Defining Trump as a threat to American democracy will also be motivated but seriously reductive for a man of Stiglitz’s intellectual stature: The italics of Teo Dalavecuras
A heavyweight of the American liberal intellectual class, Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz published days ago in Project Syndicate an article in which he denounced the relentless war that the Republicans would have waged against American democracy. Again for the same newspaper (supported as known by not exactly marginal personalities 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 from it.
Less belligerent in terminology but even more significant for the deliberate violation of rule number 1 of journalism, which contrasts the news with the obvious affirmation, and yet the choice of the New York Times that ten minutes after the start 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 response of the Trump administration 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 is close to 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 will limit myself to pointing out that the alignment of the American liberal media system, a preponderant 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 assume more and more the connotation of a militarization.
Well aware that I am stating something that is taken for granted, I would however like to draw from this circumstance a consideration which – if not less obvious – nevertheless seems to me to be systematically ignored in public discourse. Whether we are talking about the constitutional order, or about democracy, there is no doubt that among the assumptions of the declared political structure of the United States there would be the existence of a radically free information system which, while having 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 has seemed the situation, so that defining Trump as a threat to American democracy will also be motivated but reductive, seriously reductive for a man of the intellectual stature of Stiglitz: and that kind of half-truth that rightly is attributed to the “populists”.
In history, there is no news of republics that have become empires while keeping republican institutions and America intact, despite the misunderstandings that are nurtured above all in public discourse in Europe, and 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 the Rome of Numa Pompilius).
