It wasn’t intended as a hostile summary. Perhaps I misunderstand your beliefs or expressed it poorly. I thought your belief was that the state in general was bad, and that the only good way of running things is authentically local communities that govern themselves. From that perspective, I would then think that you would reject any attempt to construct a virtual political community based on abstractions. Maybe characterizing as evil is where I went astray?
As far as the EU goes, weakish global or semi-global organizations are probably good in that they probably decrease the likelihood of war.
Also, some issues are global and need some kind of global agreement.
Also many of us are in favour of continual expansion of the EU to eventually encompass much more of the globe (rename it as needed).
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Both in characterizing it as evil and being absolutist.
Freedom is good. Democracy is good. All things should be decided as locally and democratically as practical (down to the level of the individual) so that everyone has the most freedom and direct input over the rules that they live under. Broader organizations are needed to protect things like the environment, but also to protect individual liberty.
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I think the biggest problem with the EU is how undemocratic it is. How it is dominated by a small group of politicians and officials with little connection to the member states in the day to day practice and also dominated by Germany. Not sure how hot that take is though. Countries like Greece and Spain end up being treated like, say, the IMF treats the poorest countries in the world, and getting put into debt bondage.
It’s reasonable criticism of an entity still at a relatively embryonic stage in its development, but don’t NY/CA wield a lot more power than some other parts of the US (I’m asking, not stating)?
Having said that, nation states habitually do very similar things to their own uneconomic regions; not debt bondage as such but handcuffed dependence on welfare handouts to whole communities in lieu of the jobs they once had.
Eventually national borders dissolving to be replaced by local areas with a high degree of autonomy determining how best to spend their rebates from the EU or w/e, which focuses its attentions on issues like climate change that could be solved or at least vastly improved by a larger entity.
And ostensibly that’s what the US and it’s constitution are supposed to do, but the state is captured by money and why things like the 14th amendment are benefiting corporations rather than individuals 90%+ of the time. It’s a result of the scope of the state. It’s too far reaching and massive and dependent on money to leave uncaptured.
I would say no. NY and CA have some extra power federally because they have about 60 million people between them. Per capita smaller states are more powerful. If you’re talking about money, then rich people have a lot of power, but it’s not like a rich Californian is getting power because they are in California.
You’d like to see NY/CA given more power under a reformed/abolished electoral college/democratic system?
I think what he’d like is for every American to have equal representation in the federal government. A Californian has 1/65th the representation in the Senate of a Wyominger.
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Chalk me up as fine with one global currency, govt, mutt-race and meta-culture some day (while still celebrating the good parts of traditional culture - like food). It’s the only way to avoid tragedy of the commons stuff like global warming imo. I just don’t see any chance of real shared sacrifice as long as there are "other"s.
The sooner we all look like J-Lo the harder it will be for rich politicians to get young poors, with absolutely nothing to gain, to kill each other over a small patch of land.
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I liked it as a positive statement, not as a normative one.
There’s a lot here where we’re disagreeing subtly.
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American identity is not a pure abstraction. What Americans are (normatively) taught is that Americans are great because we invented modern democracy and have a great Constitution drafted by geniuses, and that part of Americanness is bringing in immigrants who want to flee more backwards areas and join in our project, etc, etc. That is different from both traditional nationalism and a purely abstract commitment to justice for its own sake. It’s a hybrid.
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I also reject the idea that the motivations of the Founders reflect the “real” nature of American identity. However cynical a view of the Founders’ motivations you have, the ideas they used to build an identity to achieve their own goals stand independently of what those goals were. Even if you take it as a given that the Founders wanted to build a replica of UK aristocracy, but with themselves in charge, they failed. The Articles collapsed, then limitations on white suffrage fell. Then efforts to reconcile slavery and American identity failed. And so on. To think about it another way, I suspect that many of the Founders would have liked to memory-hole the Declaration after the UK was kicked out, but they lacked that power. And the Declaration needed to say the things it did to be good enough propaganda to win the war. So they’re stuck.
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I don’t uncritically endorse American-style patriotism as a necessary bulwark against the Nazis. However, I do think that something is necessary, and the naive neoliberal/globalist view that you can run a purely cosmopolitan political system is misguided. As is the technoutopian vision that virtual community is an adequate replacement. Moreover, I worry that the historic American political identity is seriously, perhaps fatally, wounded. Even if that fatal wound is deserved, everyone should be near-panicking about what comes next, or at least have a clear answer about how the new system will handle people’s desires for political identity. Because the current leading candidate is hating the outgroup on social media or cable TV, which is not the basis for a great political system.
EDIT: This is @microbet, somehow got disconnected from the post it’s replying to.
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A relevant concept is the theory of civil religion, as popularized by the sociologist Robert Bellah.
As a proponent of ultimately replacing the Constitution, I see the difficulty of doing so when it is considered akin to scripture in the American civil religion. Heck, the Mormons believe it to be divinely inspired. (See: the White Horse prophecy.)
We are, once again, what Abraham Lincoln called “a house divided” and this is unsustainable. And the resolution will be that we become all one thing or all the other.
Where the left has always been lacking is in supplying a foundational myth, an operating narrative, to replace the past. And, as history shows us, replacing one religion with another is usually a source of great conflict.
Many people are content to continue on with at least the trappings of the religion they are raised in, so long as it’s easy. What sort of existential crisis causes people to convert to a new religion or to abandon religion altogether? Take that and apply it to the concept of civil religion and perhaps we can find a path towards transforming our political system.
When do you think American-style patriotism started? Because we more or less were as bad as Nazis throughout a lot of our history in terms of what we have done to Native Americans, African Americans and Southeast Asians.
One difference though is the Nazis, like the Soviets and Chinese were totalitarians. The government was more or less all powerful and even the in-group was afraid to not conform.
I’m just asking, because I’m vaccinating on this myself, but what’s the arc of US trends toward totalitarianism? How does that relate to American-style patriotism?
Your mission, should you choose to accept it.
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I don’t think there’s much to discuss if this is where you’re starting from. You could collect the most horrible things Americans have done over the past 400 years and they would be comparable to very bad things that the Nazis did, but if you think they are “more or less” the same, then you’re missing an enormous amount.
Damn swipe wrote “vaccinating” instead of “vacillating”.
But, that’s a horrible post. Certainly extermination camps were not the essential part of Nazism you were talking about anyway. Are you pretending you’re offended to try to score a point?
What do you mean by this anyway? Bulwark against Germany in WW2 or against the rise of Nazism or something like it now?
Because if you’re going to define Nazism as extermination camps that murder millions of people in a few years, there are lots of countries that have avoided doing that without American style anything.
That’s why I asked the above. Certainly pre-civil war, and really pre-Spanish American war Americans gave no shits about millions of people in the out-group. (Millions were murdered in SE Asia in the 1960s and 70’s, but that did have to be done somewhat in secret and with a lot of propaganda that we were helping those people.)
Are you talking about slave owning Native American killing founders when you say American style patriotism or a post WW2 kind of liberalism? And, yeah, it was a real question. Certainly this kind of American sentiment changed a lot over time.