To the World, We're Now America the Racist and Pitiful

[babylonsister]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/to-the-world-were-now-america-the-racist-and-pitiful

To the World, We’re Now America the Racist and Pitiful
By Robin Wright
July 3, 2020

snip//

The Trump Administration’s ineptitude in handling the COVID-19 crisis, as well as the President’s disdain for longstanding allies and international treaties, have compounded the damage to America’s image. A second poll, released last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations, reported that public perceptions of the United States are increasingly negative in virtually all of the European nations surveyed. In France, the country that backed the American Revolution and later donated the Statue of Liberty, forty-six per cent of the people polled said that their opinion of the U.S. has “worsened a lot.” The proportion of respondents who still view America as a key ally is “vanishingly small”—as low as six per cent in Italy.

America’s standing worldwide has sunk before, although usually over foreign-policy decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The mood globally feels different now, Richard Burkholder, who was the director of Gallup’s international polling for decades, told me. Criticism is now focused on American practices at home. “The United States was once a beacon,” he said. “I don’t see people looking up to us as they did before.” Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for the Irish Times, was blunter. “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” he wrote, in April. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

snip//

The sorry state of America’s political and physical health ripples across the globe. The United States, long the bedrock of the Western alliance, is less inspirational today—and perhaps will be even less so tomorrow. “The United States has traditionally had an ability to reinvent itself,” Mark Leonard, the co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “The brutality of the American political system—where entire élites get kicked out whenever there is a change of party at the top—has led to resilience historically. What you see now are structural problems much more difficult to solve.” He added that inequality is so “deeply baked”—in education, property and the economy, job opportunities, gerrymandering of voting districts, policing and justice, and the media—that America is now a “toxic brew” of problems. “That means there’s not much bandwidth in America for thinking about anything other than its culture wars,” he said.

This Fourth of July holiday is one of the most humbling in our history. Even at the height of world wars or the Great Depression, America inspired. But, today, the United States is destroying the moral authority it once had. There will still be fireworks. And the Statue of Liberty still towers over New York Harbor. But it is harder today to convince others that Americans embrace—or practice—the ideals that Lady Liberty represents.

[soothsayer]

1. We'll restore things, but at the moment that's spot on

[Buckeye_Democrat]

2. Look away! We're hideous!

[Alacritous Crier]

6. 😂

[Buckeye_Democrat]

9. You caught the reference!

I'm impressed!

[minidriver]

3. Waiting for tinyhand drumpf to propose

replacing the Statue of Liberty with a statue of a fat white redneck dude complete with confederate belt buckle and waving a shotgun.
I had left to visit my relatives in Canada around this time since drumpf took over the office, but not this year.

[johnp3907]

4. We always were.

Don’t believe the hype.

[babylonsister]

5. I disagree. Some presidents

had the respect of the majority of the rest of the world and tried to work with them. The differences are stark.

[lunasun]

7. Can't shake the disease . Have pity on us world about 30-40% are very sick and doing everything

they can to drag the country lower everyday now.

[Ferrets are Cool]

8. I tend to believe not pitiful as much HORRIBLE.