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Frank Lee's avatar

This is a standard Democrat neocon, globalist, corporatist, establishment, oligarchy Regime piece void of any objectivity. Like most of this type of propaganda we see today, it completely fails any mention of the basis behind the Trump agenda and what the American people elected him to do.

This is very weak writing for a Substack called Persuasion.

The US is nearly $40 trillion in debt, has a $2 trillion per year deficit, $1.2 trillion per year trade

deficit, has interest payments on that debt exceeding its defense budget, has millions of homeless, depression and suicide rates skyrocketing, life expectancy plummeting, violent and property crime exploding, drug addiction and death higher than ever, and crumbling infrastructure. Meanwhile Wall Street just kept chugging transferring more and more wealth into the pockets of the already well-off 1%.

The US has been funding the Global Order while all these other countries implemented their own nationalist industrial policy. China has been looting the US to an empty economic shell. Our necons have been filling their pockets with Raytheon stock returns chasing every war they can find.

And none of this is reported here. Things are just peachy with the old Biden Regime status quo.

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John W Dickerson's avatar

"There’s no explanation for this shift apart from Trump’s desire to dismantle the liberal international order that the United States helped to build after World War II." Perhaps the fact that the liberal international order has brought bankruptcy to the United States, and our democracy descended into depravity is not a reason for you, it is for me. And if the liberal establishment has not tried to impeach, bankrupt, jail or kill Trump, and had worked with him to stop our moving in the wrong direction as 75% of the population agreed, then just maybe we would not have a President disemboweling the trust the United States has built in the last century.

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Sally Bould's avatar

The US has a reputation in the developing world. They say that China comes and helps build bridges and ports. The US comes to give a lecture. Unfortunately the former is more successful than the latter.

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Ralph J Hodosh's avatar

So far the Trump administration has not faced a major crisis. With the possible exception of the Clinton administration's vacation from history, all administrations face crises, some of their own making and some foisted upon them. We will see how well the Trump administration handles it first crisis without an ideology to help steer the ship of state through stormy seas.

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Mitchell in Oakland's avatar

There's a name for the ideology that might replace liberalism: National Conservatism. Its proponents have been quite open about their goals, and about their perspective. (FWIW, it's a perspective that I, as a liberal and a pluralist, do NOT share.)

If we wish to counter this ideology, we need to be a good deal more open (and a bit more modest) about the ways that liberalism differs in its philosophical underpinnings -- along with its basic assumptions about the human condition -- from the NatCons'. It's not useful (or valid) to claim that those who don't share our assumptions (or our vision) lack any vision of their own. (We shouldn't be emulating Marxists who've accused liberals of "having no analysis" because our analysis [and our conceptual vocabulary] differs from theirs.)

It's not enough to go touting a "rules-based international order" as long as we're the ones who've made (and established the legitimacy of) the "rules." It's not enough to pontificate about "the rule of law," unless our objective is to be ruled by (or to promote the status of) lawyers.

To prevail in the marketplace of ideas, liberalism requires transparency; it can't be merely the packaging adopted by bureaucratic institutions.

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