What happened in 2012? Gosh! Good question! I’ve been telling everyone*** “the population of the U.S. have more rights, more freedom, and more democratic principles than ever before … and it just keeps getting better!”*** At least I think that was me who said it? Boy was I wrong, huh! :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
International Democracy Index rankings are pretty goofy that way. They rank the things you’d expect: electoral process, civil liberties, etc - but also things like “political culture” that amount to a value judgment on what a democracy should look like. I’m more on your side: as long as the government is carrying out the will of the people, even if that’s polarizing and ugly, then that government is a democracy. Otherwise, you’re judging the people, not the government.
Well, I quoted you what the IDF report said to justify the ranking. If you want to break it down further, from 2010 to 2012:
“Electoral process and pluralism” was unchanged.
“Functioning of government” dropped from 7.86 to 7.5.
“Political participation” was unchanged.
“Political culture” was unchanged.
“Civil liberties” was unchanged.
So, to you, this justifies a conclusion that American rights, freedoms, and democratic principles are waning?
OK.
Not at all. I’m sure the Index is just a misunderstanding or a typographical error and the 25 nations listed above the U.S. is due to a Microsoft Word virus that shifted the list incorrectly at the very moment it was published.
Any insights at all on what they said?
I’ll try again, I guess: do you understand that the IDF report bases their rankings on five different categories?
Congratulations guys, you have discovered the post-WW2 migration to the suburbs. :rolleyes:
It is true that the City of Detroit has lost 800,000 people since 1960, of that there is no doubt. However, metropolitan Detroit has gained from 3.7 to 4.3 million since then.
What you had in Detroit was mirrored in other US cities as well. The city of Cleveland peaked at 914k in 1950, is now just under 400k (a greater % loss than Detroit and a better example for your argument, actually. On the other hand, metropolitan Cleveland has grown from 2.2 million to 2.8 million in the same period.
I’m truly stunned that the population decline of a political entity as small as a city (disregarding the population growth of the areas surrounding it) is cited as a reason why the US is a banana republic when:
- The US population grew from 190 million to 320 million in the same period*
- The German population peaked at 82.5 million and has now lost 800k souls (the same as Detroit!) and is down to 81.7 million. Are the Germans a banana republic because the entire country is losing population?
- Berlin peaked at 4.3 million and is now at 3.4 million. Banana Republic?
Y’all got to do better than this.
*BTW, apropos of nothing, I knew the kid who kicked the census counter to 200,000,000. I went to school with him in Chamblee, GA, and he was born a few months after me. Nice guy, played baseball, smart, and appeared in a number of ads - for years I kept a clipping of him in a Maytag magazine ad made while we went to school together.
Yawn. Yet another list that shows the US in the mix with a bunch of European countries: lower than Scandinavia, statistically insignificant from others, and above still others.
Somehow I’m supposed to accept that the US is a BR because it ranks 21st on a subjective list, but at #28 (tied with renowned democratic powerhouse Slovenia) France is not?
Congratulations JohnT. You’ve discovered the exodus of rich urban tax base to the suburbs.
Yawn.
(Hint: Contrast tax revenue sources for urban underclass between The Land of the Free™ and other developed democracies.)
Yes, but we’re not debating whether any particular city has issues or whether the US has issues, but whether the country is turning into a “banana republic.” Are you making the point that white people moving 10 miles, from the city of Detroit to the city of Warren, is a strong enough citation to make the US a banana republic?
Not that it matters, but I was going to use “white flight” in the post above, but don’t know if Riga and/or NiceGuyJack would know the term.
Yes. It’s a Socialist or even Communist plot to discredit the U.S. The Reds doctored the figures alright, just like they always do.
I do know that, yes. But I think even an idiot knows that lack of Democratic principles have nothing to do with Freedom of Speech, nothing to do with Freedom of Expression, nothing to do with Civil Rights, nothing to do with who Represents who (people or government), nothing to do with Civil Liberties, nothing to do with Freedom of Choice, nothing to do with the right to Vote, nothing to do with the Freedom to pursue Happiness, and nothing to do with DEMOCRACY.
The U.S. may have far less of those things, than many other countries, but it is the World Leader in Freedom and Democracy! You just try to deny that, huh!!!
Huh?
Per the IDF index that you yourself introduced as a valuable measure of these sort of things, the U.S. is not on the decline in its freedom of speech/expression/choice/happiness (as the “Civil Liberties” score was unchanged), nor its electoral process, nor its political culture, nor its political particpation.
It did grade the U.S. as decling in “Functioning of government”, though without specifying their rationale for this. The federal shutdown wasn’t until 2013, so that can’t be it. The only clue to be had is that line I quoted about polarization and brinkmanship.
As has alrady been noted, mere polarization of viewpoints or heated rhetoric isn’t inamicable to democracy. It stands to reason that the people of homogenous states like Norway and Sweden would have more unified political views, and thus less polarization. If social unity is the measure of democracy, then the U.S. is fundamentally incapable of ever topping the IDF rankings, just by the nature of its demographics. There are just many more groups in the U.S. vying for political power than in Scandinavia. That same diversity pays dividends in other ways, though.
It’s a leader, along with the other 24 nations the IDF grades as “full democracies”.
You seem to be arguing against a strawman position, that the U.S. is Number One In Everything Forever…no one in this thread has said that, because it’s not true.
FYI, Riga, implying that posters are idiots is not allowed in this forum.
Sorry to Jr. mod, but there it is.
So you got nuttin’ and all your bloviating on this topic is pointless drivel.
The US is not a banana republic, but it’s really hard to argue that it’s not on that path. I mean, what is a banana republic? Isn’t it a country of mostly very poor people ruled by a small oligarchy that is deeply corrupt, generally with a matching deeply corrupt civil service and police, often with the military propping up the government and sometimes with the military holding the real power in civil society. The middle class is generally small and identifies primarily with the wealthy oligarchs. The poor are generally poor for life, with very little mobility between the classes, and a great gulf dividing most citizens from the upper classes. There is little in the way of public education to give the poor a shot at upward mobility, and trade unions are suppressed.
Now I do not believe our civil service is deeply corrupt, for the most part, except for the ones at the national level who deal with finance and the military, where the revolving-door phenomenon has corrupted most of them thoroughly. But it’s not like the third sub administrator for southeastern agricultural affairs routinely solicits bribes. I’m sure a few do, but for the most part, civil servants make their money by doing their jobs, not shaking down those they serve in their jobs.
I do not believe our military is deeply corrupt or all that interested in seeking political power, though of course those who deal with contracting are.
I DO believe that Congress is deeply corrupt. Most have to solicit bribes, or as they are called in America, “PAC donations,” to get re-elected, whatever their political persuasion. Our post Citizens United government is inherently corrupt at the level of federal elected officials. We are definitely in banana republic territory here.
We have the highest level of wealth inequality of any developed nation. Our government does what Wall Street wants it to do whether most voters want that or not. We are definitely in banana republic territory here.
Our poor have access to much better public education than most banana republics, though it could and should be a lot better. Still, we are not a banana republic on that score, despite every effort of the Republicans and libertarians to make us one. On the issue of upward mobility between the classes, we are well below most developed nations, so we are definitely in banana republic territory there.
Our middle class is much larger and healthier than most banana republics. I think this is mostly an aftereffect of the tremendous success of the American middle class from the 1950s to the 1980s. The middle class has been in recession ever since, with stagnant wages and a rapid loss of wealth relative to the upper classes. Some members of the middle class identifies with the wealthy oligarchs (as do some members of the poor). It’s perhaps evenly split. So we are not in banana republic territory with regard to the middle class, though we are trending that way.
Politically, one party, the Republicans, has been making efforts to manipulate the vote so as to allow a minority of affluent whites to retain power, through such ruses as phony concern over illegal voting to create barriers for millions of legal voters of the “wrong” sort (i.e., Democrats) and blatant gerrymandering. But they have not had nearly enough success to date to say they control elections. We are trending toward banana republichood on the Republicans’ acount, but at a tiny rate.
Trade unions in America have lost greatly in political power, though it’s hard to say they have been suppressed, certainly not in traditional banana republic ways (executions, jailing, etc.).
Overall, we are not all that near being a banana republic, except in the area of economics, where we are either at full banana republic status or fast approaching it.
Alarm is good. Let’s look at some history as well.
I graduated high school and entered college in 1968.
Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot, there was a police riot in Chicago, and Richard Fucking Nixon was elected president. There were no gay rights, no women’s rights. You could be arrested for living together without being married. You could get beaten up for having long hair. You could get beaten up in a race riot. Rochester had one of the first of the 60s, in 1964, which occurred literally outside the apartment I once lived in. I passed through burned out and torn down wastelands every time I took a bus downtown. You didn’t want to go to a hospital if you got beat up. Although there now existed vaccines against polio, virtually none of today’s everyday medicine and surgery existed even in the lab. The city was emptying out fast, but other cities were much worse. New York was a hellhole, and would hit bottom around 1975. I went to an inner city high school, seething with racial tension. The counselors confiscated boxes of weapons: I saw them personally. Security checkpoints didn’t exist. Maybe that’s why dozens of airplanes were being hijacked each year. Teachers tried and mostly failed. We scraped together 4 people for an AP American History class. The suburban high school two miles away had 3. Three full classes, that is. There were no ethnic cuisines unless you counted German and Italian. I didn’t eat Chinese food until I was in college. Supermarkets were the size of today’s drug stores. No specialty foods, no special diet foods, no prepared foods, and little to no fresh produce in winter except for a few expensive items flown in from California. Did I mention that George Wallace won several states in the election? Look him up. And J. Edgar Hoover was spying on everyone, especially Martin Luther King, whom he considered a Communist. Not a Communist Fascist like Obama. The real thing. The worst thing possible. He had records on every politician and regularly blackmailed them. His troops infiltrated every peace and protest movement. He wiretapped everybody everywhere, except for the Mob, which he didn’t believe existed.
If you would have told us this was the Golden Age and the U.S. would have gone into a decline since, we would have slit our wrists. The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible.
We paid no attention to the Depression and the War that our parents lived through. We could see with our own eyes how much was wrong.
But now things are reversed. We’re the old ones with the memories. You’re the ones who see all the bad things with your own eyes. You’re angry. That’s the natural order of things.
The only real difference is that we weren’t stupid enough to try to convince anybody that things were better during the Depression!
To add to what Exapno said, in 1965:
- The FBI was in the midst of COINTELPRO (which Exapno was alluding to).
- The Vietnam war was starting to ramp up which would lead to the draft lottery.
- The Cold War was in full swing.
- The US environment was in worse shape than it is now and there were almost no environmental protection laws.
- Violent crime was higher than it is now and was still going up.
Many in the thread concede that the term was grossly misused. Still it points to substantive issues; to ignore that substance and “win” the debate against the weakest strawman is rather pointless, no?
The way you stress “10 miles”, as though that were of particular relevance, suggests that, after all, you do need to click and study the links I posted about “white flight.”
And, yes, although “banana” was an exaggeration, it is true that robbing from poor cities to subsidize an elite is a characteristic of failing societies: e.g. communist countries and, yes, classic “banana republics.”
Click on the little red triangle in the upper right-hand corner of the post in question for better, quicker, and more effective results.
You don’t agree that the U.S. gets better all the time and that rights are improving day by day?
Any luck specifying when the U.S. was better, or freer, than it is right now?
That’s not possible. It was** NEVER **better than it is right now.