"America is a Great Nation"

Responding to Two National Chauvinist Joes

Somebody got a cool sticker on a Kamala poster in Chicago’s South Loop

Chicago, August 20, 2024

There’s a center-right media personality named Joe Scarborough.

He used to be a Republican Congressman and he’s married to Mika Brzezinski, who is the daughter of the leading US imperial Cold War strategist and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

As a lawyer, Scarborough represented Michael F. Griffin, an anti-abortion activist who murdered Dr. David Gunn in 1993. (Wiki: “It was the first documented killing of an obstetrics and gynaecology doctor where the stated intention of the perpetrator was to prevent a doctor from providing abortion care in an act of anti-abortion violence in the United States.”).

Joe and Mika have a longstanding morning political talk show called “Morning Joe” on supposedly left-wing MSNBC.

The mission of this show is to report and comment on US politics from a centrist, bipartisan, and bourgeois-imperialist perspective. It’s very strong for Kamala Harris right now.

Scarborough brings a sports-talking “guy’s guy” flavor to the proceedings, often talking over his guests and going off on semi-controlled rants while Mika pretends to worry that he’s being too boorish.

Joe Scarborough hates the malignant narcissist fascist maniac Donald Trump (a former friend of Joe and Mika’s, by the way).

Joe doesn’t want to live under a Trump dictatorship. 

I suppose I ought to say “good for Joe” on loathing Trump but that’s a pretty low bar.  Do we really need to praise Scarborough for criticizing a man that Noam Chomsky has rightly described as “the most dangerous criminal in human history”?

The problem is that Scarborough still wants us all to live under the dictatorship of the parasitic and oppressive capitalist-imperialist system that hatched Trumpism-fascism and that has brought livable ecology to the brink of extinction while pushing us closer to nuclear war than any time in more than six decades.

Scarborough advances this system in the name of a fervent American patriotism that does egregious violence to objective reality.

The target of Morning Joe Scarborough’s ire yesterday was Trump’s claim that “America is a failed nation” and “a nation in decline.”

These narratives piss Scarborough off. 

He dedicated his rant yesterday to his belief that “America is great. America is good.  American is a great nation.  America is a good nation.”

Here’s a key part of what Scarborough said:

“Let me give you, um some facts. America is a great nation. America is a good nation….America is a great nation. America is a good nation.  We fed and freed more people through the years than any other country on the planet. And today, economically stronger than ever.  Stronger relative to the rest of the world and richer than ever.  A twenty-seven trillion-dollar GDP! The Dow, higher than it’s ever been, far higher than when Donald Trump was president! Donald Trump says ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’  Some Democrats may not like it, but, uh, if you look at the United States and its oil production, the United States has produced more oil this past year than any other country in history. Militarily, far from being a Woke military, we are the strongest military power in the world.  We are stronger relative to the rest of the world than any time since 1945. Culturally…(smug laughter), just, I mean (big smile), I could talk about all of America’s reach and soft power, but let’s just talk about Taylor Swift going through Europe and the economic boom that is for those countries. We’re strong politically.  We’re strong diplomatically. Again, relative to the rest of the world, America is stronger than it’s ever been. …We’re a great nation.  Americans are proud of their country. And Donald Trump is always talking about Vladimir Putin and what a great leader he is.  You know our GDP is 27 trillion, Russia’s is $1.4 trillion and probably dropping right now. Texas has a higher GDP.  California has the fourth highest GDP on the planet. That’s how powerful we are. …you know, Thomas Paine talked about ‘sunshine patriots,’ talked about ‘summer soldiers’ and ‘sunshine patriots.’ Well that doesn’t even define what this Republican Party is because it is summer in America, economically.  It is summer in America, militarily. More powerful than ever…..For those who think America is great regardless of who the president is, these are pretty good times.  And we’re gonna hear about those good times a few hours from now when the Democratic National Convention begins in Chicago.”

Let’s all say this together.  Repeat after Joe Scarborough: “America is great.  American is good.  America is great.  America is good. America is great, America is good.”

What a vapid and ridiculous tribute to the USA! Tom Paine would not be impressed.

Where to begin in unpacking the absurdity of Scarborough’s tirade?

He’s proud that the USA has extracted more oil than any country ever in the summer that saw the hottest four days ever recorded thanks to a deepening climate catastrophe rooted in a growth- and fossil fuel-addicted capitalism that has no bigger champion, model, and enforcer than “America.”  For real? It is doubtful that livable ecology can survive another decade of fossil capitalism.

Scarborough cites the size of the US economy and the heights of the stock market with zero concern for the ecological extermination and massive and social inequality, exploitation, and parasitism that are built into the system whose scale he worships.  The top tenth of the upper US 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom US 90 percent.  The US oligarchy’s opulent hyper-affluence and that of oligarchs around the world is based on (a) the ruthless and reckless extraction of profit from the blood, sweat, and tears of billions of poorly paid workers the world over and (b) the endless profit-seeking rape of the planet’s natural resources.  While US poverty is slight compared to a world where half the people live on less than $7 US  dollars a day, two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, without adequate savings for an emergency.

The USA leads the world’s rich nations by far in domestic economic inequality and barriers to upward mobility.  It has the weakest social safety net, the least benevolent welfare state among those nations.

No rich nation claiming to be a democracy matches the US when it comes to entrenching Minority Rule into its electoral and governing system.  This is thanks to potent barriers to “one person, one vote” that are built into the US constitutional order, including the preposterous and archaic presidential Electoral College, states’ rights, the absurdly powerful and malapportioned (and filibusted) US Senate, and the lifetime-appointed Supreme Court.

No rich nation can match the US for plutocratic campaign finance and corporate media dominance, which combine with each other and “constitutional” Minority Rule to cancel majority public opinion on one key policy issues after another and another.  

Scarborough left out some other ugly ways in which the US leads. He forgot to mention that America stands far in the global vangaurd when it comes to per-capita carbon emissions, mass imprisonment, racist policing, police brutality, racial residential and school segregation, gun ownership, gun violence, gun death, and the distribution of military-style weapons amongst the population.  

Scarborough is delusional if he thinks the US is more economically and militarily powerful relative to the rest of the world than any time since 1945.  The world system has become increasingly multipolar since the end of the Cold War. China has emerged as a serious competitor as the world’s most powerful economy and as a potential military peer.

By trumpeting vapid American corporate pop culture and its spread across the world’s capitalist media platforms as a form of imperial “soft power,” Scarborough reveals himself as an Ugly American philistine.

“Fed and freed more people through the years than any other country on the planet”? Seriously?! That’s straight out of Orwell.  “America” (the USA) is simplynot perceived that way around the planet, for some very good reasons: the imperialist United States has oppressed, impoverished, maimed, and murdered more people, overthrown more governments, and propped up more authoritarian states through the years than any other country in the world.  For details, please see my 2018 Truthdig essay “The World Wil Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony.”   Here’s a key section of that essay relating to global opinion and US conduct:

“According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth's people see the United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat by a wide margin. ..There is nothing surprising about that vote for anyone who honestly examines the history of ‘U.S. foreign affairs,’ to use a common elite euphemism for American imperialism. Still, by far and away world history's most extensive empire, the U.S. has at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80 foreign countries and ‘troops or other military personnel in about 160 foreign countries and territories.’ The U.S. accounts for more than 40 percent of the planet's military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times over. Last year it increased its ‘defense’ (military empire) spending, which was already three times higher than China's, and nine times higher than Russia's…Think it's all in place to ensure peace and democracy the world over, in accord with the standard boilerplate rhetoric of U.S. presidents, diplomats and senators? Do you know any other good jokes?”

And of course, since I wrote that essay, the American Empire under Joe Scarborough’s friend and fellow centrist and national chauvinist Joe Biden has provoked and fueled the biggest war on European soil since World War II in Ukraine and funded, fueled, equippedm and politically and diplomatically protected a Zio-fascist genocide that may end up killing 186,000 or more Palestinians in Gaza.

Politically and diplomatically strong in the world? Seriously?  The preponderant majority of global political opinion is arrayed against US policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.  Global sentiment is sickened by the transparent imperial hypocrisy of “America” being outraged over Russia’s invasion of white Ukraine while lining up behind and providing many of the weapons for Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of brown-skinned Gaza.  Most of the politically and morally cognizant world agrees with the following recent statement from the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian:

“Harris and Walz claim that their campaign is about ‘freedom, compassion, and the rule of law.’ But where is the ‘rule of law’ in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the many other war crimes that this country has repeatedly carried out? Where is the ‘freedom’ and ‘compassion’ for the masses of Palestinian people, including more than 15 thousand children, who have been massacred in the genocidal slaughter being carried out by Israel, armed and fully backed by Biden, Harris, and the rest of the ruling class of this country? Where is the ‘freedom’ and ‘compassion’ for the billions of people throughout the world who are cruelly exploited—including more than 150 million children, who are denied a childhood, and instead are forced to work in slave-like conditions, in sweatshop factories, mines and farms—creating the wealth that the capitalist-imperialist system rests on?”

Yesterday in Chicago, well outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC), thousands marched against the US-backed “genocidal slaughter” that Avakian references.  Some of the protesters marched in their own way against “the capitalist-imperialist system.”  I have significant political and related moral differences with the “radical” groups that were most heavily represented in the DNC protest (most particularly the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the so-called Party of Socialism and Liberation), but I joined the march with other revolutionary communists in solidarity with participants’ opposition to the US-backed crucifixion of Gaza and with their forthright calling out of (appropriately nicknamed) “Genocide Joe” Biden and “Killer Kamala” Harris as agents of a criminal Empire.  

Last night, thousands of Democratic Party convention delegates ritually chanted “USA, USA” in support of Biden, who criticized the orange fascist maniac’s “declining nation” narrative by boasting of America’s “record high stock market” and vomiting up this vapid nonsense: “Name me a country in the world that doesn’t think we’re the leading nation in the world. Without America—not a joke, think about it, I’m being literal—who can lead the world other than the United States of America? Well, guess what? America’s winning and the world’s better off for it.”

What a load of crap. Countries don’t think, human beings do, and most politically cognizant humans think of the US as a menace, a selfish empire, and an exploiter/oppressor, not a  world “leader.” I can guarantee DNC delegates and the president that most of humanity does not think the US “winning” anything is good for the world.

And here’s another truth: the world isn’t in need of a parasitic Empire to “lead” it, for f*#k’s sake; it needs socialist revolution within and beyond the US for the emancipation of humanity from a capitalist-imperialist class dictatorship that is cancelling livable ecology while putting the world on track for nuclear war and giving rise to fascism across the planet.