Important Issues Facing the U.S. Today

                                         

                                   

The question was asked to students, and they did research on their trip. In this connection, a number of documentaries and articles were produced. 

The American Dream?

One of the groups wanted to explore the concept of the American Dream.

The American Dream? Documentary

                                                made by Alberte, Rosa, Astrid and Ellen


What is the American Dream? a documentary made by Marius, Julian, Oscar and Isak.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gcl_l1qYG5Q16S8NTwt4_HL1Eaow5jkd/view?usp=sharing




The following film is based on an interview with the actor, Toney Goins. Film made by Laura, Hannah, Nanna and Emilie

Consider the following question: 

What do you think is the most important problem in the US today?

Read the small paragraph about the US challenges of today.(follow the link)
Infographic: The Most Important Issues Facing The U.S. Today 
https://www.statista.com/chart/10278/the-most-important-issues-facing-the-us-today/

2 different answers to these questions: a student from 2y

The most important issues facing the U.S. today

1)    Explain the chart.

The chart shows what adult people living in the US think is the most important problem facing their country. The chart is from July 2019. At the top of the list with 27% is immigration. And at the bottom with 4% is climate change.

2)    Does anything strike you in the chart?

It actually strikes me that the poor government leadership is that high. I knew that a lot of people are dissatisfied with the leadership, but I didn’t know that it was that many people. Another striking factor is that the climate change issue is so low on the chart, even though Trump isn’t a proponent of global warming, it still surprises me that there aren’t more people who voted on that.

3)    Try to explain why we see these results. 

I believe that the reason why we see these results could be because Trump is the president at the moment and he has some strong beliefs. He is focusing a lot on immigration, and less on example climate change. As he is the president his opinions and derogations affect people. Furthermore, the chart is made by the Trump administrations, and as he as the president wants to approach himself in the best way possible. He doesn’t believe in climate change, and it is a great way to show the people living in the U.S that he is right.

4)    Give your views on how the US would approach these challenges the best way (you are welcome to draw on your knowledge from Isak's presentation - or from the study trip).

Immigration is not only a problem in America, however, a global issue. Illegal immigration is a complex problem, that doesn’t have an obvious solution. And you could even discuss that immigration isn’t a problem. The Mexican and South Americans make a substantial proportion of the working force in America. If they weren’t there, the economy would break down in the United States. Personally, I think the easiest way to solve the problem of illegal immigration is by legalizing it.

America Expert, Isak Hüllert's comments on this question :

March 16 2020

As you may recall from my talk, American life and many of its institutions are permeated by hyper partisanship nowadays, and Americans are increasingly divided across political, economic, and cultural fault lines. These divisions manifest themselves in Gallup polls such as this one, published in Statista, showing which issues Americans find most important. Still, at first glance I’m struck by how issues such as - immigration and government/poor leadership - starkly illustrate America’s partisan divisions. Immigration has long been at the very top of Gallup’s monthly polling, when it comes to non-economic problems. Still, the issue of immigration has become even more salient among voters and gained increasing strength in polls during the rise of Trump as a political figure. Both as a candidate and during his tenure in office, Trump has shed further light on the fact that the US is in dire need of immigration reform, and he has long championed an anti-immigration agenda that appealed to many white Americans, whom hold deep seeded cultural resentments and anxieties about the demographical changes washing over the United States.

As I mentioned during my talk, Trump has managed to hold on to roughly 40-45 % of the American electorate. He has a core base of voters, who are extraordinarily loyal to him and devoted to his cause of restoring their conception of American greatness. Because we have insufficient datapoints on the respondent’s political leanings in the poll, it is difficult to state anything conclusive about it as we are unable to fully assess the political composition of the 27 % of Americans, who said that immigration is the most important issue facing the country. Moreover, we are unable to say whether Trump’s devout base or Republican voters in general make up a majority of the respondents, who chose immigration as the most important problem in the poll. We are however able to say with certainty that Republican voters and Trump voters in particular, tend to view immigration as a critically important problem that the country faces. To illustrate how Trump appealed to these sentiments within the Republican electorate, in the very much month, in which this Gallup poll was conducted, I have found two clear examples of Trump tapping into voters’ cultural resentments and anxieties and using it as a forceful political strategy in a country heavily divided across various lines.

The first example is from July 14, 2019. Trump tweeted out to his millions of followers on Twitter that four newly elected progressive Democratic congresswoman of color should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested place from which they came”, drawing widespread criticism and accusations of racism. On July 17, Trump continued his “dog-whistle poltics” (look this term up if you are interested in race relations in America!) as it is known within the academia of American political history, when he held a rally in North Carolina and intensified his attacks on the four progressive Democratic congresswomen, painting them as the face of the Democratic Party -- as a fevered crowd chanted "Send her back!" about an American congresswoman of color. As the President castigated her - Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar - with a litany of accusations, the crowd chanted, "Send her back!" Trump made no effort to stop the chant, pausing for 13 seconds as the chants grew louder.

To put Trump’s remarks into perspective, the progressive lawmaker, Rep. Ilhan Omar, was born in Somalia but came to the US as a refugee in 2000 and became an American citizen when she was 17. In the 2018 midterm election, Omar became the first Somali born American to be elected into Congress and is widely regarded as one of main figures in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, along with other known names such as NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump later tried to disavow the chants by claiming that he was unhappy with his rally crowd’s “send her back” chants and rejected the notion that his tweets against the congresswoman of color were in any way racist. This is textbook Trump and, in many ways, the political playbook of many previous American politicians, who have used culture and race to drive voters from one another in order to gain an advantage electorally. In spite of Trump downplaying his conduct in the days that followed, this type of rhetoric illustrates how he constantly signals to his base and throws cultural red meat at them to maintain their diehard support. Many of his supporters actually support him for this very reason; they believe that “he says it how it is”; that he is unconstrained from all the traditional political niceties and all the political correctness that they believe is crippling the American nation. They want someone who will stand up against the changes washing over the United States and defend their conceptualization of American greatness. Another noteworthy culture/immigration related development occurring in July 2019 was the legal battle over the border wall funding. On July 26, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Trump Administration could use military funding for the construction of the border wall. This SCOTUS decision gave Trump 2.5 billion dollars to fund his core campaign promise; erecting a wall along the southern border in order to halt the influx of immigrants. This further demonstrates the political sentiments at play during the period, in which this poll was conducted.

Respondents in poll who said that ‘government/poor leadership’ was the most important problem that the country faces, are likewise, likely to be on the other side of the political spectrum. There is a high probability that they are Democratic voters, independents or moderate republicans who are tired of the current president and administration. During my talk I mentioned that the Democratic electorate appears to be primarily focused on one issue leading into the 2020 presidential election and that is; beating Trump. Since Trump was elected, we have seen a mass countermobilization against him. This enormous uproar has consisted of a multitude of demographical groups; we have seen woman across the US, who are fed up with the pre-me-too status quo and the realities of sexism, stand up and march for their rights; we have seen students and mothers who are tired of the gun violence wreaking havoc across communities in the US; we have seen African Americans who still face the brutal systemic injustices and hurdles in their daily lives – racial inequities that are becoming even more apparent in the age of Trump; we’ve seen many Hispanic Americans, who fear deportation and dehumanization/otherizing by their fellow countryman & -woman. These minority groups are eager to do whatever it takes to remove Trump from office. Moreover, a large portion of white suburban Americans, particularly white woman, who previously were moderate republican voters, have moved over to the Democratic column as a result of the election of Trump and the subsequent transformation of the Republican Party into a personality cult. Along with all these demographic groups, the traditional core democratic voter base - young Americans, very liberal/progressive Americans, and native Americans -have also come into the fold of this mass mobilization of Americans that are furious with the ruling party.

In addition to the countermobilization, the Gallup poll also reflects the democratic electorate’s primary focus on electability and the importance of beating Donald Trump in 2020. Much of the focus on government/poor leadership can be ascribed to Americans desire to get rid of Trump. Although there is much disapproval of the Trump administration, Congress is known for having longtime low approval ratings, and is often cited as the most disliked institution in America because of its suffocating polarization and gridlock. The Gallup poll shows how Americans are increasingly tired of their chaotic current political reality and they want to have a normal and stable federal government. As we discussed during my presentation, Joe Biden has staked his claim on being the candidate that is most electable, and he has pledged to return the nation’s government to a state of normalcy. His argument of being the most electable person and the most qualified to go up against Trump, ended up working fairly well against Sanders. Democrats focus on electability, which we even see a hint of in a poll from July 2019, proved to be the most consequential issue of the democratic primary election. Whether voters listened too much to all of the media’s talk of Biden being the “electable” candidate and voted based on what the pundit class said, is unclear at the moment, but it will assuredly be examined closely by political scientist, historians and other academics in the near future. What can be said, however, is that after having consolidated all of the moderate wing and beaten Bernie Sanders in critical states, Biden proved to be the candidate that Democratic voters wanted to nominate and he is now the presumptive democratic nominee, whom will face Trump in 2020, assuming that we all get through this Covid-19 pandemic.

In regard to the lower ranked issues, I am surprised to see healthcare poll so poorly as it tends to be at the very top of the priority list among a majority of Americans, across partisan lines. Furthermore, I’m slightly surprised that unifying the country polls low as well because that too tends to be a hope among American voters.