Putin Just Revealed Democracy’s Superpower
&gt; The U.S. model has been tarnished by hyper-partisanship, gridlock, fake news, the rise of Trump, his mishandling of COVID, and Biden’s inability to push through his reform agenda.<p>This is a very local view of politics produced by commercial news storytelling based on nationalist sentiment. First, what&#x27;s the US model? Is it laissez-faire capitalism with oligarchy controlling every aspect of politics (as it is today, and as it was in the times of the robber barons)? Is it planned centralized economy without unemployment like in the time of Roosevelt? Is it legal slavery (not wage slavery) as it was even before? The USA is a mix of all those things, and plenty more. If you talk about &quot;the US model&quot; you need to be very precise about what you mean, unless you mean the model the CIA&#x2F;NSA have exported all over the world since 1945 which is private property (massive poverty) and political dictatorship (no power to the people).<p>If you&#x27;re not talking about a specific model but USA&#x27;s reputation as a brand around the planet, it sure has been tarnished. Anti-USA sentiment is more alive than ever, but is completely unrelated to any of the points you quoted. I would personally say it&#x27;s more because of:<p>- 9&#x2F;11 turning into a mass hysteria of killing&#x2F;pillaging millions of people in Iraq&#x2F;Afghanistan (who had nothing to do with 9&#x2F;11?!) in the name of &quot;freedom&quot; because that&#x27;s exactly what freedom means apparently... then the USA government hunts down and prosecutes the journalists responsible for the public knowing what the government is doing (eg. wikileaks &amp; friends)<p>- the much-predictable collapse of the .com bubble, the subprime crisis, and the formation of a new bubble with VCs giving billions of dollars to startup based on cash burn rate no matter what value they actually produce for society ; in every crisis, the government intervenes to bail out the big fish but lets poorer people to die on the streets, or as people coined it &quot;socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor&quot;<p>- the consolidation of economy in the hands of a few corporations: from an outside perspective it appears anti-trust regulations don&#x27;t exist in the USA anymore... how can you allow Bayer and Monsanto (two of the most despicable firms producing chemical weapons for war) to merge? or Microsoft and Github? I&#x27;d be tempted to say the authorities are corrupt, but it seems the whole system is broken<p>- inequalities and injustice are more visible than they ever were previously thanks to widespread internet and cameras: people all around the world know that the USA police is a terrorist organization slaughtering innocent black people, and that the USA is a country in which many people sleep on the streets despite an abundance of empty dwellings (this fact only is inconceivable in many parts of the world)<p>- the government waging war against its own population: FBI&#x27;s CoIntelPro was dismantled on paper but equivalent programs exist to this day and most people advertised in the media as domestic terrorists were in fact setup by the FBI (as outlined by The Intercept in its most glorious reporting), or were legit radical activists fighting for a better world (&quot;ecoterrorism&quot;)<p>- the price of healthcare climbing up even for well-established medicine that we know to mass-produce since over 100 years like insulin: people from countries with free healthcare are shocked that this is a thing in a country that pretends to lead the world by example<p>- massive pollution in the cities (Flint?) and in the countryside (fracking turning water taps into flamethrowers of sorts), an ever-growing list of environmental disasters, and industry and government who continue to produce more useless industrial projects that negatively impact most people<p>- women&#x27;s rights regressing significantly with anti-abortion abortion centers, thriving anti-gay&#x2F;trans conversion therapies, and constant legislative pushbacks against anything that&#x27;s not workplace discrimination<p>And probably many other things that don&#x27;t come to mind right now. The american dream was always a lie (read some socialist&#x2F;anarchist critique from the 19th century if you doubt it) but the scam is now more apparent than ever.<p>&gt; Let us know what you think<p>You outlined an important fact that people in the global north are concerned with Putin&#x27;s dictatorship and value peace and multi-party decision making now more than ever. But in doing so, you forgot to talk about actual politics and that ordinary people don&#x27;t hold any political power (democracy) in the USA: no, delegating your power to whichever brand&#x2F;party of psychopaths is gonna fuck up your life is <i>not</i> democracy (power to the people). I bet life would be better for everyone if we all lived in actual democracies (autonomous communes without a centralized Nation States) and not in a TV reality show where oligarchs who own all mass media communication &quot;engineer consent&quot;.<p>I personally recommend you read some political sciences books. You may realize we struggling people have more in common across all borders and cultural divides than geopolitical analysis (which ruling psychopath gets which part of the pie) will ever tell you. You may then produce analysis which resonate more with people outside of your corporate US media bubble who believes the problem is &quot;partisanship&quot; and &quot;fake news&quot;.<p>Greetings from France, another colonial empire who&#x27;s worked hand in hand with the USA (since before the USA was even a thing) to fuck up the lives of the entire (neo-)colonized world.