{"id":47177,"date":"2019-07-11T07:29:31","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T12:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47177"},"modified":"2019-07-11T07:29:34","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T12:29:34","slug":"tomgram-dilip-hiro-american-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47177","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, American Decline"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, American Decline<\/a>\u00a0<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Did Donald Trump just make his first genuine mistake in the race for reelection in 2020? As I wrote<\/a> during the 2016 campaign, The Donald had one striking distinction. He was the only candidate (or essentially American politician) of that moment who didn\u2019t feel obliged to claim that the U.S. was not just great but the greatest of all powers, ever. In a single speech<\/a>, his opponent Hillary Clinton managed to call the U.S. \u201cthe greatest country on Earth,\u201d \u201can exceptional nation,\u201d and \u201cthe indispensable nation\u201d that possessed \u201cthe greatest military\u201d ever and she was hardly atypical when it came to American politics then. Trump\u2019s claim was that he would make the country great again<\/em>; in other words, he was our first declinist candidate<\/a> for president, the only one who claimed that the country wasn\u2019t then beyond compare. And that message — including, for instance, his claims that a \u201cdepleted<\/a>\u201d U.S. military, driven beyond its limits by its twenty-first-century forever wars, was a \u201cdisaster<\/a>\u201d and its \u201cgenerals… reduced to rubble<\/a>\u201d — rang a distinct bell in the heartland. It arguably won him the election by convincing enough white working-class voters, who already sensed their world in decline, that he was their man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was then, this is… well, consider the slogan the president recently tried out at the\u00a0Florida rally<\/a>\u00a0he used to launch his reelection campaign: not \u201cMake America Great Again,\u201d but \u201cKeep America Great,\u201d or KAG. In other words, he tossed the \u201cagain\u201d out the window and with it his declinist claim about the country. The implication, of course, was that, under his supervision, America had indeed become \u201cgreat again.\u201d As he told NBC\u2019s Chuck Todd in a\u00a0recent interview<\/a>, \u201cMy economy is phenomenal. We have now the best economy, maybe in the history of our country… [W]hen I took over, this country, the economy was ready to collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, American Decline\u00a0 Did Donald Trump just make his first genuine mistake in the race for reelection in 2020? As I wrote during the 2016 campaign, The Donald had one striking distinction. He was the only candidate (or essentially American politician) of that moment who didn\u2019t feel obliged to claim that the U.S. was not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[26242,13277,6463,827],"class_list":["post-47177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-american-decline","tag-dilip-hiro","tag-tom-dispatch","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47177"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47178,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47177\/revisions\/47178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}