The internet was something new.
Human rights were a subject that drew the attention of the best minds of the planet long before the notion of America occurred to any one of them.
So were utopias. You know what the best minds have figured out about them?
They aren’t practical.
Please refute them by devising one in practice. We’d all be grateful.
It would have been dismissed as “impossible” anyway. Certainly as something so far off in the future, demanding that people walk around with portable computers, as completely impracticable in the lifetimes of adults living in 1978, and certainly by a majority of people. The ones who could have imagined it as a practical reality were regarded as dreamers. In casting “equal rights” as a utopian (“no place”) idea, you’ve stacked the discussion in your favor, and you’ll need to find someone more gullible than I am to play your game.
Right. The FF could not have foreseen the industrial revolution or the emergence of a middle class. They probably couldn’t even imagine equal rights and opportunities for people who weren’t white male landowners, let alone build those rights into their experiment.
Truth.
A situation where moving the goalposts is a good thing.
Which is precisely why “equal rights for everyone” can go from being unimaginable now to a practical reality tomorrow. Or maybe next week.
They are primarily homogenous because they are not racially diverse.
Sweden - 86% white
Finland - 92% white
Norway - 98% white
Denmark - 92% white
Iceland - 99% white
I wish I could agree, but that last 20% can hang on a long time – and be vocal, troublemaking bastards. ISTM that “success” would be keeping those holdouts from having any impact on society, and we’re a long way from that.
Um…that was my point. 
Homogeneity and diversity are opposites.
Homogeneity - noun
the quality or state of being all the same or all of the same kind.
Define “equal rights for everybody” and give real-world examples of which of those rights don’t exist in American law.
American law is a joke–slavery was legal until relatively recently. But I’d start with everyone’s vote counting equally, which is the practice in most of the world’s democracies, unlike here where gerrymandering (perfectly legal) and the Electoral College (firmly established in our laws) and the permanent misalignments in the House of Representatives (as per the U.S. Constitution) make some people’s vote count as a mere fraction of others’ vote.
That’s just for starters, of course.
Some of that, having been been baked into the actual operating system (as opposed to the publicity sloganeering) from the start, would tend to support the line that the idea of the “experiment” being one of achieving your notion of a land of justice and equality for all and everyone, was but misleading marketing.
Pretty good rationalizing. So the topic of “the American Experiment” is invalid since it was never really what it purported to be, and has been a fraud from the git-go? I’ll accept that.
You know who in this thread argued against it being “a fraud from the git-go”?
This guy.
Since that’s what the people you are arguing against have been arguing, as one of them I have to say it’s a good argument, a much better one than the argument you make in other posts.
This got me thinking - which countries are the most diverse? A quick google turned up sites like THIS, suggesting the most culturally and racially diverse countries are in Africa. It would be interesting to try to rank the most culturally and ethnically compassionate countries, and cross reference their own diversity.
As usual, good posts by LSL. Communism is fantastic - for some species other than humans. And democracy is the worst system - except for all of the others. 
I think the biggest factors to address in the US - or any other developed country - are to aggressively target racism, and to address unfettered wealth/greed. I suspect a government reflecting more socialist values would tend to be more humane across the board, than one strongly reflecting capitalism. Doubt it is really achievable, but one could try, and hopefully make progressive minor improvements. (Apologies for possible hijack: That is one reason I tend to support Dem policies more than Repubs. At least major portions of the Dem platform seems to ATTEMPT to help out the less fortunate. Whereas the majority of Repubs’ platform seems to try to protect what the fortunate have and continue keeping the others down.)
Not the squelcher you seem to think. It’s a complicated subject, with much nuance, but essentially a corrupt failed system with lofty pretensions,
Many African countries had their borders drawn by colonizers, not the people living there.
To be clear, I was just trying to be illustrative of the two positions. The either-or was just meant to be that a person either has criteria in which the american experiment would be considered a failure, or they don’t.
I would consider the “perpetual fight” description that you gave to be under the “don’t” pile.
…which is not a criticism. Like I say, most, perhaps all countries have some motivational / foundational beliefs about their nation, and if they inspire people, then great.
I was just pointing out that many of the earlier posts in this thread were people saying this or that specific thing doesn’t constitute a failure, without being clear whether anything ever could constitute a failure under their understanding of “american experiment”.
Yes indeed, which has been my problem with this thread from the beginning. It’s an unfalsifiable proposition, its terms undefined, and its boundaries elastic. The first thing I would like to hear from “the experiment’s” defenders is what would have to happen for them to label the experiment a failure? I contend that nothing specific will be named, enabling them to go on saying, at worst, ‘Well, it hasn’t failed yet.’
IMO …
The experiment fails when the current US Constitution is thrown out and something overtly tyrannical has replaced the US government, both formally and informally.
Anything less is the experiment still ongoing, albeit possible stalled or even in freefall in a reverse direction.
Pretty expansive definition. In your view, then, “failure” is impossible until the U.S. Constitution is formally revoked and denounced by the current U.S. government, which would no longer exist by its own terms. Until that day, we’re a successful experiment-in-progress?