J2T2W13 Is History Still Relevant In Today’s World Flashcards
Trump failed to replicate “Reaganomics” in today’s America.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan reduced taxes and rolled back regulations to get the US out of an economic slump - which he did. “Reaganomics”, however, came to be seen not as a one-off success, with the cure matching the context, but as ratifying right-wing economic policy as the correct way to generate growth. It spawned the much-maligned idea of “trickle-down economics”, where tax breaks for CEOs and corporate powerhouse would eventually boost employment rates among bottom-feeding workers.
Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts (TCJA) in 2017, but while Reagan cut the corporate tax rates to 40%, the TCJA slashed them to a mere 21%. Not only was it vehemently-and rightly- criticized for favoring big businesses and the wealthy to a disproportional degree, it did not even improve the economy as a whole. Over the course of Trump’s presidency, the US’ GDP growth rates were their worst since the Great Depression, and he presided over the loss f 2.9 million jobs and a strong of factories closures and mass retrenchments.
His failure owes, of course to the dramatic differences between the American economies of the 20th and 21st centuries. The US is struggling not because of penny-pinchers are not spending enough, and need to be incentivized via tax cuts, but because it is mired in a trade war with China and hemorrhaging jobs to countries with cheaper labors. Trump’s $1.9t tax break for the rich could neither rejuvenate the Rust Belt nor return offshore and outsourced jobs to the US, illustrating how history is simply not a good guide to modern day problems.
Putin’s miscalculation on geopolitics.
Another example might be Putin’s insistence on seeing the global geopolitics as a zero-sum game between the East and the West - a battleground where compromise is impossible and conflict is inevitable, a matter of the mighty prevailing over the weak. This might have been the case in the Cold War era, where international institutions and instruments for diplomacy and peace keeping were lacking in legitimacy, but is no longer true of today’s interconnected world where countries have more to gain from cooperating economically and politically.
When Russia annexed Crimea and Donbas in 2014, its trade partners were unimpressed, and levied sanctions that ended up costing Russia $570b by 2016 and turning the Ruble to rubble. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 to use as a buffer zone against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), its unchecked aggression forced Finland to formally apply to join the alliance. If the bid goes through, Russia will share 1340 km of its land perimeter with its military rivals. In both cases, applying an ancient, atavistic logic of “might makes the right” or “winner takes all” to foreign affairs achieved the opposite of Putin’s intentions. Hard power might have worked for him to get his way in a more polarized, primitive past, but today’s world has evolved too much to fail to such one-dimensional shows of force
Racism against Malays stems from historical reasons
In Singapore, a common stereotype associates the term “lepak” (spending one’s time loafing around) with the Malay community. The term is used to make fun of Malays being inherently lazy, sometimes casually or comically; other times, however there are real consequences to this trope, such as when our first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew claimed that they are not as “hardworking and capable as the other races.” Even his rival, Malaysia’s former PM Dr Mahathir, has made references to the “easy-going” character of his own race.
However, this is not an essential feature of Malay-hood, and the etymology of this stereotype tells us a different story. In The Myth of the Lazy Native, Prof Syed Hussein Alatas reveals how it was European colonizers who first used the term lazy to describe Malays.
For the “crime” of refusing to submit to the colonial rulers as slave workers, the native Malay population was described as “essentially indolent” and “disinclined to work” by the British, in contrast to the “industrious” Chinese and Indian coolies who, as outsiders to the region, had no choice but to endure exploitive, back-breaking labour.
This label tossed about so unthinkingly today is contingent historical development rather than an essential ahistorical fact.
