Barack Obama has made America great again
By Daniel W. Drezner
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.
The word “populism” has had a good week, but President Obama took issue with the meaning of that word Wednesday in Ottawa:
-snip- (6+ minute video)
It’s a bit long-winded, but we here at Spoiler Alerts applaud the president for challenging conceptual premises. Indeed, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts likes to look at public opinion polls to see if things are actually popular. For example, despite claims to the contrary, it’s not at all obvious that the American people have turned super-protectionist.
I bring this up because Pew Global Attitudes has just released a survey that offers up some powerful ammunition showing that in the eyes of Americans and the rest of the world, no one needs to make America great again — America is already there:
As he nears the end of his presidency, Barack Obama continues to enjoy a broad degree of international popularity. A new Pew Research Center survey conducted in 10 European nations, four major Asia-Pacific countries, Canada and the United States finds that half or more of those polled in 15 of 16 countries express confidence in the American leader.
Three charts from Pew help to explain the legacy that Barack Obama leaves for the next administration. The first is confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing in world politics:
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/30/barack-obama-has-made-america-great-again/
= new reply since forum marked as read
"America is great" = "Obama is great", implying that "America = Obama."
It's like saying Lebron made the Cleveland team, players, and city great again. Take away Lebron, and you have the same players. Are they suddenly great? Probably not. Is Cleveland suddenly what it was many decades back? Naw.
"America is great" implies that there's a certain measure of respect for the president, but also that it was the dominant force economically and militarily in the world, that a fair number of other countries wanted to emulate its economy, political system, etc.
Now the best you can say is that America is great because it as a rock star president. Amazing, having so much rest on the shoulders of one man. It's the Kennedy effect. I don't engage in fallacy envy.
The other two things are perceptions are that the US is more important economically than China (under 50%, to be sure) ... in Europe. Or perceptions among Americans that we're economically important (over 50%). This is really redefining what it meant for American to be great downward significantly, perhaps just in order to be able to use the phrase.
America was great because it had a virtual lock on technology, with competitors being small or being an Iron Curtain. It was great because other countries hadn't developed technologically, or were destroyed by war. We manufactured stuff they couldn't, we exported it, and that helped our economy. America was great because it had a variety of freedoms that were not widespread at the time, and a functioning political system which, while it had wrinkles, weren't the disasters seen in a wide variety of countries at the time. It had a higher life expectancy than many, and an education system that was envied in much of the world. It had the will to do some projects that few other countries could even think of doing. In some industries, America supplied nearly all its own raw materials. America may have been surpassed by one or two countries for each of these metrics, but it was exceptional in being near the top in all sorts of categories. And while the US had some ethnic divisions, they were largely black and white, without the extensive identity politics that we have now and with most immigrant families having been assimilated to a fairly common public culture that involved a high degree of social capital; immigration had been sharply curtailed until the '60s. Social mobility in immigrant families was consequently large, with black/white racism and its "legacy" arguably being the real hindrance to a nicely percolating society.
Since then technology's spread, largely because policy was to help technology spread--bring in grad students from abroad and have them go home. Publish widely to uplift. No more Iron Curtain. War destruction in Europe and Asia was undone, infrastructure rebuilt. In so doing, they can produce their own crap and we don't export as much--in fact, we import. In some industries we now have to import raw materials we didn't 60 years ago. More countries have adopted a set of freedoms that they like, dictatorships are reduced in number. The US political system has come apart at the seems. Life expectancy in many countries has caught up and surpassed the US, and the educational system in the US has also been surpassed while we struggle how to handle a lot of students with deficient educational backgrounds and "alternatively normed" sets of behaviors in a one-size-fits-all system. Social trust is on the wane.
And, at the same time, transparency has made problems more apparent, and the world's become a lot more critical (albeit not "critically thinking"
place. We all find our echo chambers to live in.
Reality. Perception.
