We all have experiences and memories in life that make each of us unique humans, unlike anyone else on the planet, living, dead, or yet to Be. And so, from my perspective as one who, as a boy growing up in America, lived through the period of The Third Reich and its NSDAP era with the brown-shirt storm troopers beating up people on the streets, and eventually the Gestapo and Germany's expansive aggression and mind-boggling cruelty in warfare; and witnessed our discoveries about the Holocaust and its horrors - - these are things I recall that are part of what makes me who I am. You are different, you don't have the same things in your head, and so you don't necessarily understand how I'm feeling these days - - distressed beyond measure as I see and read about and hear about political upheavals going on in Western democracies where people don't have the past that I have. It's distress so keen, unto despair except for my being thankful that I lived when I did and will not experience the collapse of what I and my generation and the generations before me knew as America to be loved, almost deified.
It isn't that people have forgotten, it's that people never knew, and now they are going to experience. I'm so glad to have Been when I Was. I'm so sad for you because of where you are taking things, and America; same with folks in other democracies that America tried so hard to export and share with the rest of the world. For a while, it even seemed that it was aborning in Russia.
We don't have to agree, and indeed we do not agree. Our politics are so very different, even opposite. Our religion is totally different - - mine is neither better nor worse than yours, it's just that my Christian venture into Seek The Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will has taken me, moved me, to new places, discoveries, realizations. Politics-wise and patriotism-wise, I remember My Lai as a horrifying Epiphany and corrective: we were never what I thought we were. You and me, our points of reference are so different. We are not the same, our values are not even woven into the same fabric. Our hopes and expectations - - mine have collapsed and yours are winning, have won, will prevail. I am so sad for you. What comes to mind this morning after having read the WorldView piece below? Well, the song, "O Danny Boy,
The pipes, the pipes are calling ... it's you, it's you must go and I must bide."
Where I have been was brighter than anything you will ever know.
T89&c
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|  | | with Kelsey Baker |
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| German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during a news conference Tuesday in Berlin. (Liesa Johannssen/Reuters) |
Almost everywhere you look, there are grim tidings for center-left parties in the West. In a month, the Democrats will find themselves shunted out of the U.S. executive branch, in opposition in both chambers of the legislature and stuck with a judicial apparatus led by a right-wing majority Supreme Court. In Britain, the honeymoon for the recently elected Labour government lasted just a matter of weeks, as its approval tanked amid political missteps and factional infighting. In France, President Emmanuel Macron is grappling with a dysfunctional parliament where his liberal and centrist allies are beholden to the whims of an ascendant far-right faction. On Monday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, lost a confidence vote in the country’s parliament, paving the way for elections in February that will likely see his party’s vote share significantly shrink. The outcome was not unexpected, and reflected mounting popular dissatisfaction with Scholz’s collapsed coalition government and deepening despair over the state of the country’s stagnating economy and politics. The German leader famously cast the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a historic “turning point” for his nation and Europe as a whole, but is seen by critics as failing to grapple with the new realities of the moment.  |
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That same day across the pond, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saw his top lieutenant, finance minister Chrystia Freeland, quit the cabinet. Freeland, a former high-profile journalist turned stalwart Trudeau ally for the better part of a decade, pulled few punches in her letter to the prime minister, in which she seemed to warn him about not preparing adequately for the looming threat of tariffs imposed on Canadian exports by the incoming U.S. administration of President-elect Donald Trump. “The abrupt resignation is the greatest challenge yet to Trudeau’s leadership,” my colleague Amanda Coletta wrote. “The embattled prime minister, elected in 2015, has seen his popularity nosedive over the past year amid economic torpor, a nationwide housing shortage and voter fatigue. If federal elections were held today, polls project, his Liberal Party would be wiped out.” In Canada and Germany, Trump’s return casts a shadow. His browbeating populist style and right-wing nationalism has been echoed by opponents of Trudeau’s minority government in Ottawa and the far-right Alternative for Germany, which polls show may emerge the second-biggest party in parliament after Germany’s next federal elections — a result that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Though their contexts are different, Scholz and Trudeau are politically tethered to a liberal establishment in the West that is in pronounced retreat. The values that undergirded it, including an embrace of the virtues of globalization, multiculturalism and environmentalism, are under siege to varying extents across Western democracies, and increasingly seen as the aloof dogma of an entrenched elite that hasn’t adequately reckoned with the concerns of ordinary citizens. “The Liberal government has not just wasted money,” noted an editorial in the Globe and Mail, a leading Canadian daily, which decried years of “narrow, partisan” rule. “Much worse, it has wasted time, long before the question of Trump’s tariffs arose. The housing shortage, now afflicting major cities, will take years to relieve. The stresses in the immigration system continue to build as the government contemplates quarter-measures.” It’s unclear if their right-wing opponents have the right solutions, but voting publics across the West are eager for change and more open to anti-system politics. Trump’s bulldozing approach toward his northern neighbor, analysts suggested, is aimed at upsetting an apple cart that was already tilting over. “Trump is a disrupter, and has less of an ideological agenda than he does to disrupt, dismantle and upset a stable political system,” Jonathan Rose, head of the political science department at Queen’s University in Canada, told the Guardian. “And that’s what he’s doing here. The lesson for other countries is to manage negotiations with a bully carefully.” |
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau listens to Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland during a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, in 2018. (Chris Wattie/Reuters) |
Despite calls for his resignation, Trudeau aims to stay in office until elections, slated to be held at the latest by next October. Scholz, meanwhile, will carry on in his lame duck role and lead his embattled Social Democrats in the next election. The resurgent center-right Christian Democrats are in pole position to form the next government, possibly with Scholz’s party relegated as a junior partner. Germany’s troubles transcend any one faction. Scholz came to power as part of three-party coalition with the Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats. Internal disagreements over economic and financial policy cratered the coalition, and all three parties are expected to fare poorly in February. As in many countries in Europe, more ordinary German voters are drifting to the far right and, to a lesser extent, the far left. For Germany’s political establishment, the challenge may be structural. “Scholz could not forge unity in his party or the public,” James Bindenagel, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany and visiting distinguished fellow at the German Marshall Fund, told my colleague Kate Brady. “He did not successfully manage the country’s three critical dependencies: cheap Russian energy, Chinese markets and American security.” Jan Techau, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, said the squabbles that brought Scholz down are “a symptom of a broader economic crisis that has undermined competitiveness, growth, and tax revenue” in Germany, which has “high labor and energy costs and a high reliance on exports, especially to China.” That overreliance on the Chinese market has become a weakness, as China’s economy has grown and evolved to start competing with German industry and its major exporters. The uncertainty and frailty wracking Europe’s biggest economy follows a moment in Trump’s first term when Berlin, under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, styled itself a bulwark of the liberal order. The confidence of the Merkel era has faded into self-doubt, with Germans in angst about their country’s sluggish growth and new vulnerabilities to open war on the continent. “The collapse of Germany’s government comes at an awkward and fragile moment for the world,” noted Post columnist Marc Fisher. “It’s especially unnerving because, whether they like it or not, the Germans have become a vital symbol of stability for the West — a model of what the U.S.-led community of nations can achieve.” ++++++++++++ I will leave this on Facebook for a couple hours, then move it to archives. T |
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