Explain the joy!
Out of context: Reply #45
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- kelpie0
"Many liberal-minded people expressed, often sorrowfully, their deep disillusion with America during the dark Bush years. The nation they had grown up looking up to, as a beacon of hope – a place that, while flawed, still inspired dreams of a better future and produced great movies, soaring buildings, rock'n'roll, John Kennedy, and Martin Luther King – had been hopelessly tainted by reckless wars, officially sanctioned torture, coarse chauvinism, and extraordinary political arrogance.
Others expressed the same disillusion with a gloating air of schadenfreude. At last, that big, arrogant, fatally seductive nation, which left the Old World in its shade for so long, had been brought to its knees. Watching the economic rise of China, Russia, and India, and the American debacles in the Middle East, it was tempting to believe that US power really did not count for very much anymore. A multi-polar world, many thought, would be vastly preferable to more Pax Americana.
Yet such projections could never entirely disguise a nagging anxiety. How many Europeans (or Asians, for that matter) would really be happier being subjected to the superior power of China or Russia? Under all the confident-sounding dismissals of US power, there is still some yearning to return to a more reassuring time, when the democratic world could lay its collective head on Uncle Sam's broad shoulders.
This, too, is probably an illusion. Too much has changed since the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, and the Cuban missile crisis. But I do not believe that the American dream has died in Europe quite yet. Obamamania seems to have revived it.
Obama's election has demonstrated that things are still achievable in the US that remain unthinkable elsewhere. As long as this is so, the US, as first among equals, can still be looked up to as the defender of our freedoms."