Today's Must-Read: Are We Great Yet?

I fan across this article by Robin Wright late yesterday. It's rather sobering. Wright starts off with a history of the Statue of Liberty -- not what you may have learned in school. Farther along, this struck me:

On the eve of America’s anniversary—our two hundred and forty-fourth—much of the world believes that the country is racist, battered and bruised. “Europe has long been suspicious—even jealous—of the way America has been able to pursue national wealth and power despite its deep social inequities,” Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, in London, told me. “When you take the Acela and pass through the poorest areas of Baltimore, you can’t believe you’re looking at part of the United States. There’s always been this sense of an underlying flaw in the U.S. system that it was getting away with—that somehow America was keeping just one step ahead of the grim reaper.”

The flaw, he said, is reflected in the American obsession with the stock market as the barometer of national health—economically, politically, socially. The reaction to Floyd’s murder exposed the deep injustices in the American economic model, as well as in the police and judicial systems, Niblett said. Europeans, he added, are no longer so envious.

The Trump Administration’s ineptitude in handling the covid-19 crisis, as well as the President’s disdain for longstanding allies and international treaties, have compounded the damage to America’s image. A second poll, released last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations, reported that public perceptions of the United States are increasingly negative in virtually all of the European nations surveyed. In France, the country that backed the American Revolution and later donated the Statue of Liberty, forty-six per cent of the people polled said that their opinion of the U.S. has “worsened a lot.” The proportion of respondents who still view America as a key ally is “vanishingly small”—as low as six per cent in Italy.

As I was reading this I kept hearing echoes of Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again". It occurred to me that greatness is not a quality one assumes for oneself -- it is a quality that is recognized by others. In that context, Trump and his enablers have taken what was once America's greatness and flushed it down the toilet. It will take a massive, sustained effort to regain that -- if we can.

Read the whole thing. Wright also notes the role of capitalism in the current state of affairs, which is itself an eye-opener.

Via Digby.