I was raised believing that America was the greatest country in the world, the home of the free and the brave, leader of the free world. I continued to believe that, or something like it, well into this century. To be sure, I found the war in Vietnam disillusioning, heartbreaking, as well as the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I found the rise of inequality dismaying, though the Occupy movement gave me some hope, alas, short-lived. Obama was disappointing. Trump's first term wasn't as bad as it could have been. Biden? Another disappointment.
And now, Trump's let loose the dogs of war in his own country, even on the people who elected him. To be sure, that's not what he thinks he's doing. And his many followers don't seem to realize what he's doing to them. Well, some of them know well enough, and they're fine with that, the ones with means. But the rank and file MAGA, they're still under the spell, most of them. It does not look good.
But if not America, what's the alternative?
Michelle Goldberg has a suggestion: Is Claudia Sheinbaum the Anti-Trump? NYTimes, April 4, 2025. She was elected president of Mexico in October 2024.
Around the globe, liberal humanism is faltering while the forces of reactionary cruelty are on the march. So Sheinbaum, who has adopted López Obrador’s slogan “For the good of all, first the poor,” can seem like a shining exception to the reigning spirit of autocratic machismo. Goldberg's column is a long one, too long for me to summarize. Here's how she characterizes Sheinbaum:
“I feel very proud about her,” Marta Lamas, an anthropology professor and leading Mexican feminist who has known Sheinbaum for years, told me in Mexico City last week. “She is a light in this terrible situation that we are facing: Putin, Trump.”
Lamas said she’d feared a sexist backlash against Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, but six months into her term, there’s no sign of one. Sheinbaum was elected with almost 60 percent of the vote. Today her approval rating is above 80 percent. Last week, Bukele [president of El Salvador], who likes to call himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” asked Grok, Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot, the name of the planet’s most popular leader, evidently expecting it would be him. Grok responded, “Sheinbaum.”
For those of us steeped in American identity politics, it can be hard to understand how a woman like Sheinbaum came to lead the world’s 11th-most-populous country. Her parents, both from Jewish families that fled Europe, were scientists who’d been active in the leftist student movement of the 1960s. As a child, Sheinbaum was a dedicated to dancing ballet, a discipline that still shows up in her graceful posture and in the many social media videos of her doing folk dances with her constituents. She did research for her Ph.D. in energy engineering at UC Berkeley and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
She is, in short, part of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia typically demonized by populist movements. But as I was told again and again in Mexico, her rarefied background meant little in light of her close relationship with López Obrador, who she’d worked beside since he was mayor of Mexico City 25 years ago, and whose economic populism earned him the enduring devotion of many downtrodden citizens.
At the end:
An easy riposte is that democracy means more than just elections. But that argument is convincing only if you’ve already accepted that liberal democracy is a superior system, and it’s increasingly clear that many people do not. In elections across the globe, we’re seeing how little many voters care about abstract liberal proceduralism; they’re happy to cede power to the executive branch if they think it will improve their lives.
I find this trend tragic, but there are no signs that it’s going to reverse any time soon. Given this reality, we should judge politicians not just on how they amass power, but also on what they do with it.
In the United States, centralized authority has allowed Musk, inspired by Argentina’s Milei, to take a metaphorical chain saw to all sorts of federal programs, including those that help the most vulnerable. Sheinbaum, by contrast, is trying to build a national care system for children, the disabled and the elderly, lifting the burden of unpaid labor from many Mexican women. American progressives should be cautious about projecting their desperation for a heroine onto Sheinbaum. But at least right now, her kind of populism looks far better than the alternatives.
There's much more in the article.
Regardless of what happens with Trump's current term, or for that matter, with Sheinbaum's (six years), the America I had believed in, the one that would save the world, that America is gone forever. We may well be able to recover from the depredations of the Trump presidency, but that America, leader of the free world etc., that America is gone forever.
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Over at The Bulwark William Kristol writes:
Yesterday afternoon, having dispatched his regular mid-day newsletter, my friend and colleague Jonathan Last was moved—compelled, I think—to write a second, emergency newsletter. His eloquent and powerful missive arrived in our inboxes around 6:30 p.m. If you haven’t yet read it, do so now.
The heart of Jonathan’s argument is that yesterday, April 3, 2025, was the day that, in his words, “The age of American empire, the great Pax Americana, ended.”
We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.
It was almost 111 years earlier, on August 3, 1914, that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stood with a friend at dusk at a window of his room in the Foreign Office, looking out across St. James’s Park. Seeing the first lights being turned on along the Mall, Grey famously remarked, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
The Liberal statesman was right. World War I, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, Stalin and Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust—these all followed in the space of three decades. The lamps were not to be lit again in Grey’s lifetime. A century of relative stability and peace, of progress and prosperity, was followed by thirty years of chaos and war, of darkness and misery.
Later on he writes: “But now a new time of monsters—of terrible mistakes, monstrous deeds, and disastrous consequences—could well be upon us.”
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