The Stakes Are Higher Than You Realize: I increasingly fear that The West is on the ballot too.
Sobering--and not far fetched!
The Stakes Are Higher Than You Realize
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-11-04/donald-trump-would-bring-the-kind-of-change-you-really-dont-want?src=usn_tw
A President Trump might undo all that America has accomplished globally since World War II.
The Stakes Are Higher Than You Realize
By Simon Rosenberg | Contributor
Nov. 4, 2016, at 6:00 a.m.
In one of the more memorable riffs of the 2016 election, President Barack Obama recently said "My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration – that's on the ballot right now!"
I increasingly fear that The West is on the ballot too.
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It is important to note that a key reason many rising nations over the past generation have gravitated towards this American-led global system it that it has worked. Colonialism ended. The right of self-determination of all nations no matter how small was enshrined in the founding principles of the U.N. Populations, standards of living, life expectancy have all exploded across the developing world, while rates of poverty and infant mortality have plummeted. The spread of the traditional and mobile Internet has helped spread modernity, technology and knowledge throughout the world, lessening the isolation many poor developing nations had been trapped in for centuries. While the world has seen conflict and war, there have no global conflagrations like the 20th century World Wars. All in all this global system has helped usher in what is undoubtedly the most broadly prosperous and peaceful time in all of human history.
Designing, advancing and preserving this global system has been a world-altering historic achievement by the United States and leaders of both parties over the past 70 years. No major candidate for president during this period has questioned the project, the values that animate it or America's leadership of it. Until Donald Trump that is.
[SEE: Editorial Cartoons on Donald Trump]
Perhaps it has been obscured by the focus on his temperament and predatory past, but criticism and rejection of the achievements of this global order has been arguably the defining argument of Trump's campaign this year. He says the system is corrupt, "rigged," run by "globalists" conspiring against the hard working people of the United States. He has promised to "rip up" trade arrangements, which would start unraveling the rules-based global trading systems w've helped build over decades. He has questioned the efficacy of the global nuclear nonproliferation regime, and has promised to immediately withdraw from the recent Paris climate accords. He has suggested he would default on our debts, endangering a far too fragile global financial system. He has attacked the American military as an ineffective "disaster," ridiculed our current campaign against the Islamic State and gone after specific generals by name. He has attacked close allies like Mexico and Japan, committing unprecedented breaches of diplomatic protocol. He has challenged the propriety of NATO, the legitimacy of the EU and cheered Brexit, angering our closest and most important historic allies in Europe. He has even said flippantly that his election would represent an American Brexit – a rejection of the global order itself.
Domestically, he has repeatedly challenged and questioned long held American democratic norms. He has refused to release his tax returns, his health records and has banned news organizations he didn't like from covering his campaign. He has threatened to reject the outcome of the election that he claims has already been rigged by the media and other elites, threatened to jail his political opponent, encouraged illegal voter intimidation tactics and publicly supported efforts to make it harder for people to vote declared illegal by the courts. He has called for religious tests for current and future immigrants, something that could not be more at odds with the American creed. He has called for a "deportation force" that would round up millions of people and forcibly remove them from the country. Perhaps most ominously, he has encouraged the intervention of a foreign hostile power against his domestic political opponents, an event without precedent in the modern history of the United States.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
…with its emphasis on how you couldn't have one without the other, one cynical editorialist questioned the dogma, raising the possibility that the future might be more like Singapore -- a NONdemocratic capitalism, where erstwhile "free-market" policies (in reality, more often "crony capitalism"
merged with authoritarian, tightly-controlled rule focused on making sure the gears of the corporate economy were well-greased, rather than with personal freedom or the common good.
I fear we may be closer to this than we realize.
Much of the Far East is now under that form of government. The Third World remains mainly under strongmen of one form or another. And, of course, Putin has turned the largest country in the world into the exemplar of that system. If President Trump should lead the U.S. down that primrose path (and abet Putin in his goal to scuttle the European Union and reassemble the Cold War-era eastern bloc as a confederation under his authority), what is left as genuine liberal democracy worldwide? A handful of countries in Western Europe? The U.K.? Canada? Japan? Australia? New Zealand? How long will those islands be able to hold out against the wave of neo-feudalism? (And that's the most-optimistic forecast. Prior to the emergence of "The West," smaller, divided nations led by egotistical rulers had a tendency to go to war with each other on a regular basis. This time, they'd likely be doing it with nuclear weapons.)