plunging into, and you can thank, in part, the continuing Trumpification of America for that. Tom
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