12-19-2008, 06:47 AM
The mother of all paradoxes, the American social model
Front page / Opinion / Columnists
We see it all around us. In places the world shrinks. In others it expands. Things change and shift around. But America Land of the Free, part of the shrunken world, tries not to see its shattered dream. Dazzle their minds with impossible dreams. Implant in their mindsets visions of triumph. Then, mask the inevitable loss of hope by the masses. Feebly old dreams try to resurface and again vanish. The glamorous glitter of once-upon-a-time has been reduced to a tacky faint flicker of the lonely used car lot or the mottled colors of empty Burger Kings blinking in the night. Begrudgingly, cars get smaller. Houses run down. Legions of Walmarts experience a sense of abandonment while beautiful celebrities look out of TV screens soothingly and travel around the world and buy villas on Lake Como.
Meanwhile, Europeâs one hundred year old social state based on a spirit of solidarity is weakening and ceding ground to the selfish American capitalist-individualistic-everyman-for-himself society and its neo-liberal allies of the European Union. Yet the European Idea of the social state hangs on and resists. There is still a veritable abyss between the American market model based on individualism (that is the hosanna-ed American Dream), with a high rate of mobility at the cost of a low level of protection of its people, and the European system based on the social state, which is the European Idea.
The absence of a solid and stable workers movement in the USA which should be this nationâs third party is responsible for Americaâs anti-social answer to what is in essence a social issue. Once-upon-a-time workers movements and trade unions in America chalked up some important achievements. That was a long time ago. On the east side of the ocean the workers movements had a close relationship with the rise of the nation states and the effects of the industrial revolution and the eventual emergence of the social state.
America âs dissonant voice is instead the anti-social divergence of the model projected by the USA. Therefore the pernicious halo surrounding propagandistic Americanism. Therefore, the transformation of the American Dream into nightmare. That impossible dream, that at the very most dream-gone-wrong, that incubus, has in turn provided the foundations for an enduring Corporatism-Fascism, in America stubbornly referred to as individualism.
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/106843-1/
Front page / Opinion / Columnists
We see it all around us. In places the world shrinks. In others it expands. Things change and shift around. But America Land of the Free, part of the shrunken world, tries not to see its shattered dream. Dazzle their minds with impossible dreams. Implant in their mindsets visions of triumph. Then, mask the inevitable loss of hope by the masses. Feebly old dreams try to resurface and again vanish. The glamorous glitter of once-upon-a-time has been reduced to a tacky faint flicker of the lonely used car lot or the mottled colors of empty Burger Kings blinking in the night. Begrudgingly, cars get smaller. Houses run down. Legions of Walmarts experience a sense of abandonment while beautiful celebrities look out of TV screens soothingly and travel around the world and buy villas on Lake Como.
Meanwhile, Europeâs one hundred year old social state based on a spirit of solidarity is weakening and ceding ground to the selfish American capitalist-individualistic-everyman-for-himself society and its neo-liberal allies of the European Union. Yet the European Idea of the social state hangs on and resists. There is still a veritable abyss between the American market model based on individualism (that is the hosanna-ed American Dream), with a high rate of mobility at the cost of a low level of protection of its people, and the European system based on the social state, which is the European Idea.
The absence of a solid and stable workers movement in the USA which should be this nationâs third party is responsible for Americaâs anti-social answer to what is in essence a social issue. Once-upon-a-time workers movements and trade unions in America chalked up some important achievements. That was a long time ago. On the east side of the ocean the workers movements had a close relationship with the rise of the nation states and the effects of the industrial revolution and the eventual emergence of the social state.
America âs dissonant voice is instead the anti-social divergence of the model projected by the USA. Therefore the pernicious halo surrounding propagandistic Americanism. Therefore, the transformation of the American Dream into nightmare. That impossible dream, that at the very most dream-gone-wrong, that incubus, has in turn provided the foundations for an enduring Corporatism-Fascism, in America stubbornly referred to as individualism.
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/106843-1/