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Good Read: The End of the Anglo-American Order
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/magazine/the-end-of-the-anglo-american-order.html?src=me&_r=0
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BTW; You can get past the paywall by clearing the cache on your browser. 
http://nyti.ms/2gDAv47
The End of the Anglo-American Order
For decades, the United States and Britain’s vision of democracy and freedom defined the postwar world. What will happen in an age of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage?
By IAN BURUMA NOV. 29, 2016
...But their success is dismaying precisely because it goes against a particular idea of Anglo-American exceptionalism. Not the traditional self-image of certain American and British jingoists who like to think of the United States as the City on the Hill or Britain as the sceptered isle splendidly aloof from the wicked Continent, but another kind of Anglo-American exception: the one shaped by World War II. The defeat of Germany and Japan resulted in a grand alliance, led by the United States, in the West and Asia. Pax Americana, along with a unified Europe, would keep the democratic world safe. If Trump and Farage get their way, much of that dream will be in tatters...
...In the years when most of Europe was overrun by the Nazis or fascist dictatorships, the Anglo-American allies were the last hope of freedom, democracy and internationalism. I grew up in the world they shaped...
...But the victorious Anglo-Saxon nations, especially the United States, largely shaped the postwar Western world we lived in. The words of the Atlantic Charter, drawn up by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941, resonated deeply throughout a war-torn Europe: Trade barriers would be lowered, peoples would be free, social welfare would advance and global cooperation would ensue. Churchill called the charter “not a law, but a star.”...
...America’s prestige was greatly bolstered not just by the soldiers who helped liberate Europe but also by the men and women back home who fought to make their society more equal and their democracy more inclusive. By struggling against the injustices in their own country, figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the Freedom Riders or indeed President Obama kept the hope of American exceptionalism alive. As did the youth culture of the 1960s. When Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright and later president, hailed Frank Zappa, Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones as his political heroes, he was not being frivolous....
...The Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1980s — deregulating financial services, closing down coal mines and manufacturing plants and hacking away at the benefits of the New Deal and the British welfare state — was regarded by many conservatives, on both sides of the Atlantic, as a triumph for Anglo-American exceptionalism, a great coup for freedom. Europeans outside Britain were more skeptical. They tended to see Thatcherism and Reaganomics as ruthless forms of economic liberalism, making some people vastly richer but leaving many more out in the cold. Nonetheless, in order to compete, many governments began to emulate the same economic system....
...Radical economic liberalism did more to destroy traditional communities than any social-democratic governments ever did. Thatcher’s most implacable enemies were the miners and industrial workers. The neoliberal rhetoric was all about prosperity “trickling down” from above. But it never quite worked out that way. Those workers and their children, now languishing in impoverished rust-belt cities, received another blow in the banking crisis of 2008. Major postwar institutions, like the I.M.F., which the United States set up in 1945 to secure a more stable world, no longer functioned properly....
...Neither Brexit nor Trump are likely to bring great benefits to these voters. But at least for a while, they can dream of taking their countries back to an imaginary, purer, more wholesome past. This reaction is not only sweeping across the United States and Britain....
...Not only were even the least privileged Americans told that they lived in God’s own country, but white Americans, however impoverished and undereducated, had the comforting sense
that there was always a group beneath them, who did not share their entitlement, or claim to greatness, a class of people with a darker skin. With a Harvard- educated black president, this fiction became increasingly difficult to sustain...
For decades, the United States and Britain’s vision of democracy and freedom defined the postwar world. What will happen in an age of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage?
By IAN BURUMA NOV. 29, 2016
...But their success is dismaying precisely because it goes against a particular idea of Anglo-American exceptionalism. Not the traditional self-image of certain American and British jingoists who like to think of the United States as the City on the Hill or Britain as the sceptered isle splendidly aloof from the wicked Continent, but another kind of Anglo-American exception: the one shaped by World War II. The defeat of Germany and Japan resulted in a grand alliance, led by the United States, in the West and Asia. Pax Americana, along with a unified Europe, would keep the democratic world safe. If Trump and Farage get their way, much of that dream will be in tatters...
...In the years when most of Europe was overrun by the Nazis or fascist dictatorships, the Anglo-American allies were the last hope of freedom, democracy and internationalism. I grew up in the world they shaped...
...But the victorious Anglo-Saxon nations, especially the United States, largely shaped the postwar Western world we lived in. The words of the Atlantic Charter, drawn up by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941, resonated deeply throughout a war-torn Europe: Trade barriers would be lowered, peoples would be free, social welfare would advance and global cooperation would ensue. Churchill called the charter “not a law, but a star.”...
...America’s prestige was greatly bolstered not just by the soldiers who helped liberate Europe but also by the men and women back home who fought to make their society more equal and their democracy more inclusive. By struggling against the injustices in their own country, figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the Freedom Riders or indeed President Obama kept the hope of American exceptionalism alive. As did the youth culture of the 1960s. When Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright and later president, hailed Frank Zappa, Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones as his political heroes, he was not being frivolous....
...The Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1980s — deregulating financial services, closing down coal mines and manufacturing plants and hacking away at the benefits of the New Deal and the British welfare state — was regarded by many conservatives, on both sides of the Atlantic, as a triumph for Anglo-American exceptionalism, a great coup for freedom. Europeans outside Britain were more skeptical. They tended to see Thatcherism and Reaganomics as ruthless forms of economic liberalism, making some people vastly richer but leaving many more out in the cold. Nonetheless, in order to compete, many governments began to emulate the same economic system....
...Radical economic liberalism did more to destroy traditional communities than any social-democratic governments ever did. Thatcher’s most implacable enemies were the miners and industrial workers. The neoliberal rhetoric was all about prosperity “trickling down” from above. But it never quite worked out that way. Those workers and their children, now languishing in impoverished rust-belt cities, received another blow in the banking crisis of 2008. Major postwar institutions, like the I.M.F., which the United States set up in 1945 to secure a more stable world, no longer functioned properly....
...Neither Brexit nor Trump are likely to bring great benefits to these voters. But at least for a while, they can dream of taking their countries back to an imaginary, purer, more wholesome past. This reaction is not only sweeping across the United States and Britain....
...Not only were even the least privileged Americans told that they lived in God’s own country, but white Americans, however impoverished and undereducated, had the comforting sense
that there was always a group beneath them, who did not share their entitlement, or claim to greatness, a class of people with a darker skin. With a Harvard- educated black president, this fiction became increasingly difficult to sustain...
