Who, how and why wages war on Trump in the US
Defining Trump as a threat to American democracy will also be motivated but it is seriously reductive for a man of Stiglitz's intellectual stature: The italics of Teo Dalavecuras
A heavyweight of the American liberal intellectual class, the Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz, published an article in Project Syndicate days ago in which he denounced the relentless war that the Republicans would have waged against American democracy. Also for the same newspaper (supported as known by not exactly marginal figures of the American establishment such as Bill Gates and George Soros) the journalist writer Elisabeth Drew signs a contribution entitled, hardly equivocal, "The next civil war?". Trump, Ms Drew recalls, has repeatedly demonstrated his determination to destroy the constitutional order of the United States, on the sole condition that he can derive a political advantage.
Less bellicose in terminology but even more significant for the deliberate violation of rule number 1 of journalism, which contrasts the news with the obvious affirmation, however, is the choice of the New York Times that ten minutes after the beginning of the televised debate between the vice president Mike Pence and the Democratic candidate for the same office Kamala Harris launched the following information on the web, as a "Breaking New": "at the beginning of the debate with Mike Pence, Kamala Harris harshly criticized the Trump administration's response to the virus" .
I very willingly leave to the experts, commentators and above all to the "analysts" (the latter category which, as far as I am concerned, borders on the ineffable) any evaluation of the merits of the two positions mentioned above (the third is a pure and simple data of fact, only it's less than news). I limit myself to pointing out that the alignment of the American liberal media system, a predominant part of the media system, not so much in favor of the challenger Joe Biden as against the outgoing president Donald Trump, with last resort tones as the election date approaches, it tends to take on more and more the connotation of militarization.
Well aware that I am stating something foregone, I would like to draw from this circumstance a consideration which – if it is no less obvious – nevertheless seems to me systematically ignored in public discourse. Whether we are talking about the constitutional order, or about democracy, there is no doubt that among the prerequisites of the declared political structure of the United States there would be the existence of a radically free information system which, despite the indisputable prerogative of taking a position is governed above all – in theory exclusively – by the pact of loyalty with the public, which does not behave in short as the "scrum package" of one of the contenders, where in this electoral campaign but, one might say, since the beginning of the mandate of Trump (by the way, what happened to Russiagate ?) This seemed to be the situation, so that defining Trump as a threat to American democracy will also be motivated but it is reductive, seriously reductive for a man of Stiglitz's intellectual stature: it is that kind of half truth that is rightly attributed to the "populists".
In history, there is no news of republics that have become empires while preserving republican institutions intact and America, despite the misunderstandings that are nurtured above all in public discourse in Europe, is objectively an empire, indeed, for the moment it continues to be the empire (and the fact that the emperor is called president should not be a big problem: after all, the "emperor" of the Catholic Church is called "pontiff", even if the Catholic religion is not exactly the same as Numa's Rome Pompilius).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/chi-come-e-perche-fa-la-guerra-a-trump-negli-usa-stiglitz/ on Sat, 10 Oct 2020 06:35:13 +0000.