Is the World Laughing at the United States?
Are they laughing? In a word, no. Quite the contrary.
Most of the Earth’s population has historically counted on the U.S. to do the right thing when it comes to things like human rights and rule of law, and they take this quite seriously.
That’s why, when I interviewed a bunch of Swedes during Trump’s first term in the White House, they all agreed, “Trump may have 6% or 8% support in Sweden, but the vast majority of us simply feel sorry for you. If a fascist had come to power in Ecuador or Mali, we would have said, ‘Well, what did you expect?’ But the United States of America? No one ever thought it could ever happen there.”
When Americans went to the polls earlier this week, the idea expressed in the meme here went from a real possibility to a pipe dream.
Now what? We can start by feeling sorry for many different groups of people, mostly here, but some abroad as well, who will experience terrible consequences of Trump’s re-election, either directly or indirectly.
When American actor (then called an “actress”) Katherine Hepburn made this statement in the middle of the 20th Century, it hit home with our country’s women. After all, how many females at the time could expect to live with the same rights and privileges as men?
The author of the meme needs to understand the use of apostrophes.
Perhaps the saddest single feature of our world today, and the United States in particular, is what we do with power.
Almost all Americans have a passionate interest in the outcome of today’s presidential election, but how many of us see these results as something that will be meticulously studied by historians over the coming decades?
It’s true that Trump supporters don’t care about morality, legality, or the truth. But almost half of these American voters do have things they care about very deeply: White Nationalism, the rejection of science, and the end of women’s rights.
At left is another good example of a “straw man fallacy,” one that occurs “when someone misrepresents an opponent’s argument in order to make it easier to attack and refute. The person using the fallacy pretends to be arguing against their opponent’s original position, but instead creates a distorted version of it that is easy to rebuke.”
As pointed out here, if Trump wins re-election, there will be no voices of reason and civility to prevent him from becoming just one more authoritarian dictator in our already-troubled world.
