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▶️ Current Events

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The world’s love-hate relationship with the USA

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The world’s love-hate relationship with the USA

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▶️ Frank Gardner: The world’s love-hate relationship with the USA (2002)

1. Is this love-hate relationship with the USA true for the rest of the world as well? Discuss why/why not.

2. Make two lists in pairs or in class of the things you love and hate about the USA. Discuss.

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3 x 3 x 3

Groups of three

Three-minute presentation

Using three images (and nothing else)

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▶Emma Lazarus: The New Colossus (1883)

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Huddled masses? Losers! Trump v Statue of Liberty | US news | The Guardian

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Huddled masses? Losers! Trump v Statue of Liberty | US news | The Guardian

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A senior Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, sparked a furor last week when he dismissed the famous poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. In response, we asked 21 poets: what type of poem would Trump like to see at the statue?

Last week, Donald Trump threw his support behind a "merit"-based immigration policy that would would drastically curb legal immigration to America. Under the plan, applicants with English proficiency, doctorates, high salaries, investment holdings and credentials like Olympic medals and Nobel prizes would be given preference.

The proposal kicked off a ferocious debate at a White House press briefing when CNN's Jim Acosta asked Miller if the plan violated the spirit of the poem The New Colossus, inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poem, by Emma Lazarus, includes the celebrated welcoming lines: "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Miller responded by noting that the poem "was added later and was not part of the original Statue of Liberty". He went on to attack Acosta for his "cosmopolitan bias".

And so, the Guardian asked 21 American poets - from the Pulitzer prize winner Rita Dove to the Inuit poet Joan Kane - to imagine in writing what type of poem would Trump like to see at the statue? We also gave the poets the option to write a contemporary take on the Lazarus poem. What follows is the extraordinary collection of work they produced on a short deadline.

We'd also like to invite our readers to join the Guardian's Lady Liberty poetry challenge. We'll publish a selection of our favorite reader-submitted poems. You can read more about how to enter here.

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Huddled masses? Losers! Trump v Statue of Liberty

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A senior Trump advisor, Stephen Miller, sparked a furor last week when he dismissed the famous poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. In response, we asked 21 poets: what type of poem would Trump like to see at the statue?

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1. Talk to a partner for 2 minutes about the poem and the following two headlines

1. In a nutshell

2. Why I care

2. Now spend 5 mintutes writing you individual reflections on these same headlines.

3. Share them in the WorkFlowy list, you've shared with me. Use #TheNewColossus (← triple-check that spelling!)

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1. Great Pyramid of Giza

2. Hanging Gardens of Babylon

3. Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

4. Statue of Zeus at Olympia

5. Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

6. Colossus of Rhodes

7. Lighthouse of Alexandria

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Save this as part of your own notes!

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Edward N. Kearny: The Frontier Heritage (1984)

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Obama: A More Perfect Union, The American Promise (2008)

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Obama: A More Perfect Union, The American Promise (2008)

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▶ Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union

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The United States has a long-held reputation for exceptional tolerance of income inequality, explained by its high levels of social mobility. This combination underpins the American dream - initially conceived of by Thomas Jefferson as each citizen's right to the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This dream is not about guaranteed outcomes, of course, but the pursuit of opportunities. The dream found a persona in the fictional characters of the 19th-century writer Horatio Alger Jr - in which young working-class protagonists go from from rags to riches (or at least become middle class) in part due to entrepreneurial spirit and hard work.

Yet the opportunity to live the American dream is much less widely shared today than it was several decades ago. While 90% of the children born in 1940 ended up in higher ranks of the income distribution than their parents, only 40% of those born in 1980 have done so.

Attitudes about inequality have also changed. In 2001, a study found the only Americans who reported lower levels of happiness amid greater inequality were left-leaning rich people - with the poor seeing inequality as a sign of future opportunity. Such optimism has since been substantially tempered: in 2016, only 38% of Americans thought their children would be better off than they are.

In the meantime, the public discussion about inequality has completely by-passed a critical element of the American dream: luck.

Just as in many of Alger's stories the main character benefits from the assistance of a generous philanthropist, there are countless real examples of success in the US where different forms of luck have played a major role. And yet, social support for the unlucky - in particular, the poor who cannot stay in full-time employment - has been falling substantially in recent years, and is facing even more threats today.

In short, from new research based on some novel metrics of wellbeing, I find strong evidence that the American dream is in tatters, at least.

White despair, minority hope

My research began by comparing mobility attitudes in the US with those in Latin America, a region long known for high levels of poverty and inequality (although with progress in the past decades). I explored a question in the Gallup world poll, which asks respondents a classic American dream question: "Can an individual who works hard in this country get ahead?"

I found very large gaps between the responses of 'the rich' and 'the poor' in the US (represented by the top and bottom 20% income distributions of the Gallup respondents). This was in stark contrast to Latin America, where there was no significant difference in attitudes across income groups. Poor people in the US were 20 times less likely to believe hard work would get them ahead than were the poor in Latin America, even though the latter are significantly worse off in material terms.

A man waits at dawn, after sleeping in his car, to see a free 'mobile doctor' in Olean, New York. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Another question in the poll explores whether or not respondents experience stress on a daily basis. Stress is a marker of poor health, and the kind of stress typically experienced by the poor - usually due to negative shocks that are beyond their control ("bad stress") - is significantly worse for wellbeing than "good stress": that which is associated with goal achievement, for those who feel able to focus on their future.

In general, Latin Americans experience significantly less stress - and also smile more - on a daily basis than Americans. The gaps between the poor and rich in the US were significantly wider (by 1.5 times on a 0-1 score) than those in Latin America, with the poor in the US experiencing more stress than either the rich or poor in Latin America.

The gaps between the expectations and sentiments of rich and poor in the US are also greater than in many other countries in east Asia and Europe (the other regions studied). It seems that being poor in a very wealthy and unequal country - which prides itself on being a meritocracy, and eschews social support for those who fall behind - results in especially high levels of stress and desperation.

But my research also yielded some surprises. With the low levels of belief in the value of hard work and high levels of stress among poor respondents in the US as a starting point, I compared optimism about the future across poor respondents of different races. This was based on a question in the US Gallup daily poll that asks respondents where they think they will be five years from now on a 0-10 step life satisfaction ladder.

I found that poor minorities - and particularly black people - were much more optimistic about the future than poor white people. Indeed, poor black respondents were three times as likely to be a point higher up on the optimism ladder than were poor whites, while poor Hispanic people were one and a half times more optimistic than whites. Poor black people were also half as likely as poor whites to experience stress the previous day, while poor Hispanics were only two-thirds as likely as poor whites.

What explains the higher levels of optimism among minorities, who have traditionally faced discrimination and associated challenges? There is no simple answer.

One factor is that poor minorities have stronger informal safety nets and social support, such as families and churches, than do their white counterparts. Psychologists also find that minorities are more resilient and much less likely to report depression or commit suicide than are whites in the face of negative shocks, perhaps due to a longer trajectory of dealing with negative shocks and challenges.

Another critical issue is the threat and reality of downward mobility for blue-collar whites, particularly in the heartland of the country where manufacturing, mining, and other jobs have hollowed out. Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University finds that poor black and Hispanic people are much more likely than poor white people to report that they live better than their parents did. Poor whites are more likely to say they live worse than their parents did; they, in particular, seem to be living the erosion of the American dream.

The American problem

Why does this matter? My research from a decade ago - since confirmed by other studies - found that individuals who were optimistic about their futures tended to have better health and employment outcomes. Those who believe in their futures tend to invest in those futures, while those who are consumed with stress, daily struggles and a lack of hope, not only have less means to make such investments, but also have much less confidence that they will pay off.

Desperate people are more likely to die prematurely, but living with a lot of premature death can also erode hope

The starkest marker of lack of hope in the US is a significant increase in premature mortality in the past decade - driven by an increase in suicides and drug and alcohol poisoning and a stalling of progress against heart disease and lung cancer - primarily but not only among middle-aged uneducated white people. Mortality rates for black and Hispanic people, while higher on average than those for whites, continued to fall during the same time period.

The reasons for this trend are multi-faceted. One is the coincidence of an all-too-readily-available supply of drugs such as opioids, heroin and fentanyl, with the shrinking of blue-collar jobs - and identities - primarily due to technological change. Fifteen per cent of prime age males are out of the labour force today; with that figure projected to increase to 25% by 2050. The identity of the blue-collar worker seems to be stronger for white people than for minorities, meanwhile. While there are now increased employment opportunities in services such as health, white males are far less likely to take them up than are their minority counterparts.

Lack of hope also contributes to rising mortality rates, as evidenced in my latest research with Sergio Pinto. On average, individuals with lower optimism for the future are more likely to live in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with higher mortality rates for 45- to 54-year-olds.

Desperate people are more likely to die prematurely, but living with a lot of premature death can also erode hope. Higher average levels of optimism in metropolitan areas are also associated with lower premature mortality rates. These same places tend to be more racially diverse, healthier (as gauged by fewer respondents who smoke and more who exercise), and more likely to be urban and economically vibrant.

Technology-driven growth is not unique to the US, and low-skilled workers face challenges in many OECD countries. Yet by contrast, away from the US, they have not had a similar increase in premature mortality. One reason may be stronger social welfare systems - and stronger norms of collective social responsibility for those who fall behind - in Europe.

Ironically, part of the problem may actually be the American dream. Blue-collar white people - whose parents lived the American dream and who expected their children to do so as well - are the ones who seem most devastated by its erosion and yet, on average, tend to vote against government programmes. In contrast, minorities, who have been struggling for years and have more experience multi-tasking on the employment front and relying on family and community support when needed - are more resilient and hopeful, precisely because they still see a chance for moving up the ladder.

There are high costs to being poor in America, where winners win big but losers fall hard. Indeed, the dream, with its focus on individual initiative in a meritocracy, has resulted in far less public support than there is in other countries for safety nets, vocational training, and community support for those with disadvantage or bad luck. Such strategies are woefully necessary now, particularly in the heartland where some of Alger's characters might have come from, but their kind have long since run out of luck.
Carol Graham is the author of Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Do you believe the American dream is dead? Please share your experiences in confidence at inequality.project@theguardian.com

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Research shows that poor people in the US are 20 times less likely to believe hard work will get them ahead than their (poorer) Latin American counterparts - with white Americans particularly pessimistic. What's driving their despair?

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C-SPAN: Barack Obama Speech at 2004 DNC Convention

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Barack Obama-Keynote Address to the Democratic National Convention

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'It's all fake news, it's phoney stuff - it didn't happen ... I think we have one of the great cabinets ever put together ... Don't be rude. Don't be rude. Don't. Be. Rude ... I'm not going to give you a question. I'm not going to give you a question. You're fake news." In his first press conference, President-elect Trump was fiery, abrupt and off-the-cuff. He spoke less like a president than like a bad-tempered reality TV star with - in Lord of the Flies terms - a firm grip on the conch.

Public oratory has been at the centre of the American project from the time of its founders. The framers of the constitution gave themselves classical noms de plume in their correspondence, and consciously modelled their new nation on the Roman republic. Every presidency is punctuated with set-piece speeches, and its historical turning points have been marked by historic speeches. In Donald J Trump, though, we have a presidential communicator who is quite unlike the other ducks.

So what does this augur for the public face of his administration? How does his language work? On a purely linguistic level, three things seem striking.

1) Trump uses a pretty small working vocabulary. This doesn't seem to be a conscious strategy, though it works as well as if it had been. Much was made during primary season of the way in which reading-level algorithms (unreliable though they are) found his speeches pitched at fourth-grade level, ie the comprehension of an average nine-year-old.

2) His syntax, spelling and punctuation are - in conventional terms - a catastrophe. In his tweets, he is prone to run-on sentences, shouty capitalisations, unpresidented misspellings and malapropisms, quote marks used for emphasis and verbless exclamations. In speaking, he is prone to anacoluthon - sentences whose grammar collapses - and reflexive repetition.

3) The workhorses of his rhetoric are charged but empty adjectives and adverbs. Things are "great", "wonderful", "amazing", "the best", or they're "crooked", "fake", "unfair", "failing". He sprinkles intensifiers liberally: "a very, very, very amazing man, a great, great developer".

All of those qualities, though they invite sneers, have something to be said for them as communicative strategies. Simple language reaches the widest possible audience and it tends (insert rueful joke here) to connote honesty. The plain style - short words, simple syntax and a folksy approach - has long been a winner for presidents. Remember George W Bush pretending to be a down-home Texan cowpoke? Remember Ronald Reagan playing "the Gipper"? Remember Bill Clinton playing the good ol' boy? People mistrust smooth talkers, and Obama's showy articulacy didn't always count in his favour.

Simple (or absent) grammatical structures leave the audience with nothing so taxing as a train of thought: rather, a random collage of emotive terms, repeated for emphasis. You come away from a Trump speech with a feeling, not an argument.

Trump's plain style is unvarying, though, and that's a key part of his ethos, or how he projects himself to his public. Most of his predecessors were able to command a range of registers. The presidential - dignified, high-flown - was available to George W Bush even as he struggled with his syntax (a struggle that, as I've suggested with Trump, didn't necessarily hurt him). It was abundant in Obama. And it underpinned even Reagan's folksiness.

In fact, the ability to shift register mid-speech - to say something historic-sounding but then to humanise it with a confidential joke, a mention of "folks", or a self-teasing personal anecdote - has been a basic presidential skill. Lincoln certainly had it. And even on the attack, Trump's predecessors never sounded petulant. They worked to convey either grave seriousness, or a sense of command so absolute that contempt was expressed as amusement. Think of Obama's deadly sally at John McCain - "I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans; I just think he doesn't know"; or Reagan smirking at Jimmy Carter, "There you go again ..."

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George W Bush struggled with his syntax but even he could shift registers and sound dignified. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In Trump, there is a note of wounded vanity, and of spite - "Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood" - that you struggle to find in recent presidential history other than in Nixon's private conversations. Trump simply doesn't sound presidential, ever. He doesn't have different registers for different occasions: he always sounds boastful, vengeful, bullying and naive.

To many of us, that looks like a failing. But to some, we might have to accept that it's a selling point: he doesn't sound like a normal president, and that's why people like him. There's only one Donald Trump. What you see is what you get. That can be seen as a sort of authenticity.

A related point: where Trump's language differs most profoundly from that of any of his predecessors is in his ability flatly and unblushingly to contradict himself. I'm saying this not to rattle my pearls at how awful he is, but to marvel at how it works rhetorically.

Most politicians are good at being equivocal. They are"economical with the actualite"; they "misspeak"; in extremis, like Bill Clinton, they may quibble over "what the meaning of 'is' is". But they do not like to say something that is unequivocally, checkably at odds with the truth of their behaviour or with their previous statements.

This is because, as a rule, the most effectively damaging charge against a politician has been dishonesty - or its practical cousin, hypocrisy. The media can say you are wrong or even evil. But these attacks don't nail you to the wall. They can be ascribed to ideological opposition or to differing interpretations of data. If you said X and you did Y, or you said X and they prove you knew Y was the case, you are sunk. You have damned yourself on your own terms.

This rule shows all signs of having been suspended for President-elect Trump. Yes, a lot of the time he's vague. But when he does say things that are concrete, he says them directly: I never supported the Iraq war; Alicia Machado made a sex tape; I saw thousands of Muslims cheering 9/11; Hillary Clinton started the rumours about Obama's birth certificate but Donald Trump "finished them", and so on. Often those things can be proved to be untrue, or contradict something he previously said. Yet that seems to do him no harm at all.

I wonder at this as much, I imagine, as you do. My hunch is that we have an electorate so used to politicians being equivocal, and so enraged by it, that the bounce Trump gets from not sounding like that is much bigger than the demerit he incurs for being a clouds-of-smoke-billowing-from-his-pants liar. We'd rather have an open liar, in other words, than a conventional politician. Let's see how that works out.
Sam Leith is the author of You Talkin' To Me?: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (Profile Books). To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Topics

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Trump's rhetoric: a triumph of inarticulacy

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'It's all fake news, it's phoney stuff - it didn't happen ... I think we have one of the great cabinets ever put together ... Don't be rude. Don't be rude. Don't. Be. Rude ... I'm not going to give you a question. I'm not going to give you a question.

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Six months have passed since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office.

His administration remains deeply understaffed. His legislative agenda is stymied. He has been active in issuing executive orders, but many are toothless, others are only in the early stages of undoing Obama policies and some are tied up in the courts. So far, Trump's leadership has mostly been defined by his rhetoric.

And his rhetoric, the conventional wisdom holds, could not be more different from his predecessor's.

Barack Obama was, as president, eloquent. His language was sophisticated. He spoke in measured tones and advanced informed, reasoned dialogue.

Donald Trump is inarticulate and brusque. His language is simplistic. He dishes out invective. He shows so little regard for the facts that some say he's the exemplar of a " bullshit artist." And he promotes a dialogue of the deaf.

The differences between Trump's and Obama's rhetorical styles seem stark. Yet, when we set aside the presidents' speaking styles and looked more carefully at the specific words Trump employed in his first months in office, we were surprised to discover that, in certain ways, these two presidents are remarkably like each other and unlike their predecessors. Here's what we found - and why Obama and Trump have more in common than you would think.

How we did our research

Our analysis is based on Trump's more substantial speeches - which we somewhat arbitrarily define as those longer than 500 words - which were directed primarily at domestic audiences. We scraped from the website of the American Presidency Project all of Trump's campaign speeches and presidential addresses through July 1 that met these criteria. We ended up with 74 campaign speeches, representing more than 230,000 words, and 56 presidential addresses, which included more than 122,000 words. We compared these bodies of speech to each other and to a separate database of postwar presidential speech that one of us had collected, using these same criteria, for a recently published book.

We ran these speeches through a specialized computerized content analysis program called Diction. Diction contains 33 separate dictionaries tailored to political speech. It searches texts for the words contained in the designated dictionaries and then calculates the number of words from each dictionary that would be present in a typical 500-word sample.

Obama and Trump vs. everyone else

On two key dimensions, Obama and Trump look similar - and stand in marked contrast to all other presidents.

First, their rhetoric is much more self-referential, meaning it uses more first-person pronouns. Obama's rhetoric is 69 percent more self-referential than the presidential average, and Trump exceeds Obama by another 20 percent.

Trump employs almost 50 percent more first-person pronouns than the second most heavily self-referential president after Obama, Gerald Ford. Trump's rhetoric is twice as self-referential as the postwar presidential average.

Second, both Trump and Obama rank very high on measures of "tenacity." This dictionary includes a series of words such as "must" and "need" that call for action and that " connote confidence and totality." Obama's rhetoric is around 45 percent more tenacious than the presidential average. Trump's rhetoric is a bit more tenacious than even Obama's. They are the only two presidents who substantially exceed the average.

Obama and Trump's rhetoric suggests that the prime mover of government is not separation of powers, political parties or the bureaucracy - but the will of the president. Its self-referentialism projects an image of strong leadership and of the president as the central pivot of action. Its tenacity expresses confidence that the president will triumph over the many obstacles in his way.

For all their differences, both Obama and Trump consistently presented themselves as the solution to the nation's problems. Accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention, Trump assured Americans, "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it." He regularly cited his own biography as the reason that Americans should "trust" him. The irony is that the predecessor who, on this dimension, most resembles Trump is the very one whom Trump cast as an utter failure and weak leader and as his chief foil. Obama too regularly invoked his unique personal story as the reason that Americans should place their faith in him. Minus Trump's boastfulness, Obama too portrayed himself as the key agent of national transformation: " I'm the one who brings change. It is my vision. It is my agenda," he told The Washington Post in January 2009. He saw other government officials as just "good mechanics."

Yearning for a strong leader

The computerized content analysis of presidential rhetoric sets out a pattern, it does not explain it. However, we believe it likely that Obama and Trump adopted the same rhetorical tack for the same reason: Audiences across the political spectrum have craved a strong leader who will overcome Washington's paralysis and address the nation's challenges.

Especially since 9/11, American politics has grown more partisan and polarized, even as Americans' values have converged. That partisan divide has produced gridlock in the halls of power, and Congress has become a site of minority party obstruction. As a result, Americans have become frustrated with Congress, and their trust in government has plummeted. They have increasingly looked to the president to seize the initiative, conquer Washington's dysfunction and persuade Congress to act.

In 2007, " honesty" mattered most to Americans in selecting the nation's next president, with "leadership/strength" a distant second. In 2012, American voters said that " shares my values " was their top consideration in electing a president. By 2016, having a president who was a "strong leader" had easily taken the top spot, across voters of all parties, and was twice as important to them as it had been four years before.

Obama and Trump's self-referential and tenacious rhetoric - one might even call it authoritarian - seems designed to satisfy that demand for strong leadership centered in the presidency. It is not accidental that their rhetoric, as the linked charts show, also reflects a continued, long-term decline in "cooperative" and "accomplishment" language, as collaboration across party lines has been rare and as there have been few achievements. Ironically, "satisfaction" rhetoric has experienced a corresponding rise - perhaps because there has been less to celebrate and therefore more reason for presidents to proclaim that all is well.

Of course, some of this may be Donald Trump's inimitable rhetorical style. The figures above reveal that Trump the candidate was somewhat less self-referential and less tenacious than Trump the president has been. Perhaps he was simply restraining himself during the campaign. Once ensconced in the White House, he could become more himself. Trump the president may be Trump unleashed.

But the data suggest that Trump is also a manifestation - albeit an extreme manifestation - of our political age. Obama's self-centered, self-confident but soaring speeches gave way to his successor's self-centered, overconfident and vain tweets. Karl Marx knew what he was talking about: History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Nevertheless, we'd better get used to authoritarian rhetoric. It appears to be here to stay.

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Trump and Obama have one surprising thing in common - the words they use

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Six months have passed since Donald Trump entered the Oval Office. His administration remains deeply understaffed. His legislative agenda is stymied. He has been active in issuing executive orders, but many are toothless, others are only in the early stages of undoing Obama policies and some are tied up in the courts.