By Philip Giraldi
It is sometimes difficult to absorb how much the United States has changed in the past twenty years, and not for the better. When I was in grade school in the 1950s there was a favorite somewhat simplistic saying much employed by teachers to illustrate the success of the American way of life that prevailed at that time. It went âWhatâs good for General Motors is good for Americaâ and it meant that the U.S. version of a robust and assertive capitalist economy generated opportunity and prosperity for the entire nation. Today, having witnessed the devastation and offshoring of the domestic manufacturing economy by those very same corporate managers, such an expression would be rightly sneered at and considered risible.
Currently the politically motivated expressions of national greatness tend to honor Americaâs quality rather than the jobs and prosperity that it is able to generate. Presidents speak of the countryâs âExceptionalism,â as well as it being a âforce for goodâ and âleader of the free worldâ with all that implies. That Americans are now in fact both poorer and less safe has generated its own national myth, that of a country beleaguered by terrorists who despise âour freedomâ and which has been stabbed in the back by others, mostly in Asia, who have been engaging in unfair practices to bring America down. President Joe Bidenâs gang of apologists has as well been fixated on the positive assertions that âAmerica is backâ and that the president will âbuild back better,â surely meaningless expressions that reflect the vacuity of the Democratic Party pre-electoral hype that Donald Trump had led the country to perdition.