The US past was no paradise, but might give us reason for nostalgia.

Adam Shatz writes in LRB: ‘Richard Nixon, a brooding, often monstrous leader who spied on his fellow Americans and presided over bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia, made significant contributions to environmental protection and to the welfare state, which are being dismantled only now.’

Shatz quotes Simone de Beauvoir: ‘The arrogance of Americans is not their will to power; it’s the will to impose Good.’

A common arrogance, also outside the US.

Shatz sees hope in Mamdani, elected thanks to Palestine. (Younger voters see Palestine ‘not simply as a foreign policy issue but as a domestic one’.)

Mamdani, the better Bernie Sanders?

Shatz quotes the Algerian journalist Ihsane El Kadi: ‘We can always rely on America to bring us the best and the worst!’

American exceptionalism lives on, especially among its critics.

(a sf 2049)