After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.

Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion.

Military alliances and foreign policy no longer command the cross-party consensus of the cold war era, when politics could be relied upon to “stop at the water’s edge”, in the famous formulation of the Truman-era senator Arthur Vandenberg.

Now the politics don’t stop at all, for any reason. And alliances are for chumps.

  • @Kyrgizion
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    74 days ago

    Always has been. It’s just that the thin veneer that was always on top has now has come off.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      244 days ago

      No. There really was a time when FDR’s New Deal raised millions out of poverty and gave them a taste of the good life.

      • bambam
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        -64 days ago

        Its Roosevelt’s fault. His policies soothed working class desperation and anger and prevented the bloody class war that we should have had.

        • @[email protected]
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          184 days ago

          Every time I hear someone online talk about wanting a war, I ask them how many bullets they have personally caught.

          Before WW1 many folks thought that a war might be a good thing, because it would help things settle down.