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PAUL KELLY
Donald Trump exposes loss of American virtue
Illustration: Eric Lobbecke
Donald Trump should never have become the Republican nominee for president. His nomination and his campaign is the greatest failure of the Republicans and of American conservatism since World War II. The crisis has been decades in the making.
It is the culmination of a profound historical trend: the abandonment by the US ruling class, in particular the political class, of its responsibility to exemplify and uphold standards of character, integrity, competence and civility for the nation. The American ruling class seems hollow at its core and its public policy atrocities of the past 20 years now loom as a staircase to catastrophe.
This failure feeds on and reflects a parallel phenomenon — the loss among the American people of those qualities, habits and behaviour that made America different and exceptional for much of its history, seen, above all, in an expanding middle class whose values once dominated the nation.
Enter Joyce, a potential saviour
PETER VAN ONSELEN
Never mind The Donald
The crisis of the American community is economic and cultural. The signs of sickness abound in the growth of a rich, self-interested elite, richer, more aloof and more isolated than ever from the people; an expanding underclass entrenched in intergenerational deprivation; the weakening of middle-class prosperity and optimism; the loss of US capability and ingenuity to tackle its problems from jobs to drugs to obesity to poor schools; the debasement and coarsening of a culture drunk on fatuous celebrity and a reality TV circus; and the rise of an indulgent, divisive, victimhood brand of identity politics.
America is a country that has been fooling itself. For years its politicians, Left and Right, have been extolling the superiority of the American model while that model was unravelling in front of them.
The warning issued by US writer Charles Murray in his penetrating 2012 book, Coming Apart, is now loaded with prescience. Murray’s thesis was that America over the past 50 years had grown into two different societies: a new upper class and a new lower class in a betrayal of the founding fathers’ ideals.
For Murray, “a significant and growing portion of the American population is losing the virtues required to be functioning members of a free society” while the thriving elites were “scratching one another’s backs”, exploiting and entrenching their privileges and “rigging the game but within the law” — the exact accusation made by a hypocritical Trump.
Murray said America would stay rich but on current trends it was “leaving its heritage behind”. This was the civic religion identified from the American Revolution onwards in which liberty and public virtue sustained each other in a way that made America unique. “We may continue to have a president and a congress and a Supreme Court,” Murray said four years ago. “But everything that makes America exceptional will have disappeared.”
The polarisation of US politics reflects an infantilisation of the culture. In Trump’s case it is the seduction of authoritarianism, arising from the failure of conventional politics and the lure of a strong man on horseback equipped with state power pledging to solve all your problems. “I alone can fix it,” he boasts in the chant of the demagogue down the ages.
There is a direct correlation between the numbers prepared to vote for him and the loss of faith in the American project. Trump symbolises the betrayal of the founding American ideal. The most startling story is the sheer ease with which Trump hijacked, trashed and corrupted American conservatism.
Deeply aware of the historical crisis that Trump symbolises for America, columnist George F. Will wrote: “Conservatism’s recovery from his piratical capture of the conservative party will require facing unflattering factors about a country that currently is indifferent to its founding.” Echoing Murray’s earlier warning, Will called for a recognition that “whatever remains of American exceptionalism does not immunise this nation from decay to which all regimes are susceptible”.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opi...e/news-story/b9a1c295a4536bb9b9fd3cba0162d21c
Mod Edit: Please do not post entire articles, also, you need to include some original content in your opening post.
Donald Trump exposes loss of American virtue
Illustration: Eric Lobbecke
- PAUL KELLY
- The Australian
- 12:00AM October 15, 2016
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Donald Trump should never have become the Republican nominee for president. His nomination and his campaign is the greatest failure of the Republicans and of American conservatism since World War II. The crisis has been decades in the making.
It is the culmination of a profound historical trend: the abandonment by the US ruling class, in particular the political class, of its responsibility to exemplify and uphold standards of character, integrity, competence and civility for the nation. The American ruling class seems hollow at its core and its public policy atrocities of the past 20 years now loom as a staircase to catastrophe.
This failure feeds on and reflects a parallel phenomenon — the loss among the American people of those qualities, habits and behaviour that made America different and exceptional for much of its history, seen, above all, in an expanding middle class whose values once dominated the nation.
Enter Joyce, a potential saviour
PETER VAN ONSELEN
Never mind The Donald
The crisis of the American community is economic and cultural. The signs of sickness abound in the growth of a rich, self-interested elite, richer, more aloof and more isolated than ever from the people; an expanding underclass entrenched in intergenerational deprivation; the weakening of middle-class prosperity and optimism; the loss of US capability and ingenuity to tackle its problems from jobs to drugs to obesity to poor schools; the debasement and coarsening of a culture drunk on fatuous celebrity and a reality TV circus; and the rise of an indulgent, divisive, victimhood brand of identity politics.
America is a country that has been fooling itself. For years its politicians, Left and Right, have been extolling the superiority of the American model while that model was unravelling in front of them.
The warning issued by US writer Charles Murray in his penetrating 2012 book, Coming Apart, is now loaded with prescience. Murray’s thesis was that America over the past 50 years had grown into two different societies: a new upper class and a new lower class in a betrayal of the founding fathers’ ideals.
For Murray, “a significant and growing portion of the American population is losing the virtues required to be functioning members of a free society” while the thriving elites were “scratching one another’s backs”, exploiting and entrenching their privileges and “rigging the game but within the law” — the exact accusation made by a hypocritical Trump.
Murray said America would stay rich but on current trends it was “leaving its heritage behind”. This was the civic religion identified from the American Revolution onwards in which liberty and public virtue sustained each other in a way that made America unique. “We may continue to have a president and a congress and a Supreme Court,” Murray said four years ago. “But everything that makes America exceptional will have disappeared.”
The polarisation of US politics reflects an infantilisation of the culture. In Trump’s case it is the seduction of authoritarianism, arising from the failure of conventional politics and the lure of a strong man on horseback equipped with state power pledging to solve all your problems. “I alone can fix it,” he boasts in the chant of the demagogue down the ages.
There is a direct correlation between the numbers prepared to vote for him and the loss of faith in the American project. Trump symbolises the betrayal of the founding American ideal. The most startling story is the sheer ease with which Trump hijacked, trashed and corrupted American conservatism.
Deeply aware of the historical crisis that Trump symbolises for America, columnist George F. Will wrote: “Conservatism’s recovery from his piratical capture of the conservative party will require facing unflattering factors about a country that currently is indifferent to its founding.” Echoing Murray’s earlier warning, Will called for a recognition that “whatever remains of American exceptionalism does not immunise this nation from decay to which all regimes are susceptible”.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opi...e/news-story/b9a1c295a4536bb9b9fd3cba0162d21c
Mod Edit: Please do not post entire articles, also, you need to include some original content in your opening post.
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