The Headline…

…that is being reported is “A Record Percentage Are Proud To Be American”.   That’s the headline that you’re seeing everywhere.

Buried deep in the story:

Currently, 32% of Democrats — down from 43% in 2017 and 56% in 2013 — are extremely proud. The decline preceded the election of Donald Trump but has accelerated in the past year.

Less than half of independents, 42%, are also extremely proud. That is down slightly from 48% a year ago, and 50% in 2013.

As has typically been the case, Republicans are more inclined to say they are extremely proud to be Americans than are Democrats and independents. Seventy-four percent of Republicans are extremely proud, which is numerically the highest over the last five years.

The actual title of the piece should have been “Democrats Continue Pouting About The 2016 Election”.

3 thoughts on “The Headline…

  1. What, no Lee Greenwood? Don’t be depressed. Go out and shout that this is your country, and you’re taking it back…

  2. To Democrats, “Proud to be American” mean s “Proud of our government.”
    It is as though they have confused the chamber of commerce with America.

  3. Perhaps the better question would have been: “Do you agree with the direction of the country?”

    The foundation of modern American global power rests on the awesome economic power of the principles of risk reduction and risk sharing. Powerful modern capitalism with worldwide reach rose with the development of risk reduction through marine insurance for long distance trade and risk sharing through the joint stock company during the 17th century. These powerful innovations were developed in Northern Europe, which is a major reason why this regions and its commercial descendants in the overseas Anglo-sphere continue to be world leading economies (Japan modeled itself on Great Britain when it began its march to enduring economic power).

    American global power was designed and implemented during the Roosevelt-Truman years 1933-53. Franklin D. Roosevelt applied these principles to the domestic US economy through risk-sharing techniques such as deposit insurance, federally guaranteed mortgages, old age security insurance, unemployment insurance and similar programs and avoidance through regulation of “race to bottom” economics through hours and wage regulation. In foreign policy, FDR organized a worldwide coalition and came up with the name “United Nations” to win the Second World War and then institutionalized it in the United Nations after the war. Truman brought a magnificent realization of these concepts with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Japan Peace Treaty, and put muscle to the commitment to collective security by fighting the Korean War to counter Communist aggression. The New Deal was in fact a great deal.

    There is almost something Biblical to the long reach of accomplishment that was generated by these twenty magnificent years. A crucial point to understand is that the power of these concepts is rooted in the economics of risk and its sound management. That wisdom is absent in modern-day, overly corrupted Washington DC.

    In contrast to the rage and resentment of Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron of France advocates economic and political reform that provides social reassurance to working and middle classes. He contends that a strong national society can provide the social goods necessary to move the entire society successfully into the economic future. His view is that larger economies must meet the Scandinavian standard of achieving high levels of social assurance with great openness to the global economy. Macron “gets it.” This thinking might be much likelier to take hold among European countries, more cosmopolitan and trade oriented to start with, than with the parochial American heartland which increasingly sees “over there” as being “the other.”

    If America were to reelect Donald Trump, then it would prove itself as psychologically enfeebled as he is by the challenges of the modern world.

    Trump and the modern Republican party have been engaged in a large — scale assault and undermining of these principles from the New Deal era for over a generation now. If successful, the US will become a much smaller global power economically and inevitably politically. The US will continue as a highly militarized power due to the institutionalization of its collective paranoia about the world beyond its bordrs and will continue to fund its military industrial complex while inevitably under-investing in its economic capability. It will become a new Sparta.

    Where does that leave the global balance of power? Diplomats from other advanced economy powers in Europe and the Far East (Japan, South Korea, Australia, etc) will want to engage with diplomats from China and India on coming up with new understandings and new mechanisms of international cooperation. If China continues to focus on projecting economic power rather than military power, common bases of agreement could be expected to be reached with other world economic powers to create a mid-century world economy that is highly integrated and probably quite free-trade oriented. America will become an annuity power continuing to live off dividends from its once great international status, a dividend stream managed by its plutocratic elites mostly for their benefit and through the shrewd management of domestic monopolies through application of political power in Washington DC. The US will no longer be a source of dynamism (that is what the rise of Far East and Asian tech power inevitably means). Enterprises like the FANGS are never forever economic powers but rather enterprises that follow an S-curve life cycle of rise and decline; they swim in an ocean roiled by the gales of creative destruction.

    With the decline of an Athenian — like US world power, the other actors on the world stage must create a new Hellenistic Age that is multi-centered but prospers from its highly integrated links in a dispersed world. The next Alexandria will not be in the US.
    So maybe it is fundamentally a time to ask if an overall better world society can be created out of the retreat of the Americans.

    Europeans should be sending the best and brightest of their young to universities across Asia while Asian countries should be sending its talented young to Europe (and Latin America and Africa and elsewhere). These may be the people charged with building a better world at mid- century.

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