The Perils of Following the American Left
Progressivism should be rooted in local issues instead of importing values from the US.
The word ’broken’ manages to tell a story in six letters.¹ As much as it describes a condition locked in time, it also alludes to things that once were. Brokenness implies a before and an after. It captures lost beauty, unfulfilled promises, and perhaps the possibility of being fixed too.
American politics is broken. The world has not yet noticed, however, and we keep copying the United States as if it were still the beacon of democracy it used to be. Progressives² in my country have a history of importing ideas from the West, particularly the United States. I fear that in doing so today, we risk replicating some of its faults instead of learning from them.
One might wonder why I chose to write about progressivism when the most blatant example of decadence across the Atlantic is a puzzling, orange-haired entity. Sure, American conservatism has become an embarrassing parade of failures as well. But the left is my intellectual environment. The magazines I read, the newspapers I follow, and the podcasts I listen to are predominantly American, mostly liberal, and ideologically broken.
