Watching the American arguments on Capitol Hill about the budget has been (for a foreigner) a dispiriting and banal experience. The arguments surrounding the life-blood of the American people (money) take place with hardly any real thought about what those people are suffering. It is not usual for us to think of American’s suffering, or of American poverty, but American poverty affects far more Americans than American prosperity.
Underneath the diet of the rich in our newspapers, magazines and TV are a large middle class who would be homeless within months if they ever stopped working. Underneath them are millions who barely know what it is to not have to worry about how to afford new shoes.
Yet politicians think the important thing is to score points against their political rivals and drive them from office because being in power is the only aim of their careers. And those who have different aims seem weak and indecisive. There is a very serious crisis in the USA in that its prominence as the leading country in the world has created a natural belief that its pre-eminence is due to something integral in the American dream. It isn’t. It is due to the exploitation over 300 years of an almost untouched continent that helped produce the greatest military in human history.
Without that there is no American dream. And that’s what has given every country pre-eminence that ever held any.