politics

These MAGA idiots don't get it. We didn't just have a seat at the table, we had the seat at the head of the table. We were the richest, most prosperous nation. The nation nobody dared cross. The nation looked to for guidance and leadership. And now we've thrown it all away to become a fucking backwater. The North Korea of North America. God damn these pricks for destroying our nation.

I mean, people have been writing this headline for over 20 years. Not that its strictly wrong, but even Fukiyama wasn't so blinded by the veneer of US hegemony in the wake of the Bush War on Terror and the cracks in the global international.

If you get into the history books, NATO's OG purpose was to guarantee a future in which Germany never gained a continent-wide grip over Europe. That mission went out the window in the wake of 2008, as German banks and businesses consolidated their influence over the continent through supply chains and mass transit developments. US/EU relations have been downhill ever since, with Trump simply flooring the gas while Presidents like Obama and Biden gently massaged the brakes.

Similarly, NAFTA and the Pacific Rim outsourcing of the 90s/00s did in domestic industrialization. We turned our physical capital into the hands of Indonesian/Philippine juntas, Singaporean oligarchs, and Chinese Communists. Trump trying to bring it all back by slamming the door on imports does nothing to rebuild the lost domestic industrial capital. But then neither did endless speculative investment and bailout for the FIRE sector or the domestic mineral extraction industries.

Putting all this on Trump's shoulders is shortsighted. He's the bumbling duffus who finally took the propaganda of Evangelicals and Anarcho-Capitalists swarming over Wall Street and Silicon Valley seriously. But this is apotheosis, not mere consequence. Trump is a vehicle for an ideology that's been brewing in the US since the Hoover Institute opened its doors in 1919.

Similarly, the shattering of confidence over the last three months is not merely the result of Trump's reckless abandon, but of the 40 year Federalist Society Mission to root out and replace all those Warren Era liberal judges with rock-ribbed Calvin Coolidge conservatives combined with the 30 year long Gingrich/DeLay project to gerrymander conservative states into a Permanent House Majority. This, combined with a liberal establishment to timid - and in many cases quite explicitly senile - to oppose the JD Vance-guard of the Republican Counterrevolution, has removed all the traditional barriers a President might have normally faced when attempting to wield dictatorial power.

Talking about this from an "Evil Russian Agents" perspective only further illustrates the rot within the American mass media. Even now, as one of the 1980s most iconic American Business Tycoons implements a playbook authored by some of its most seditious and sadistic neo-confederates, we still cannot recognize this as a uniquely American problem. Its gotta be some impurity in the American strain - pee tapes or some baroque clandestine debt arrangement or KGB mind control - that's causing an American President, surrounded by his American advisors to execute on an economic playbook straight out of the Ron Paul Newsletter.

Even then, we can look at this as the End of An American Age or we can look at this as the end of a failed experiment in illiberal democracy. Maybe the 80 years that took us from Truman to Nixon to Bush/Obama to Trump hasn't been so great after all. Maybe we've fucked around long enough, and now - by finding out - we can move into a future in which the US isn't required to be an unassailable City On A Hill in order for domestic residents to live an honest and satisfying life.

Or maybe we just can't handle our Imperial Reign ending and we blow it all up. WW3! WW3!!

I do agree that Trump managed to destroy the image of the US in a few months, he's not actually the sole reason. It's the ~33% of the population that voted for him again that really destroyed the image of the US.

The world has known for a while that Americans are dumb, but the fact that we not only let him run for president again, but let him get elected again is the real loss of trust. We (in the broad sense, probably not any of us actually in this thread) voted for a felon, and as far as anyone can tell democratically elected a man who had already made us the laughing stock of the world in the past. They graciously forgave us once, and then not only did we not change, we doubled down on crazy. We're a democracy, we're all also a bit responsible for the destruction of our reputation by allowing this to happen and continue. Even those of us who have never voted for Trump.

70 days. He ruined the American image in 70 days. He’s a disgrace.

This realization may be painful for Americans. But we should know that the rest of the world understands us more clearly than we understand ourselves.

It seems to me most Americans here know what's going on, and understand it well.
But overall I think most Europeans understand USA in a way most Americans don't. We generally understand how USA as a society is sick, sick with selfishness to a degree it's become sociopathic, and for some reason it refuses anything that could help cure it.

50 years ago USA was to many Europeans an ideal to follow. Today it's a warning of what NOT to do.