Das Amerika, das ich geliebt habe, ist weg
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/20/american-dream-trump-canada
Das Amerika, das ich geliebt habe, ist weg
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/20/american-dream-trump-canada
24 Kommentare
Everything that has changed can be undone by a single executive order. None of this nonsense has been legislated. If things snap back the other way we’ll, hopefully, see some real leadership and codification of what makes this country great.
>The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.
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>I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.
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>On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.
>The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?
>The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.
>The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.
Republicans happened
the sheer cruelty of americans today is a shock to the world
Donald Trump is a terrorist. He has destroyed our one and only country.
The USA downfall started with Raygun’s Trickle Down Economics plan. The rich don’t pay taxes and they want to keep it that way. Oligarchs have taken over just like in Russia. It’s over!
I still can’t believe that nearly 25 years after 9/11, this is where we are at. You always heard that America would destroy itself from the inside, I could’ve never fathomed it going about like this.
thank god I never loved america (didn’t hate it either but I admit trolling and making fun of americans has its charm) and as an outsider I came to the conclusion that america became great by a small minority that was altruistic enough not to claim credit and the rest thought that greatness was their own.
also I remember a piece from a seasoned political analyst, back in the 90s, that claimed that the fall of the USSR was the worst possible outcome for america and he explained why: the whole world would focus on america much more (as a sole superpower) and the big differences within america will explode as there is no external threat anymore to unite against.
The America we love isn’t here yet. We have to fight for it.
Worth the read.
I think I have to disagree here. Millions have come out for the Hands Off protests, hundreds of thousands so far have come out for the Fight Oligarchy tour. And let’s keep in mind Trump’s voters only make up about 25-30% of voters, and he hardly won a mandate in this last election when the numbers were finished.
The Dems need to learn how to control the narrative better. When Biden pulled all the troops from Afghanistan in 2022, that truly began the moment Republicans went wild with controlling the narrative and painting him as the villain, and they didn’t let off him til they took the White House back last year. I didn’t see the Dems pushback nearly as hard in saying Biden was following the deal Trump created with the Taliban before the end of his first term. I would have hammered that fact at every chance I got. Leaving Afghanistan was always going to be messy no matter when it happened, no president would escape that unscathed, but the Biden team just did not control that narrative effectively to minimize the impact.
From there the negative sentiment grew, I think. People didn’t like how that was managed, and they didn’t like how locked down things were for so long with COVID, and how inflation stayed high. The economy was cooking in general, but people didn’t feel it enough in their pocketbooks when they went grocery shopping, and that made them resentful. That’s not entirely on Biden, presidents don’t have magic red buttons on the Resolute Desk to lower prices, but he needed to control that narrative, too, by constantly talking about fighting artificial price gouging corporations were doing after COVID started winding down.
And really, he should have resigned himself to being a one termer, and been honest with himself that he came into the presidency very late in his life. I wish he would have spent way more time talking about being a transitional leader. There is just as much honor in knowing when to step away as there is when to step up.
Not condemning Israel and not saying what’s happening there is genocide also hurt the Dem party. You can say you love and support the people of Israel and condemn their government of committing genocide at the same time. That nuance is possible.
Having said all that, as long as those lessons are learned, they will be fine and go on to win future elections. I don’t think all is lost, they just didn’t play their hand well.
The america you loved never existed except in movies.
You always just had the privilege of not being the “enemy” of insane hateful white people like the rest of us.
The ambush on Zelenskyy in the White House was the moment I knew the America I grew up in was dead. I have grieved its loss, and am now ready to fight for something new.
I feel like this doomsaying is just frustrating to watch. Many countries have to deal with the potential rise of a dictator and many manage to depose them, knowing full well what the consequences may be even after they’ve begun to seize power.
The America I love, the one with the potential to continuously ascend to greatness, is still here. Many choose to fight this when some can very easily benefit, knowing that while they might not exactly be the chosen citizens or even the most fortunate, they still will lead far greater lives than whomever is the chosen enemy. Yet, we still have men and women from all walks of life that still answer to liberty.
Every country has its darkest moments and the true test of its citizenry is how well it responds to those moments, even when they have failed or have found themselves lacking when the occasion calls for action.
It is never too late to fight for your freedoms, the freedoms of others, and the liberties of those who will exist in the future.
My country is NOT dead. It will prevail. It will succeed. And, as always, the most evil among us will find that it will take more than the weak hands of a drug-addled, six time bankrupt, 78 year-old Nazi to pry my freedoms from my hands. Others have fought worse and we can excise this stain of a human from my country.
So, I’d appreciate some support for those haven’t rolled over and died at the inane bleating of the morons we call the GOP.
The illusion of freedom and the American dream has been destroyed. The curtain has been pulled back. We’re fully awake now.
Part of the disappointment is that wasn’t ever what you thought it was.
And always remember, it was Republicans that killed it.
It was never there in the first place.
The NYC I loved died with trump and ghouliani as did the SF I loved die with the likes of Musk and thiel. I tried warning who ever i could.
“The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences.”
Of course it would take a Canadian to really take our temperature.
Oh my god this is a really really good article. The old Americans dream is dead, we play with this concept in comedy like everyone laughs at George Carlin and we get this dopamine from being this aware of the state of affairs. But the flip side is that the unfathomably rich people also soaked this up and it kinda pissed them off (in some pathetic ways like Elon musk and his absolute circus of a personal life and abject misery of loosing his businesses, but also in tragic ways like Dark Kanye, who lost his mother just as he was about to start celebrating his success with her) so now we gotta watch them buy our politicians, smear doodoo on all our cultural symbols, artifacts of our liberals freedoms pissed on etc etc because they’re so upset that making all that beautiful money, meant fokol.
I don’t care what they do, I’ll die laughing at them for sure.
When biggie said, mo money, mo problems I genuinely heard him though. I took my time. Some people under estimated that wisdom. Not me hehe
Mine left on September 10th.
All that economic prosperity gone…literally the week I turned 18.
The American I loved is gone when gas hit $5 a gallon
Dead and buried.