I hate to be a stick in the mud, but it seems I'm not a fan of the Sydney Morning Herald. The last piece I read from it struck me as hypocritical, and this one is mostly fluff - once you strip...
I hate to be a stick in the mud, but it seems I'm not a fan of the Sydney Morning Herald. The last piece I read from it struck me as hypocritical, and this one is mostly fluff - once you strip away the embellishments, all it really says is "American democracy is in decline". That's not really a novel opinion or an interesting take, and the author makes no attempt to explore the history of how the US reached its current point, how it compares to Australia specifically, or especially what any possible solutions are, which I think would add a lot more meat to this. (I'm not dissing you or your worth as a content submitter to be clear, just the content of the article).
There are also a couple points the author makes that I think are nonsensical or misrepresentative:
Some 40 million Americans thrown out of work in the last couple of months.
Yes, because we're hit with a pandemic like much of the rest of the world. That's not a failure of democracy anymore than mass unemployment after a hurricane is. How these people get back to work is the standard to judge by if anything, and we won't know for a couple years how that goes.
Race riots descending into chaos in America's major cities.
That's an incredibly tone-deaf thing to say. Many of the protestors come from across the racial spectrum and are protesting police brutality in general. This isn't a "blacks vs whites" thing like the author implies. In some places, we've also seen far-right or conservative rabble rousers pretending to be protestors join in and start looting, so not all of them are even doing it for the ideological cause.
The dry tinder piles up. The dreadful race riots of the 1960s should have been a catalyst for fundamental reform but turned out to a premonition of race-based rage to come. As Serena Williams says: "The worst part is this is nothing new, it’s just filmed."
This paragraph right here honestly makes my blood boil. "Should have been"? For christ's sake, it led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964! The piece of legislation that led to the guarantee of protection against discrimination by race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and national origin! It's one of the single most influential pieces of legislation in American history. The US before the 1960's, especially in the south, was a rather strict racially based class society, complete with segregated facilities and lack of job opportunities for minorities. To pretend as if there's been no progress since then, and that those reforms were inconsequential, is spitting on their huge significance in modern society. There's a ways to go, but this is downright trivializing decades of progress and implies to me the author has an incredibly tenuous grasp on how vast the differences here have been in the last several decades.
America's problems are not intrinsic to liberal democracy. They are American failures. Above and beyond any single US problem is the system that is supposed to fix problems – its political system. When a country's political system fails, its problem-solving mechanism fails. The US today is in such a poor state because its biggest problems never get solved – they just accumulate
And so the tinder accumulates. Racism, inequality, disadvantage, third-world health care systems, convulsive economic growth. More guns won't help. Every one of these is a failure of US politics, often a result of over-politicisation.
This pretty much sums up why I don't like the article right here. Earlier, the author states that these are uniquely American problems, and yet apparently includes racism, inequality, and economic disadvantage in there. These are not American problems, these are issues in every country to some degree or another, and Australia of all countries has struggled, and continues to struggle with, these same problems. I also bristle at the labeling of America's health care system as third world - for all its faults, it has over 91% coverage of the American public and is the home to much of the world's cutting edge medical technology. A third world system would be Bangladesh's, a system that isn't able to provide for the majority of its own people, and is largely unable to cope with complex sicknesses or diseases. For the author to equate the two shows a significant lack of perspective in what a failed healthcare system actually looks like.
The second amendment, it seems, is incapable ever of being amended.
...Yes, as anyone who's looked into the basics of American politics should know. Australia's constitution can be amended by gaining simple majorities in a simple majority of states in addition to a simple majority in a nationwide referendum. To amend the American Constitution, you need a 2/3 majority in each House of Congress, and ratification in 3/4 of the states in the country. If the author is expecting this to change, then he fundamentally misunderstands the American legal system and how the Constitution relates to Americans, in much the same way my pondering of "Why don't the British just repeal the monarchy?" would show a fundamental misunderstanding of how deep the British monarchy is embedded in Great Britain's legal system.
And while the guns get bigger and more numerous, what of the butter? The US economy does produce strong bursts of growth, but in a convulsive cycle. It has suffered three recessions to Australia's one.
The US's economy is far more global than Australia's, and is largely reflective of (or a precursor to) the rest of the world's economic state. Our roughly 1 recession per decade is pretty par for the course. Australia has enjoyed tremendous market stability because its primary trading partner, China, has also enjoyed tremendous growth. That doesn't mean Australia's model is inherently better though - if China were to go under, or China decided to get a lot tougher on Australia, then Australia doesn't really have much recourse and that prosperity would evaporate quite quickly.
Occasional recessions also aren't inherently a bad thing, and Australia in particular has had a bad case of sustained growth being so high that people have had to leverage themselves with extreme personal debt in order to keep the same economic position. The average American has $90,000 of personal debt, while the average Australian has over $250,000, despite the US' GDP per capita being 20% higher. Far from pointing to a weak American economy, it suggests that Australia's is highly over leveraged and long overdue for a correction.
I hate to be a stick in the mud, but it seems I'm not a fan of the Sydney Morning Herald. The last piece I read from it struck me as hypocritical, and this one is mostly fluff - once you strip away the embellishments, all it really says is "American democracy is in decline". That's not really a novel opinion or an interesting take, and the author makes no attempt to explore the history of how the US reached its current point, how it compares to Australia specifically, or especially what any possible solutions are, which I think would add a lot more meat to this. (I'm not dissing you or your worth as a content submitter to be clear, just the content of the article).
There are also a couple points the author makes that I think are nonsensical or misrepresentative:
Yes, because we're hit with a pandemic like much of the rest of the world. That's not a failure of democracy anymore than mass unemployment after a hurricane is. How these people get back to work is the standard to judge by if anything, and we won't know for a couple years how that goes.
That's an incredibly tone-deaf thing to say. Many of the protestors come from across the racial spectrum and are protesting police brutality in general. This isn't a "blacks vs whites" thing like the author implies. In some places, we've also seen far-right or conservative rabble rousers pretending to be protestors join in and start looting, so not all of them are even doing it for the ideological cause.
This paragraph right here honestly makes my blood boil. "Should have been"? For christ's sake, it led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964! The piece of legislation that led to the guarantee of protection against discrimination by race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and national origin! It's one of the single most influential pieces of legislation in American history. The US before the 1960's, especially in the south, was a rather strict racially based class society, complete with segregated facilities and lack of job opportunities for minorities. To pretend as if there's been no progress since then, and that those reforms were inconsequential, is spitting on their huge significance in modern society. There's a ways to go, but this is downright trivializing decades of progress and implies to me the author has an incredibly tenuous grasp on how vast the differences here have been in the last several decades.
This pretty much sums up why I don't like the article right here. Earlier, the author states that these are uniquely American problems, and yet apparently includes racism, inequality, and economic disadvantage in there. These are not American problems, these are issues in every country to some degree or another, and Australia of all countries has struggled, and continues to struggle with, these same problems. I also bristle at the labeling of America's health care system as third world - for all its faults, it has over 91% coverage of the American public and is the home to much of the world's cutting edge medical technology. A third world system would be Bangladesh's, a system that isn't able to provide for the majority of its own people, and is largely unable to cope with complex sicknesses or diseases. For the author to equate the two shows a significant lack of perspective in what a failed healthcare system actually looks like.
...Yes, as anyone who's looked into the basics of American politics should know. Australia's constitution can be amended by gaining simple majorities in a simple majority of states in addition to a simple majority in a nationwide referendum. To amend the American Constitution, you need a 2/3 majority in each House of Congress, and ratification in 3/4 of the states in the country. If the author is expecting this to change, then he fundamentally misunderstands the American legal system and how the Constitution relates to Americans, in much the same way my pondering of "Why don't the British just repeal the monarchy?" would show a fundamental misunderstanding of how deep the British monarchy is embedded in Great Britain's legal system.
The US's economy is far more global than Australia's, and is largely reflective of (or a precursor to) the rest of the world's economic state. Our roughly 1 recession per decade is pretty par for the course. Australia has enjoyed tremendous market stability because its primary trading partner, China, has also enjoyed tremendous growth. That doesn't mean Australia's model is inherently better though - if China were to go under, or China decided to get a lot tougher on Australia, then Australia doesn't really have much recourse and that prosperity would evaporate quite quickly.
Occasional recessions also aren't inherently a bad thing, and Australia in particular has had a bad case of sustained growth being so high that people have had to leverage themselves with extreme personal debt in order to keep the same economic position. The average American has $90,000 of personal debt, while the average Australian has over $250,000, despite the US' GDP per capita being 20% higher. Far from pointing to a weak American economy, it suggests that Australia's is highly over leveraged and long overdue for a correction.