"The United States is no longer a model for other countries to envy, emulate, or admire. The pandemic, and the American government’s response to it, has laid bare a society marked by deep inequality and a state sapped of its basic capacity after decades of neoliberal reform."

"The prevailing views inside the United States and out are increasingly converging: this country is a failure. A decrepit private health care system, a pathetic social safety net, and enduring racialized class inequalities, it turns out, add up to disaster."

"For the right wing, the greater the distance between American promise and American existence, the more extreme the conspiratorial explanation must become."

jacobinmag.com/2020/09/joe-biden-imperialism-trump-america/

"It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependence of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed." - Kropotkin, Mutual Aid

https://truthout.org/articles/david-graeber-left-us-a-parting-gift-his-thoughts-on-kropotkins-mutual-aid/

"William F. Buckley bequeathed the right the ability to disguise cheap, fallacious talking points as reasonable arguments. He is best remembered as the creator of contemporary pseudo-intellectualism. His model is not one we should wish to see revived."

currentaffairs.org/2020/09/how-to-be-a-respectable-public-intellectual/

Right-wing storytellers engaged a tried-and-true strategy linking two potent symbols: the scarecrow — who to fear — and the scapegoat — who to blame.

Build up fear. Give it a name. Put a face to the name. Blame the face. Attack the face. Rouse the followers to do the same. Repeat as necessary.

Keep the loyal followers continually terrified — and always on alert.

Conservative anxiety is activated primarily through three scarecrows, each of which provide many targets for blame:
1) They Will Take Our Safety
2) They Will Take Our Liberty
3) They Will Take Our Culture

https://truthout.org/articles/the-right-wing-worldview-is-one-of-scarecrows-and-scapegoats/

#video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Y4Nd0AJcE

"9/11 was a godsend for an increasingly adrift American Empire. The emergence of a “radical Islamic threat” allowed American foreign policymakers to return to the Schmittian logic that had triumphed during the Cold War: similar to the evil Soviets, elites argued, evil “jihadists” promoted a totalizing ideology and wanted to dominate the entire globe. The United States we live in today, with its domestic surveillance, its permanent mobilization, and its endless wars, is the natural outcome of a way of thinking that divides geopolitics into good versus evil."

"One of the most important projects to which leftists can dedicate themselves in 2020 and beyond is threat deflation—persuading their fellow citizens that we’re actually extremely safe and have nothing to fear from terrorists, or Russia, or China, or whomever the next enemy is. While this won’t be enough to end US imperialism, it’s a crucial first step in building the public consensus necessary to begin drawing down the American Empire. Indeed, it’s especially important to move beyond a Schmittian framework given that the United States needs to cooperate with Russia and China to solve global problems like climate change, inequality, and—as is particularly apparent at the moment—pandemics."

https://fx.substack.com/p/the-american-empire-and-existential