https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -fair-pollFewer than one in 10 Europeans expect next month’s US presidential election to be completely free and fair
So much for the shining city on a hill.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -fair-pollFewer than one in 10 Europeans expect next month’s US presidential election to be completely free and fair
The chaotic US election has undoubtedly been the biggest story in the world in the last two weeks. Watching it unfold from over 13,000km away in Kenya, the election itself – the long queues, the delayed and disputed vote count, impugned credibility – was disturbingly familiar. Our own elections follow a near-identical pattern. The media coverage, not so much.
Gone were the condescending tone, the adjective-laden labels and the expectation of violence and malfeasance so often applied to “foreign” elections. In its place was an easy familiarity and assumption of competence.
The media did not feel it necessary to depict the US as a crisis-wracked, oil-rich, nuclear-armed North American country with armed terror groups roaming its ethnically polarized restless interior. But these were exactly the sorts of descriptors that have traditionally allowed western audiences to identify with and follow events in distant, “exotic” places. It seemed to me that the rest of us deserved the same consideration. And so I decided to offer this perspective in a Twitter thread
Continues here...
What I can say for certain is that I’m not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America—not just for the sake of future generations of Americans but for all of humankind. I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide. In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfers, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.