H… Someone doesn’t seem to get metaphor.
I’m beginning to wonder if there CAN be an experiment without intent. Yeah, there are high-minded ideals involved, but if there isn’t a driving force towards a specific goal behind it that everyone can agree on, is it really an experiment? I’m starting to lean towards no.
Has the place you someone lives in accomplished that?
No it is not. It’s a fairly new phrase that’s been popularized by right-wing groups, like the Heritage Institute and PragerU. The Center for the American Experiment honored Dennis Prager at their 2023 dinner. It was designed to seize the conversation back from groups trying to expand the scope of what is taught in American history, like the 1619 Project.
…if you don’t want to debate the question posed in the OP I’m not forcing you to.
That isn’t the subject of this debate. The questions that I posted here were the questions that were put forward in the New York Daily Tribune back in 1860. Its the basis of what they thought the American Experiment was all about.
My country was founded on a different set of principles. Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Partnership, participation and protection. It was never framed as an experiment.
My original cite was from 1860. I had heard of the phrase downunder long before PragerU even existed.
Yeah, on this one B_B provides an actual historical cite. However redefined over time or abused by propagandists of a specific era from then to today, the phrase and the notion of there being an “experiment” have been around at least that long. And as for being “popularized by the right wing”, heck every faction reaches for pieces of the American Myth like the Experiment or the Dream or Pioneering or Exceptionalism to claim as theirs all the time, I mean “now the American Experiment begins” is even a lyric in Hamilton.
(Interesting to note, that cite is from another historic time when the whole purported “experiment”, if that is what it was, was (not just seemed) careening into a major existential setback. )
That it’s in the “common parlance” at all is recent, not its first ever usage.
…its common enough that everyone appeared to know what we were talking about in this thread. Its common enough the multiple people have expressed an opinion on it without having to look it up. When I read the thread title I had a fairly good idea of what the topic was about. Doing my research I found that yes, my initial impressions matched up with the historical meaning of the phrase. That didn’t come out of nowhere. It certainly wasn’t the result of Heritage Institute and PragerU propaganda.
It’s a similar phrase to American Experience, which has 20 times the hits on Google, and was a documentary series on PBS. American Dream has over 80 times the hits. The American Something is a standard way of expressing the draw that has brought tens (hundreds?) of millions of immigrants to this country. I’m not surprised that people just went with the flow.
Nevertheless, the particular term American Experiment was rarely used until the right-wing decided to co-opt it. If Dennis Prager read this thread he would chuckle all night at all the lovely ammunition it provides.
…so is the argument now that this entire debate, including the OP, has just provided ammunition for a bunch of people that don’t even know this messageboard exists?
Because it doesn’t matter what Dennis Prager thinks. It doesn’t change my reference to how the experiment was regarded in 1860. It doesn’t change my opinion on how that experiment has failed, that short of a revolution there is no fixing this, that “not voting Republican” will never ever be enough, that all of the broken things like the industrial prison complex will never ever be fixed because most Americans don’t even know that it’s happening.
This is it. This is the end result of the experiment that started with the founding fathers hundreds of years ago. A two-party capitalist dystopia.
Huh, someone else here who was familiar with the term well before Prager was anywhere in my radar. Also, seems now we have some like myself who were asking if there IS an “American Experiment” then what is it, those who say “well, by the self-promoted definition it’s not working” , and now we all are supposed to learn that it’s being weaponized as a rhetorical trap from a spcific political faction and we’re just getting played.
Seems again leading to “unanswerable since there’s 330 million definitions”.
Is Stephen M. Gillon a stealth RW shill? Prescient of him to name his textbook that before PragerU ever existed.
Hey, us foreigners get to have opinions too 
Although - @Banquet_Bear has basically said anything and everything I’d want to say, but better.
Hey, my high school history textbook was called The American Pageant. Does that mean we should seriously compare it to a beauty pageant?
Beauty pageants are not the only kind of pageantry. If someone were to use the metaphor of a medieval pageant to describe the circus that is US politics, it would fit quite well.
For much of its history, the left has had a standard quarrel between the liberals and the progressives. For much of its history, the left has suffered through furious battles between those who want to provoke and those who want to work through the system. For much of its history, the left has provided on information from publications directed at insiders and general publications that can be read by outsiders. None of these modes are always right; the world always requires both. Nor is a strident commitment to one way of fighting correct; people can go back and forth depending on time and place to force progress on the right.
There’s only one line that should never be crossed. The line marking out reality on an Ngrams graph.
…so what you are telling me is that you don’t think “the American Experiment” is a failure? Okay then.
I disagree.
And I also disagree with the idea of “the left has suffered through furious battles between those who want to provoke and those who want to work through the system.”
The “left” isn’t suffering.
The marginalised are suffering.
The system doesn’t work for them. Because the so-called “American Experiment” is the system. I don’t care about this theoretical battle between “liberals and progressives.” I care about the people that the American Experiment have left behind.
This sounds to me like “I care about the problems, but I don’t care about how to solve them.” If I understand @Exapno_Mapcase’s point correctly, the “standard quarrel” he describes is over how best to solve those problems and help those marginalized, suffering people.
Banquet Bear has raised some good points. Many things are in need of improvement. However, I disagree with the implication these things can’t be improved or will never be improved. So I think it premature to conclude anything about American experiments despite the fuzziness of that term.
Some people here were probably alive from 1960 to 2008. In 1960 there were concerns about one of the presidential candidates being Catholic. That he might have allegiance to Rome. He was elected anyway.
In 2008 one of the candidates was half black. He was elected anyway.
Also elected were a divorced man and a twice divorced man. Now a black vice president, also a woman.
If we really want to talk about melting pots, intermarriage or interrelationships are definition of melting pot. One thing that cannot be undone, right? Where do we stand on that issue as compared to 1960? Do people here realize that at one time it was looked down on for a Catholic to marry another Catholic… from a different European country? Do people still think we live in that world?
Like I said, births are one thing that cannot be undone. Look at births. Now we could go full or partially Nazi Germany and start caring again. This is something I actually need to see happen though.
So even if the United States balkanizes utterly, it’s not doing so in the same world. It’s not “restoring” something from a past that never joined together. Because that’s impossible now. If people choose new terms to break apart, that’s still a changed world. In that sense, if the USA changed the world, I don’t see how you can call it a failure.
And with more patience than I ever had. It’s why he’s so triggering for a certain type of American.