What does the most gigantic economic rebuilding program of all time announced in the US under the title "Build Back Better" have to do with the increasingly fierce internal American culture war over issues such as abortion or theories of race and racism? At first glance, nothing, but for the world power, its leadership and its people, apparently a great deal. In our article on the subject, you can read about what the US is actually suffering from and why its leaders are so single-minded in thinking that they have to take care of the "soul of America."
In 2023, the American auto union UAW — United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America — astonished domestic and foreign observers with a six week industrial action against America’s proud “Big Three” auto companies — GM, Ford, Stellantis. No wonder. After all, it was demanding a wage increase of more than 40 percent over the next four years as well as the abolition of the “two-tier” pay system which stipulates lower wages — almost 50 percent less per hour — and a lower pension for all workers hired after 2007. In addition, “cost of living allowances” — a type of annual compensation for inflation — are being brought back. The UAW demanded all this to reverse the drastic concessions that had been extorted from it a decade and a half ago when the Obama administration averted the bankruptcy of its employers in the wake of the financial crisis by mobilizing a huge amount of government loans.
That sure was traumatic for the nation. For the first time since 1814, the Capitol in Washington is ransacked, but this time not by foreign soldiers acting on the orders of a hostile, undemocratic monarch. On the contrary, it’s ardent American patriots, bursting with love for “freedom and democracy,” who are going at it certain that they are only claiming their good democratic right to “four more years!” under the rule of their favorite president.
“I’m voting for the president I’ll make more money under” (an unnamed hard-working American on German television)
That is pretty close to America’s true soul: to the false materialism going with the capitalist competition that the land of unlimited opportunities excels at. But it is not even half the truth when it comes to the second wave of Donald Trump’s election campaign for “America first!” after 2016. The officially launched ‘culture clash’ between populist lies and democratic hypocrisy is about nothing less than the nation’s morality — that is, about the obedience of the people that the global might of the state is based on in the land of the free.
In wartime, the morality of bourgeois society is turned upside down. What people must never do in peacetime — kill other people ---- they are now ordered to do. The right to life, one of the inalienable rights protected by basic law, now gives way to the duty to sacrifice one’s life for the state. This revaluation of values makes war the ultimate moral challenge. It provokes the need for justification, of all things.
Racism no longer exists in a modern bourgeois polity in the form of a state’s legal decree or permission to discriminate against sections of the population to the point of eliminating them. There is no colonial privilege that legitimizes ruling over ‘uncivilized’ peoples, no Nuremberg Laws that make citizenship dependent on belonging to an Aryan master race entitled to dominate the world, and no right to own people that lays down slavery as an integral part of the political economy. — What is there instead?
For months now, a dispute has been raging in Israel acknowledged to be dividing the nation and throwing the state into crisis. It has seized both the political class democratically organized into parties, and large sections of the population. On the surface, the issue is a reform of certain aspects of Israel’s judicial system and, above all, the relation of the judicial to the executive and legislative “powers,” especially in terms of the reciprocal veto rights of the parliament and the Supreme Court. It is in fact clear to all those involved in the national divide that the reform of the judiciary, while presenting a significant change to the separation of state powers, is as such merely a part and, above all, a symbol of a dispute that goes far beyond the question of how the state is organized. What is it all about?
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Gun owners, like all Americans, see themselves as acknowledged personifications of their state power, as incarnating what makes “America” what it is and needs to be defended against all internal and external threats whether one owns a gun or not. So un-American activities are more like what those people are up to who want to ban gun ownership, thereby violating the rules governing the pursuit of happiness.
It is as if the US was looking to prove just how much freedom it has to go about its work as a world power. At the same time that the American state is carrying out a proxy war in Europe and bringing epochal change to the global economic order, the American nation is entirely free to revolve around itself, arguing bitterly about just how much freedom American women have to control their own bodies. Of course, the occasion for this dispute is no small matter. After all, with its decision in “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” the Supreme Court has overturned “Roe v.
After a year of war in Ukraine, there are about as many Russian soldiers dead or injured as reported for the “special military operation” a year ago. What for? After the first year of war, Ukraine is devastated; the government has sacrificed a significant portion of the population to its fight against the Russian invasion. What for? A year after Chancellor Scholz’s “historical turning point,” the West is surveying the costs of its anti-Russian intervention in Ukraine. What is it all for?