Being Loved Is Overrated
Good morning, America — the world hates you slightly less! They took a poll shortly after Obama’s election:
Views of the US showed improvements in Canada, Egypt, Ghana, India, Italy and Japan. But far more countries have predominantly negative views of America (12), than predominantly positive views (6). Most Europeans show little change and views of the US in Russia and China have grown more negative. On average, positive views have risen from 35 per cent to 40 per cent, but they are still outweighed by negative views (43%, down from 47%). [BBC]
And in other news, Europe (and South Korea, and Japan) still isn’t willing to help more in Afghanistan, which has a few more moments as “the good war” until the usual suspects start urging us to flee from that front, too. Ecuador just expelled someone from our embassy in Quito. Anne Applebaum points to a newly emerging school of “thought” — for now, emerging from a collection of cartoonish kooks in Russia and China, mostly — that the Obama presidency is a hoax by the hidden illuminati who really run America. And there’s always North Korea and Iran, for whom hatred of and tension with America are existential.
Here’s a prediction: two years from now, the world will still hate us. We will be hated as long as we are envied. We will be hated most, paradoxically, by many of those whose most ardent desire is to live here. It will take a little time for world opinion’s lowest common denominator to reconfigure its personalization of anti-Americanism around the figure of Barack Obama, which I suppose means that it will be heavily blended with some ancient old-world prejudices about our new President’s race. We’ve already seen some of this: a pro-government Iranian news agency called Obama a “house slave,” and the terrorist Ayman Zawahiri called Obama and other African-Americans who have served in our government “house negroes.”
Let me tell you a dirty secret about world public opinion. Try to research trends in the growth of global anti-Americanism, and you’ll notice something curious: perhaps because of the pollsters’ own assumptions or biases, most of the data only begin with the Iraq War. But in those relatively rare cases in which the assembled data go back to 2001, you can see that anti-Americanism really took off in Europe in 2001, before the Iraq War.
The conclusion is almost too ugly to contemplate: that European anti-Americanism became fashionable because of 9/11 and the events immediately thereafter, possibly to include the U.S. attack on the Taliban shortly thereafter. In Britain, Turkey, and Pakistan, for example, views of the U.S. declined more in the year after 9/11 than in any year since. Indeed, while it’s a popular myth that “the world rallied to our side” after 9/11, aside from a few politicians and editorialists, the evidence is the opposite: anti-Americanism rose dramatically after 9/11. In the Muslim world, a majority believed that the 9/11 attacks were “not carried out by Arabs” (so who then?). In Europe, a majority believed that the attacks were, as the expression goes, a case of the chickens coming home to roost. Anyone who was reading the opinion pages of The Guardian in those days will remember it all well enough. It is also true that anti-Americanism continued to rise through most of the Iraq War, though without acceleration, and didn’t begin to decline (modestly) until 2007, a year when more U.S. troops were sent to Iraq, but when America began to win the war. Overall, this doesn’t suggest that anti-Americanism is a function of America’s humbleness so much as the natural human tendencies toward envy, toward blaming victims, and toward taking the side of those perceived to be victors. It also suggests that Obama will eventually have to choose between the approval of those abroad who viscerally resent us and the approval of American voters. Place your bets.
I, for one, resolve to take perverse pleasure from documenting the end of the liberal illusion that Obama can make us loved again, and the greater illusion that it really matters.
Economic downturns come and go — but it seems to me what has made this one special – and by special meaning much worse than run-of-the-mill downturns – has been the collapse in the housing bubble and its crippling of banks — with both stemming much more from Democrat and liberal pet ideas than anything else.
The housing bubble is bigger than first-time buyers with shaky credit. It also includes homeowners who took out equity loans to finance remodeling or other projects and homeowners buying additional properties as investments or vacation homes. Savings as a percentage of annual income had plummeted to zero before the recession scared people into saving again. The average household owes about $12,000 in credit card debt. Our people, like our government, have been on an unsustainable spending spree over the past decade. Everyone knows that the economy is cyclical with periods of growth followed by a brief recession. While our economy was humming along over the past several years, households and the government should have been saving for the rainy day that is now here. Instead we were borrowing.
The recession has been worsed and the pain spread globally by the subprime crisis, whose origins lie not only in government regulations encouraging banks to make loans to credit-unworthy buyers but also by the changing mortage market. Instead of your hometown bank owning your mortgage, it is bundled with others and sold to some investment company. This means that there is no one to negotiate with if the homeowner should lose his job or otherwise get into trouble.
It is amusing to see critics of the stimulus plan howl about how our grandchildren will be paying for it. Who the heck do you think will be paying for the war we couldn’t afford for the last five years? Or the tax cuts and one-time rebate our government implemented while running a deficit? Guns and butter didn’t work for LBJ and it didn’t work for GWB, either. Borrowing against our future isn’t something new. We’ve been doing it as a people and a nation for years. If there is a silver lining to this economic storm cloud, perhaps it is that we will return to the sustainable lifestyles of our grandparents, buying homes as places to live, not investments to flip, and living within our means by paying with cash.
Hell, Obama’s only been on the job for 3 weeks.
It would be impossible to overturn 8 years of crap with one election ceremony in a 3 week period.
I’m not expecting a sudden swing from very unfavorable to very favorable, but if we can get from very unfavorable to somewhere around neutral to slightly unfavorable, terrorist groups will lose a lot of support.
Because nothing costs terrorists more support than surrendering to them!
But fortunately, I really don’t see many signs that Obama will leave Iraq or Afghanistan to genocide and terror. A lot of that “eight years of crap” will be with us until someone comes up with a better idea, and I’m still waiting to hear one.
“But fortunately, I really don’t see many signs that Obama will leave Iraq or Afghanistan to genocide and terror. A lot of that “eight years of crap†will be with us until someone comes up with a better idea, and I’m still waiting to hear one.”
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The tar baby argument. *sigh* Sadly, you are correct, Joshua, that Bush’s great legacy is his invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. We’ll never know what the present and future might look like if he had concentrated on the former and stayed out of the latter.
I can’t tell you how pleased the members of the Control Committee were at at the extent of their market penetration when they learned that you had read it from Adam Gadahn’s cave. Wolfowitz squealed like a little girl and the white cat on Perle’s lap hissed at him.
Seriously — I’d love to hear the King Baeksu solution to the world’s problems, just for the sheer entertainment value of it. Without your screeds on on this thread, I’m sure Hoju would say I was arguing against a cartoon strawman, and I’d have wasted as many as ten irreplaceable moments of my life at Democratic Underground or The Guardian. Thank you for being such a toon, Baeksu.
We’ll never know what the present and future might look like if he had concentrated on the former and stayed out of the latter.
Amen to that.