Comment by ageofwant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ageofwant | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

As an Australian it has been extraordinary to witness the end of the American hegemony in this particular way. The pandemic was not a black swan by any means, the American response to it was.

My American model of capability and competence turned out to be horseshit. I had a view of Americans as brash, somewhat obnoxious but generally genial, certainly industrious. The incredulous, self-centered and fundamentally deluded zeitgeist that seems to define current American society was a surprise to me. I think many people were sensing the decline of American society, certainly Americans, and MAGA perversely tapped into that.

America's decline is already affecting Australians with China signalling its disapproval of Australia's current 'republican' rhetoric with the current trade war. I suspect this year was a turning point for geopolitics and it won't favor western style democracies, not as what used to be the ultimate model of those turned out to be the way it has.

I agree 45% with your take.

However, in defense of US citizens, the truth was always IMO this one: «You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else -- Winston Churchill»

While it may look like that, I wonder how much of it comes from the leadership and how much from "average US person" behaviour. Thought exercise: how different do you think the collective US behaviour would be if every state (our county) leader was replaced with a Dan Andrews clone, ignoring how he'd get elected? (I don't have an answer, I can imagine many paths)

Yea I recon that matters a lot. But here, even the Lib run states generally had a decent response, with a bit of a 'fuck-off' to Morrison when he started his predictable bullshit. And as a rule, Australian's sense of civic duty carried the day, not so with Americans - as far as I can tell through the media lens anyway.

It's cute to frame the death toll discrepancy in terms of national character, with Americans who don't even _believe in science_ coughing on everybody as their scooters whirr merrily to the nearest hamburger depository, but at the end of the day, most Americans and Australians were killed by the same thing: their precarious positions in society.

It's not like private nursing homes, increasingly casualized work, and an insane weath gap aren't a thing in Australia either. Everybody slobbering Dan's knob conveniently forgets that the second outbreak could have been avoided if the government hadn't subcontracted out all the hotel security.

Australia's neoliberal death march has yet to reach the brutal conclusion that America arrived at, but it's trodding along. And smug complacency certainly won't reverse that course.

Huh? So Americans were killed because of privatisation, casual work and wealth gap, but Australia also has these and the results were different? I’m not quite following your point.

Won't favour First Past The Post, Red Party or Blue Party it's the Money Party style democracies.

There are other flavours that do better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com