Don't Believe the Right's Maligning of America

If one listens to Fox News, a.k.a Faux News, and the majority of Republican officer holders and candidates, you would think America has turned into an utter hell hole and prospects for the future are bleak.  Sadly, much of the mainstream media prefers to focus on all things negative and/or to stir controversy by parroting Republican misinformation and endlessly stirring the political pot. Truth be told, America does face challenges, but the true picture is shockingly different than what the political right would have one believe.  The right's real problem is that despite gerrymandering and the rural state bias in the Electoral College, the right and its base are losing power and the ability to inflict their dogma on the majority despite the U.S. Supreme Court's recent rulings and state level Republican legislative efforts that seek to push the nation backwards in time on matters of race, LGBT rights and the freedom to vote. Yes, wealth disparities and GOP policies that have harmed the middle class are real problems, but as a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican lays out,  America is not the wasteland the GOP and its propaganda outlets would have you believe despite the GOP's continued reverse Robin Hood agenda.  Here are article highlights: 

As Americans celebrated the Fourth of July by watching baseball, fireworks, and Joey Chestnut hammering home his 16th win in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, poor Uncle Sam labored through the mid-summer celebration beleaguered and under siege from all sides. News items over the course of the holiday weekend reported that Americans were feeling more skeptical of their country’s future and less patriotic. Seventy-four percent believe America is headed in the wrong direction, and a great majority dread the presidential rematch America seems doomed to face.

The usual suspects, who once regularly delivered garrulous Eric Stratton–style defenses of all things American, are now scattered to the winds by the tumult of Trumpism. Neither the Capitol riot nor a barrage of indictments has stopped these hucksters from slavishly siding with Donald Trump in his attacks against the same American institutions that conservatives once defended against enemies real or imagined . . .

The opposing counsel’s bench will likewise be unhelpful, because it is packed with a motley crew of progressive politicians, left-wing think tankers, and journalists who are far more comfortable prosecuting claims against American greed, U.S. imperialism, and ruling-class dominance than mounting muscular defenses of America.

Rallying around the flag still comes off as a bit gauche at Berkeley barbecues and East Hampton clambakes. So Uncle Sam lumbers on through another sweltering July, poked and prodded by political hacks of all stripes.

Liberals once gained favor among their base by attacking the Pentagon’s top brass, but now it is Republican members of Congress who longingly swoon over Russia’s manly military while trashing U.S. generals and our men and women in uniform. Those GOP attacks come despite the fact that America’s military is more powerful today relative to the rest of the world than at any time since the Second World War.

Unlike in years past, American allies no longer grouse about the U.S. “leading from behind” or burrowing itself into a self-defeating “America First” hole. Instead, the U.S. is first among equals in a dynamic and expanding NATO alliance that just added a new member with more than 800 miles of Russian border, and that has provided a devastating response to Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Looking east, the United States has finally begun its pivot to Asia, strengthening military cooperation with Japan, the Philippines, Guam, South Korea, and Australia. The current disruption in U.S.-Sino relations may have less to do with spy balloons and diplomatic missteps than with Xi Jinping’s rational fear of being hemmed in by an increasingly muscular U.S. military presence surrounding the South China Sea.

The most significant U.S. geopolitical failure of late was the country’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, a move promised by the past three presidents and supported by 70 percent of Americans before the evacuation. Even after the chaos unfolded in Kabul, most Americans told pollsters they supported Biden’s decision to get U.S. troops out after 20 years. Be assured that nobody in Moscow or Beijing is still looking at the Afghanistan withdrawal in light of recent events and parroting Republican’s un-American talking point that our armed forces are “woke” and “weak.”

While we’re on the topic of the right’s meltdown over all things woke, the Republican Party’s hypocritical attacks against American colleges and universities display the same anti-institutional impulses.

Once again, the ideological tables have been turned. In the past, it was leftist radicals who rioted on college campuses and laid siege to university presidents’ offices. Now Trump-supporting rightists bravely pull themselves off their fainting couches to declare war against the same elite institutions from which they proudly graduated not so long ago.

Every year, American colleges and universities dominate rankings of the best schools in the world. Maybe that’s why some of the most powerful political and business leaders across the globe keep sending their children to American colleges. They do so for the same reason many Republican politicians with Ivy League degrees worked hard to get admitted into Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania years ago: because nobody in the world does higher education better than the United States of America.

All of this anti-American drivel coming from Trumpists can be tedious. But stay with me, because there’s much more to be said in America’s defense.

Childhood poverty has dropped to the lowest level on record; teenage pregnancy has done the same; the U.S. dollar has experienced generational highs over the past year; unemployment recently hit a 54-year low; the number of job openings this past year also hit record highs.

Overall, the U.S. economy continues to surge forward despite economists’ dire predictions. America’s GDP grew to $25 trillion last year; Texas has a bigger economy than Russia, and although California is routinely rebuked by right-wing critics, it has the fourth-strongest economy in the world—stronger than Britain’s, France’s, Canada’s, or India’s. The United States and its European allies collectively run an economic machine that doubles China’s stagnating output. Despite record debt levels, a stubborn case of inflation, and other structural challenges, American capitalism continues to drive and dominate the world economy.

All of this is not to say that the United States is free of challenges. Like any great power, we have our fair share of political and moral failings.

Our Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveholder, the government has yet to address what it owes to Native Americans, and the right of women to control their own bodies has been shattered by Supreme Court rulings and radical state legislation.

But it was American democracy that provided a swift political rebuke to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and led to right-wing defeats in red states such as Kansas, Kentucky, and Wisconsin. The political backlash to Roe’s demise has been so dramatic that even Ann Coulter and The Wall Street Journal editorial page now take exception to the GOP’s extreme abortion stance.

[Y]es, it’s true that a fulsome defense of Uncle Sam often requires dialectical thinking. But remember this: Even with all of its failings, America has fed and freed more human beings than any other country in history. And despite the blather that cable-news hosts spit at you daily, your country is doing pretty damn well.