10-04-2018, 11:18 PM
Author Robert Kaplan answers questions from readers
My thoughts: The parochial, provincial, insular character of red America was revealed to Robert Kaplan on his tour of America, as reported in a PBS Newshour interview. It makes clear to me again how the red-state Trump voters have created their own suffering. It's the very anti-globalist, narrow-minded, pro-free market, anti-socialist, anti-diversity policies they have voted for for decades that keep them in decline, while the coasts and the university towns that are connected to the world thrive. And yet they keep voting to keep themselves in pain and in decline. In voting for Trump, the towns in the heartland have voted to make themselves even MORE cut off from the world, through erecting immigration and tariff barriers and empowering an American administration that encourages the rejection of knowledge and the understanding of other peoples. It is just the opposite course Kaplan says they need to take in order to recover. Can they wake up? Or must they be dragged into a better future through political victory OVER them?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/earnin...-questions
(includes video)
(transcript starting half way through)
Caroline Walker:
You write about the growing divide between city states and rural areas and cities that have not adjusted to the global economy.
Do you have any thoughts about how to bridge this growing divide?
Robert Kaplan:
It was stunning, what I saw.
Outside of the two coasts, outside of the university towns and college towns, and outside of a few, a smattering of state capitals, which are doing very well, much of America are towns of 20,000, 30,000 people with shelled-out storefronts, nobody on the Main Street, people having lost all hope.
This book was written and researched before the last election, before the campaign even began for the last election. And I saw a heartland which was economically and socially devastated.
Jeffrey Brown:
And how does that play into what then followed in the election?
Robert Kaplan:
And then all I could think about is, how to bridge the divide is, we can't go backward, we can only go forward, because the only future is global.
You have to get more of these places hooked into the global economy. Like, I'm traveling along the Ohio River, and I see one devastated town after another. But then I get to Marietta, Ohio, which is a tiny college, but it has students from dozens of countries. It's very highly rated. And it's part of the global world.
Suddenly, I'm there, and then I leave it again.
Jeffrey Brown:
OK, let's go to one more question.
Brandon Irwin:
Mr. Kaplan, you say in the book, "Americans, I find more and more each day as I travel, do not want to know the details about foreign policy."
Is this disconnect with foreign policy replicated around the world?
Jeffrey Brown:
You do — we should say you travel all over. You have written about many other parts of the world.
Robert Kaplan:
Yes, I do. Yes, I have got reported from 100 countries.
And in most, but it's — you only see it replicated in large, massive countries, continental-size, like the United States, where there's so much going on internally, that the outside world seems almost to disappear in a way.
But in many — Europe is mainly small countries, and even the biggest countries is small by our standards. But, in Europe, in Africa and the Middle East, people are much more connected to world events, I find, than in the United States.
It's almost as if you know intellectually that every place in the U.S. — the Oklahoma Panhandle has agricultural ties with cities in China and everywhere. You know all this intellectually, but when you actually see it, and drive across it, the continent is so big and variegated, that the rest of the world seems abstract almost.
My thoughts: The parochial, provincial, insular character of red America was revealed to Robert Kaplan on his tour of America, as reported in a PBS Newshour interview. It makes clear to me again how the red-state Trump voters have created their own suffering. It's the very anti-globalist, narrow-minded, pro-free market, anti-socialist, anti-diversity policies they have voted for for decades that keep them in decline, while the coasts and the university towns that are connected to the world thrive. And yet they keep voting to keep themselves in pain and in decline. In voting for Trump, the towns in the heartland have voted to make themselves even MORE cut off from the world, through erecting immigration and tariff barriers and empowering an American administration that encourages the rejection of knowledge and the understanding of other peoples. It is just the opposite course Kaplan says they need to take in order to recover. Can they wake up? Or must they be dragged into a better future through political victory OVER them?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/earnin...-questions
(includes video)
(transcript starting half way through)
Caroline Walker:
You write about the growing divide between city states and rural areas and cities that have not adjusted to the global economy.
Do you have any thoughts about how to bridge this growing divide?
Robert Kaplan:
It was stunning, what I saw.
Outside of the two coasts, outside of the university towns and college towns, and outside of a few, a smattering of state capitals, which are doing very well, much of America are towns of 20,000, 30,000 people with shelled-out storefronts, nobody on the Main Street, people having lost all hope.
This book was written and researched before the last election, before the campaign even began for the last election. And I saw a heartland which was economically and socially devastated.
Jeffrey Brown:
And how does that play into what then followed in the election?
Robert Kaplan:
And then all I could think about is, how to bridge the divide is, we can't go backward, we can only go forward, because the only future is global.
You have to get more of these places hooked into the global economy. Like, I'm traveling along the Ohio River, and I see one devastated town after another. But then I get to Marietta, Ohio, which is a tiny college, but it has students from dozens of countries. It's very highly rated. And it's part of the global world.
Suddenly, I'm there, and then I leave it again.
Jeffrey Brown:
OK, let's go to one more question.
Brandon Irwin:
Mr. Kaplan, you say in the book, "Americans, I find more and more each day as I travel, do not want to know the details about foreign policy."
Is this disconnect with foreign policy replicated around the world?
Jeffrey Brown:
You do — we should say you travel all over. You have written about many other parts of the world.
Robert Kaplan:
Yes, I do. Yes, I have got reported from 100 countries.
And in most, but it's — you only see it replicated in large, massive countries, continental-size, like the United States, where there's so much going on internally, that the outside world seems almost to disappear in a way.
But in many — Europe is mainly small countries, and even the biggest countries is small by our standards. But, in Europe, in Africa and the Middle East, people are much more connected to world events, I find, than in the United States.
It's almost as if you know intellectually that every place in the U.S. — the Oklahoma Panhandle has agricultural ties with cities in China and everywhere. You know all this intellectually, but when you actually see it, and drive across it, the continent is so big and variegated, that the rest of the world seems abstract almost.