Active and Healthy Aging After COVID-19 Pandemic in Portugal and Other European Countries: Time to Rethink Strategies and Foster Action

The population aging in Europe imposes challenges to societies that require adaptations and responses at various levels to minimize impacts and figuring out opportunities. Portugal has been committed to the World Health Organization and European Union's values and policy frameworks concerning active and healthy aging. In 2017, an inter-ministerial working group developed the National Strategy for Active and Healthy Aging. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic that exposed the vulnerabilities of older populations, the launch of the Decade of Healthy Aging 2021–2030 and its baseline report and the 2018 Active Aging Index Analytical Report may constitute an opportunity to strategically think about the aging of the population as a national purpose in Portugal and in the other European countries that face similar challenges.

Kiwis and COVID-19: The Aotearoa New Zealand Response to the Global Pandemic

This fast-moving global COVID-19 pandemic caught many nations unprepared and has exposed numerous flaws in global health, public health, and economic and social welfare infrastructures. It may seem premature to write about responses, but there are lessons to be learned from the response of Aotearoa New Zealand. Although its geopolitical situation as an island nation meant that it had late exposure to COVID-19, NZ has been commended because it closed its borders (to non-nationals); lockdown; traced; tested contacts; told people to pick a ‘bubble’ (immediate and usual family or household) and stay within that bubble; and promoted clear public messages. Government assistance was available for employers to retain staff, and additional support was provided for businesses and individuals. A strong and empathetic prime minister communicated regularly with the public and developed a sense of common national purpose. However, COVID-19 still exposed the impact of social inequalities. Implications for the next steps of recovery are considered in the paper.

Introduction: thinking about America in the world over the longer run

For all their bragging and their hypersensitivity, Americans are, if not the most critical, at least the most anxiously self-conscious people in the world, forever concerned about the inadequacy of something or other – their national morality, their national culture, their national purpose. This very uncertainty has given their intellectuals a critical function of special interest. The appropriation of some of this self-criticism by foreign ideologues for purposes that go beyond its original scope or intention is an inevitable hazard. But the possibility that a sound enterprise in self-correction may be overheard and misused is the poorest of reasons for suspending it....

Barack Obama and the Traditions of Progressive Reform

This chapter discusses the Progressivism of President Barack Obama. Obama's progressivism is broadly based. First, he aspired to the ideals of the Social Gospel and invoked the idea of a shared national purpose, a common good that transcended the particular interests of the separate classes, ethnic groups, and regions that have shaped American political struggles. Second, he resurrected the Progressives' emphasis on political and economic reforms. Third, Obama inherited the Progressives' pragmatism, their uneasiness with dogma, their commitment to achieving moderate, incremental progress through trial and error, and their confidence in the application of the scientific method to politics. The obstacles to Obama's progressivism run deep as well. He has had to wrestle with four stubborn features of American culture that have hamstrung reformers since the nation's founding: persistent localism; distrust of the federal government; a deep ambivalence about engaging in world affairs; and a racism that appears nearly as entrenched in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.

Inventing Un-America

No writer is more closely bound up with our deepest sense of the meaning of the “American” than Thomas Jefferson and it is difficult to imagine America's national purpose without some reference to his words. Yet Jefferson's projection of American identity also assumed and even constituted, of necessity, the un-American and it is in this sense that the un-American provided the necessary contours of what became the “American.” Jefferson's various projects are often seen in tension with one another. But this dialectic between the American and the un-American helps reconcile many of them. Federalists, Jefferson believed, assumed that governing Americans demanded the force and corruption that had long kept Europeans in order, whereas Americans, he believed, had an experience of history that rendered them capable of transcending such political theory and practicing democratic politics. This paper explores this dialectic between the American and the un-American in Jefferson's thought as a problem of national self-definition and argues that Jefferson's overwhelming confidence about American identity rested to a large degree in the shudder produced by his experience of the other. Years before Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, Jefferson's project of defining the nation created the un-American, rendering Americans ever since profoundly, however paradoxically, ambivalent about the prospects for revolutionary republicanism abroad.