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.
The reference was intended to be to modern extreme right movements, not the historical Nazis. I don’t really see the relevance of Nazi death camps to this conversation anyways. Your responses are steadily drifting steadily drifting further and further away from the point I was making, which is that while I do not believe that good-old-days American patriotism is necessary to protect a free society from [illiberal extremist forces], I do think that many people will not buy into a political system without being offered some kind of identitarian pull. Obviously other societies that have (to date) maintained liberal political systems have their own political identities (although I think that many other countries are suffering from the very early stages of some of the same problems that are afflicting the U.S., so check back in 20 years…).
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These are real questions. You’re a smart guy and I want to know what you think.
What kinds of countries do you think are the least likely to develop modern extreme right movements?
Like between France, Denmark, US, Thailand, Peru, Mexico, Japan, India, Sierra Leone or whatever - not just thinking about the US and it’s possible solutions to the problem.
And what do you mean by “good-old-days”? A specific time period? The 1950s? Or just nostalgia in general?
(US had millions of people in the KKK in the 1920s and millions of people who wanted to support Hitler in WW2)
Your thesis is “believe in something or your empty mind will be ready to be filled by the right-wing extremists”? Patriotism doesn’t seem like the best thing to fill your head with if that’s what you’re trying to avoid.
I would date the start of the American political identity to the Revolutionary War, although I definitely agree that it has evolved over time, in many cases to attempt to resolve or lessen some of its internal contradictions. I am also not claiming that American patriotism is an amulet against Americans or the American state doing evil things (although it is worth noting that many Americans did give a lot of shits about many of those evil things, seeing them as inconsistent with this country’s identity.)
The fundamental problem that I see is that the American political identity is fundamentally not true, but it or something like it is necessary to a functioning society.
Speaking of the importance of believing in fiction, one of my closest friends is a libertarianish person, perhaps not unlike you, and thinks that religion is important for society. Not for him of course, but for other people.
Brings me to something I try to bring up a lot - I think one of the most characteristic differences between the right and the left is that the right thinks that humans are bad by nature and the left thinks they are good.
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Before the Civil War, I think that patriotism was organized more at the state level, that people’s first loyalty was to their state than to the nation.
My guess is that the formation of a national identity above the states required something that could easily be defined as the other, something “un-American”.
This probably had some stirrings with the Jacksonian-era push for manifest destiny where the other was those who occupied desired land, but the solidification of an American-style patriotism was probably related to the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant nativism, as the competing narrative of state vs state and North vs South was decided by the Civil War. In some ways, nationalism and patriotism is about fostering loyalty to the State over loyalty to the Church.
The late 19th century is when Independence Day first becomes a federal holiday, the Pledge of Allegiance is written, and there is a push for “The Star-Spangled Banner” to be the national anthem, so that’s when American-style patriotism became more of a thing.
The Red Scare and the Cold War allowed American civic identity to be framed strongly in terms of being anti-Communist. Post 9/11, some tried to tie this identity to being anti-Muslim. For the left to offer up a compelling vision of what it means to be American, it needs to also offer up a clear example of an un-American other that provides contrast.
I guess that’s why I’m a Committed Centrist, believing as I do that each human is a rich and unique mix of many different character traits, some usually seen as good and some usually seen as bad.
But I both agree and disagree with your friend. Religion (so very obviously) served an important function in past societies, but it can’t really play that role any more because too many people understand that its core claims are not true. As NBZ observed, what I’m really talking about is civic religion as a substitute for real religion. While I tend to believe that quite a few core tenets of the American civic religion actually are true, many of them are not, so it’s at best on shaky ground. Assuming that you believe that the American civic religion is basically false (and don’t think it’s wise to cynically propagandize it for the greater good), then you either need to come up with a replacement or conclude that you never really needed it in the first place. My (hopefully) corrected understanding of your view is that there really isn’t a good community-substitute in politics, and that you therefore need to localize politics to the extent possible so that it takes place in real communities and you don’t need pretend ones as much.
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