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.

  • @TrickDacy
    18•4 days ago

    Fuck no we didn’t. The problem is a huge chunk of people who normally pretend to care took the fucking day off.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•3 days ago

      That’s no excuse. The results are still the same. They still voted for it by abstaining. It’s better to rip that bandaid off now and come to terms with it.

      • @TrickDacy
        5•3 days ago

        Who said it’s an excuse? I’m defending the people who voted. Which btw, I’d suspect describes the vast majority of Americans on this platform

        Coming to terms with this is exactly what I’m trying to do, whether this comment illustrates that or not. Yes, we are absolutely fucked beyond belief. But it’s not the fault of the many millions who voted against this shit. We are the victims here. The idiotic apathetic assholes who refused to vote are mostly to blame, but also the Democratic party is going to have to completely reform, which they probably won’t. I don’t know what we’re going to do but we have to figure it out.