Here’s how the German magazine/website Spiegel sees the decline of America:
The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn’t quite know what he wants to be — maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher — and he doesn’t know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn’t come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred. And so is Dinesh D’Souza.
Indeed, the United States of 2010 is a hate-filled country . . .
This is the climate in the country leading up to the Congressional elections on Nov. 2. It isn’t shaped by logic or an interest in rational debate. The United States of 2010 is a country that has become paralyzed and inhibited by allowing itself to be distracted by things that are, in reality, not a threat: homosexuality, Mexicans, Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, health care reform and Obama. Large segments of the country are not even talking about the issues that are serious and complex, like debt, unemployment and serious educational deficits. Is it because this is all too threatening?
Beware of the graphics accompanying the article. These statistics on the United States economy are not for the faint of heart.
The Atlantic has presented this collage of the United States by the numbers, comparing 2007 versus 2009. If you have the stomach for it: http://assets.theatlantic.com/static/coma/images/…
Again from a European perspective, the article does accurately portray a polity in which a toxic combination of demagoguery and plutocracy dominates one party with the other split so badly that it is unable to focus itself to act effectively in what to this observer seems self-evidently the national interest to manage the deficit. One historical analogy that is relevant is pre-partition Poland where the monarch was elected and powerless and the legislature impotent because of the librum veto exercised irresponsibly by the aristocratic members. I don't over emphasise it but if you look at the Senate there are parallels.