Making of Trump: He’d reptilian genius for intuiting the emotions of Real America
When Donald Trump ran for president, the party of Free America collapsed into its own hollowness. The mass of Republicans were not free-traders who wanted corporate taxes zeroed out. They wanted government to do things that benefited them – not the undeserving classes below and above them. Party elites were...
Real America’s attitude toward the rest of the world is isolationist, hostile to humanitarianism
From its beginnings, Real America has also been religious and in a particular way: evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth will enter every simple heart and it doesn’t come in shades of grey. “If we have to give up either religion or education, we...
Espionage: The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good
In April 1943, Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was killed when the US Air Force shot down the plane carrying him to Balalae Airfield in the Solomon Islands. The attack was made possible by the USA cracking Japanese codes and decrypting a message that revealed Yamamoto’s flight plan would just take...
National loyalty: Real America has always been a country of white people
As a national narrative, Smart America has a tenuous sense of the nation. Smart America doesn’t hate America, which has been so good to the meritocrats. Smart Americans believe in institutions and they support American leadership of military alliances and international organisations. But Smart Americans are uneasy with patriotism. It’s...
In Smart America, new economy replaced ‘outmoded ideologies’ with dazzling technologies
Winners in Smart America have lost the capacity and the need for a national identity, which is why they can’t grasp its importance for others. Politically, Smart America came to be associated with the Democratic Party. This was not inevitable. If the party had refused to accept the closing of...
Free America always had an insurgent mindset, breaking institutions down, not building them up
The government, which did so little for ordinary Americans, was still the enemy, along with “governing elites.” But for the sinking working class, freedom lost whatever economic meaning it had once had. It was a matter of personal dignity, identity. Members of this class began to see trespassers everywhere and...
While the sunny narrative of Free America shone on, its policies drove adherents away
Two strands of conservative movement in the United States – elitist traditionalism and anti-communism – remained part of its DNA for half a century. Eventually the American people made their preference for taking pleasures where they wanted clear and the first faded, while the end of the Cold War rendered...
Americans no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history or meaning
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one – they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives...
US President Biden wants full probe into claims Covid-19 was bioengineered
As for finding an intermediate host animal, researchers in China have tested more than 80,000 wild and domesticated animals, but none have been positive for SARS-CoV-2. But this number is a tiny fraction of the animals in the country. To narrow the search down, researchers say, more strategic testing is...
Jupiter’s Ganymede, largest moon in solar system, looks amazing in NASA’s photos
On June 7, NASA’s Juno probe zoomed within just 1,038 kilometres of Jupiter’s enormous satellite Ganymede, which is bigger than the planet Mercury. It was the closest any probe had come to Ganymede since May 2000, when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft got within about 1,000 km of the moon’s icy surface....
