This weekend, American skies will be aflame with fireworks celebrating our legacy of freedom and democracy, even as Republican legislature after Republican legislature constricts the franchise and national Republicans have filibustered the expansive For The People Act. It will be a strange spectacle.
It is hard to view your own country objectively. There is too much cant and myth, too many stories and rituals. So over the past week, I’ve been asking foreign scholars of democracy how the fights over the American political system look to them. These conversations have been, for the most part, grim.
“I’m positive that American democracy is not what Americans think it is,” David Altman, a political scientist in Chile, told me. “There is a cognitive dissonance between what American citizens believe their institutions are and what they actually are.”
“The thing that makes me really worried is how similar what’s going on in the U.S. looks to a series of countries in the world where democracy has really taken a big toll and, in many cases, died,” Staffan Lindberg, a Swedish political scientist who directs the Varieties of Democracy Institute, said. “I’m talking about countries like Hungary under Orban, Turkey in the early days of Erdogan’s rule, Modi […]
Many Americans are worried as well. We are electing corrupt and incompetent officials, with Biden and Harris even worse than Trump. We are embracing transgenderism and destroying the history of the nation based on racist claims, and we are leading the world in business and political policies of environmental irresponsibility. There is a very real dearth of intelligent and competent leadership, and we have a bumbling senile idiot for President. Sad!
You seriously believe Biden and Harris are more corrupt than Trump? You need to get out of the Earth 2 bubble and come back to a reality based on facts.
Hey Michael take of the QAnon glasses off and look around every thing you said applies to #45. Worse than himself really, no one is worse or more corrupt than himself. His only gift is by his outrageous corruption to hopefully bring about changes in our complacent acceptance of hidden profit-driven corruption in our governance.
We should have elected Bernie Sanders. He has a more open mind about changing things for the better. Defining Socialism is the key to changing people’s minds. It is not bad if it is defined properly, and I believe it would make a better base for Democracy to rely upon.