The Republican’s second presidential term heralds a more inward-looking US where resentment has replaced idealism and nobody wins without someone else losing

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.

  • Flying Squid
    26•4 days ago

    There are worse ways to spend your life than chasing the American dream. But once you’ve found it, like I did in Vegas, what’s called the old Psychiatrist’s Club, then it is kind of puzzling. You feel kind of naked and alone out there, because once you’ve found the dream, it is generally just a slab of burned-out concrete in Las Vegas called the old Psychiatrist’s Club, then it’s kind of hard to go on from there on the same.

    • Hunter S. Thompson, November 1, 1977, Lecture at the University of Colorado (Boulder)