Showing all posts tagged: America

Seeing Trump’s America through the eyes of a historian in 2100

18 April 2025

One way to make sense of the present upheaval in the United States might be to see it through the eyes of a historian writing about US history in the early twenty-second century. This perspective, envisaged by Peter Leyden, which doesn’t address every last (often heavy-handed) policy of the Trump administration, sees a system of government long overdue for reform:

The Pax Americana with America as the global policeman enforcing order in the international system was coming to an end. That system had a great long run of 80 years, starting at the end of World War II, but could not go on much longer.

The United States military budget in 2025 was $850 billion — more than the military spending of the next dozen countries combined — and America was saddled with chronic budget deficits that could not sustain that kind of spending.

The bureaucratic welfare state that had been the backbone of post-war society in America and throughout the West was also fiscally unsustainable and way past its prime in effectiveness. The large aging populations of these developed economies were putting mounting pressures on the budgets of entitlement programs, which were devised for the smaller numbers of elderly long ago.

Leyden’s article is completely speculative, but is a fascinating read nonetheless. The Democrats appear to have been firmly pushed aside at the moment, but in time will return to centre stage:

Trump, his MAGA administration, and the current crop of Republicans now in Congress are not going to come up with the new systems that will reinvent America in a way that allows it to thrive in the 21st century. The odds of that happening are miniscule.

However, they almost certainly are going to create the space for some other political force, some other movement, some other set of leaders to pull that off. I expect that will come out of Blue America, with new movements and a new generation of leaders looking forward with truly transformative ideas.

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Slow and steady wins the culture wars?

7 February 2025

Keeping track of what’s happening (or being said) in the world, particularly the United States, in these past few weeks feels like an impossible task. Trying to make sense of it all is another matter entirely. But as Tyler Cowen, writing at Marginal Revolution, seems to suggest, it’s all part of a bigger scheme:

You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda (I hesitate to call it an “intellectual” agenda, but it is). Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganized, and yes that does describe the Democrats today. Then just keep on going. In the long run, you may end up “owning” far more of the culture than you suspected was possible.

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Inauguration insurance, another form of cookie insurance?

6 January 2025

Josh Ellis writes about buying a plate of cookies he had no intention of eating, from an entrepreneurial twelve-year old neighbour going door to door, who was selling them. Why would anyone pay out good money for something they’re not going to consume? Ellis describes the gesture as cookie insurance:

Lastly, I bought cookies I never intended to eat for insurance. A few years down the road, when that pleasant cookie peddling 12-year-old is an angstful teenager marauding the neighborhood with his gang of defrocked Cub Scouts and altar boys looking to slash tires and crack the skulls of garden gnomes, he might say, “Skip that house fellas, old man Ellis bought Christmas cookies from me once.”

A few minutes later I read about Apple CEO Tim Cook making a personal donation (in contrast to one on behalf of the tech giant) of one-million dollars, to US President elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. Trump, despite various legal woes in recent years, is still pretty well off financially. Why on earth would Cook feel the need to send him money? As inauguration insurance?

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Tune into the vibe, ignore the opinion polls

7 November 2024

Tyler Cowen, writing at Marginal Revolution, last July:

Democrats and leftists are in fact less happy as people than conservatives are, on average. Americans noticed this, if only subconsciously.

Cowen made a whole heap of observations — I’ve quoted but one — about the then upcoming US Presidential election. But it’s tuning into the vibe that interests me. Opinion polls may say one thing, but it’s the mood on the street, if you can tap into it, understand it, that matters.

I can’t say the result was what I hoped for, but let’s keep an eye on the vibe, and see what it tells us going forward.

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New York Times publishes stinging rebuke of Donald Trump

5 November 2024

On the eve of the US Presidential election, The New York Times has published a strongly worded dis-endorsement of Republican candidate Donald Trump. It’s short, succinct, and well worth reading.

Unlike counterpart publications, including The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, The New York Times issued an endorsement of Democrat candidate Kamala Harris, at the end of September.

The result of the Presidential election is usually clear by early afternoon Wednesday, east coast of Australia time. In terms of the Electoral College numbers that is. I suspect there’ll be quite a number of eyes on the outcome here tomorrow afternoon.

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American bloggers, personal website publishers, may be among ‘enemies within’

1 November 2024

American newspapers The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, have come under fire for declining to endorse US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Their refusal to endorse Harris does not, however, from stem from a desire to back Donald Trump. Rather, both publications had prepared endorsements for Harris, but were blocked from publishing them by their owners.

The suggestion is the proprietors of both outlets fear they may face retribution for endorsing Harris, should Trump be elected. For some time Trump has threatened reprisals against Americans he sees as being the “enemies from within”, should he assume the presidency. Those showing support for Harris — in what is an election in a democracy, no less — would appear to among these “enemies”.

But major news outlets are not the only publishers concerned by the prospect of a Trump presidency. Bloggers, and personal website publishers, are likewise worried that their writing may see them labelled as an enemy within. People, like you and me, who are exercising their right to the freedom of speech, the cornerstone of any democracy, are also fearful of the outcome of the election, as US blogger Tracey Durnell writes:

In the lead-up to the election, I’ve been thinking about this blog: how much it adds to my life to be able to write and think freely… but also, how a written record of my views could become a liability if Trump wins the election or commits insurrection 2.0. I chose years ago to blog under my real name — and my political views are pretty clear. To a Christian extremist, a vocal “porn-writing” leftist woman like me — a woman without children, no less — is “the enemy within.”

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40% of Americans believe in creationism, 40% of Australians do not

20 July 2022

Recent Gallup research reveals forty percent of Americans believe humanity and the universe were created by a divine act, in the last ten-thousand years. About a third believe we have evolved over millions of years, with divine guidance, while not quite a quarter of Americans do not think a divine being plays any part in our existence.

Forty percent of U.S. adults ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years. However, more Americans continue to think that humans evolved over millions of years — either with God’s guidance (33%) or, increasingly, without God’s involvement at all (22%).

While these numbers are similar to polling carried out about five years ago, a gradual increase in Americans who do not believe in a god has been observed since the late 1940s. This trend mirrors data from the last Australian Census, conducted in 2021, which found about forty percent of Australians have no religious affiliation, up from thirty percent in 2016.

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Rachel Kleinfeld: there won’t be a second American civil war

20 July 2022

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, doesn’t see an oft spoken of civil war erupting in the United States, but the prospect makes for sombre reading.

Civil wars happen largely in countries with large, poor populations facing a bulge of young men, the demographic most likely to use violence. They generally require governments with low capacity levels, and high rates of corruption and brutality. When the U.S. Civil War erupted in 1861, the Union army had just ten infantry regiments controlled by a miniscule federal government riddled with corruption. Civil wars don’t happen in wealthy countries with strong institutions and strong militaries, like the modern United States, because it would be quixotic to try to overthrow such states.

On the other hand, Tom Klingenstein of conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, believes America is already in a state of cold civil war, with the battle lines drawn between those who want to preserve the American way of life, and those who he thinks seek to destroy it.

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