The flashiest advertisement for free market globalisation has been the apparent freedom, competence and prosperity of the United States. “A shining city upon a hill,” as President Ronald Reagan said. “— a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom,” he said, after noting that “countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from the ideologies of the past.” That was in 1989. ‘Be like us,’ was the basic argument that the US made to the rest of the world. The use of force by America, at home or abroad, was only for the protection of liberty, it claimed. There was merit in that argument, as it expanded freedoms for its own people through the 20th century. In 1963, when Alabama’s Democrat Governor George Wallace – who had vowed “segregation forever” —resisted desegregation orders of the Supreme Court, President John F Kennedy deployed the National Guards to enforce it. President Donald Trump’s threat to use the US military to “dominate” people who erupted in protest after the murder by the police an unarmed African American is history coming full circle.
The video footage of a police officer pinning down George Floyd by his neck until he died could not have come at a worse time for the U.S. whose reputation of was already undermined by the fatal failures of its free market in the wake of the pandemic. Still, there was a moral defence that the US was a free society that does not coerce its members. There was a