Ferguson Is Not Iraq

The intention of these linguistic games is typically twofold. The first is reasonable: To point out that domestic coverage of foreign politics is often hopelessly simplistic. (One suspects that as an employee of Vox, Fisher understands this well.) But the second, far less benign in nature, is to indulge the grotesque, asinine, but fashionable conceit that the United States is a dangerous outlier among the developed nations of the world — a country that is exceptional, but for all the wrong reasons. In this imagining, America simply can’t get with the program, its antediluvian people refusing, inexplicably, to be disarmed; declining to countenance any restrictions on the “hate speech” that their betters just know needs prosecution; insisting, stupidly, that their representatives spend vast sums of money maintaining the military; clinging doggedly to their religious liberty, thereby holding back scientific and cultural advancement; dissenting from the central-government takeovers of health care and education that are de rigueur elsewhere; and, to their eternal shame, hosting a society that is so inherently racist that it is still suffering riots in 2014. Channeling this instinct perfectly, Bill Maher lamented on CNN last year that “there’s a great, smart European country in America; it’s just surrounded by a bunch of rednecks.” Those “rednecks” are at the heart of Fisher’s joke.