There is no shortage of self-analysis about America’s position, insightful and otherwise, especially this week. Sometimes the views of other can offer an altogether helathful shock. The German news magazine Der Spiegel this week offers a lengthy cover story called “A Superpower in Decline: Is the American Dream Over?” Some of their observations:
“The fall of America doesn’t have to be a complete collapse — it is, after all, a country that has managed to reinvent itself many times before. But today it’s no longer certain — or even likely — that everything will turn out fine in the end. The United States of 2010 is dysfunctional, but in new ways. The entire interplay of taxes and investments is out of joint because a 16,000-page tax code allows for far too many loopholes and because solidarity is no longer part of the way Americans think. The political system, plagued by lobbyism and stark hatred, is incapable of reaching consistent or even quick decisions.
The country is reacting strangely irrationally to the loss of its importance — it is a reaction characterized primarily by rage. Significant portions of America simply want to return to a supposedly idyllic past. They devote almost no effort to reflection, and they condemn cleverness and intellect as elitist and un-American, as if people who hunt bears could seriously be expected to lead a world power. Demagogues stir up hatred and rage on television stations like Fox News. These parts of America, majorities in many states, ignorant of globalization and the international labor market, can do nothing but shout. They hate everything that is new and foreign to them.
But will the US wake up? Or is it already much too late?”
Also: “Today an American CEO earns about 300 times as much as an ordinary worker. In 1950, that number was only 30. The consequence is “social segregation,” says sociologist Robert Putnam, by which he means that people go to different schools and parties and live in different neighborhoods, and that there is no longer any overlap between groups. “The fundamental bargain, the core of America, has always been that we can live with big gaps between rich and poor as long as there is also equality of opportunity,” Putnam says. “If that is no longer true, then the core bargain is being violated.”
Also: “[The climate] leading up to the Congressional elections on Nov. 2 . . . isn’t shaped by logic or an interest in rational debate. The United States of 2010 is a country that has become paralyzed and inhibited by allowing itself to be distracted by things that are, in reality, not a threat: homosexuality, Mexicans, Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, health care reform and Obama. Large segments of the country are not even talking about the issues that are serious and complex, like debt, unemployment and serious educational deficits. Is it because this is all too threatening? It has become a country of plain solutions. People with college degrees are suspect and intelligence has become a blemish. Manfred Henningsen, a German political scientist who teaches in Honolulu, Hawaii, calls . . . .agitators like Glenn Beck “nationalist, racist and proto-fascist. . . .They take advantage of the economic situation, almost the way the right-wing intelligentsia did back in the Weimar Republic.”