I think that a problem or challenge with this as a discussion point is that it is IMHO really dependent on whatever time scale is selected and the concurrent global affairs taking place.
IANA American but as your neighbour to the north, I and many of my fellow Canadians are watching what’s going on with a lot of trepidation (if you go down the toilet we have a big problem up here).
Right now ISTM that, if not circling the drain, you’re balancing and teetering on the rim. I think that you are at a significant decision point and the decision taken is dependent on:
how much the ignorant, bigoted, xenophobic blowhards actually have power
how much more they gain; and
how much longer a “might is right” form of discourse is seen as acceptable.
Which is why I questioned if in fact there is an “American Experiment” or if it’s something we have been telling ourselves to make us feel better than just saying “ok, we’re doing pretty good compared to the average out there” but like Hell we’re coming up with The Answer as to how to run a state and society.
Or, maybe, the American version is but one part of an Enlightenment Experiment of the West, that may itself not be having exactly a grand time and itself involved a whole lot of collateral damage.
But this has been true since the 1700’s. And the country is still, more or less, staggering along.
Here’s a list just of significant armed conflicts. It includes wars in which all of the USA fought against somebody else, yes – but note how many there are in which we were fighting each other. And these are just the cases that broke out into significant violent occurences.
Can we keep on staggering along? Maybe not; but I’m unwilling to give up on us yet. People talk about the American Dream as if it had to do with money. It’s always seemed to me that the American Dream is that people of wildly different backgrounds, political philosophies, and religions can nevertheless all live together under a common structure of law and commerce, frequent mixing of neighborhoods, and at least occasional mixing of families, without (most of the time) killing each other.
That doesn’t require that the melting pot melts. (It never really has, even though nearly everybody’s decided that they like bagels.) It doesn’t require that everybody feel happy about all the other lumpy bits (besides their own) in the pot, either. What it requires is the recognition that we’re all in the same pot together and that upending it will do everybody harm, ourselves included.
It’s not a new bacteria. It’s a recurring flareup of one that’s been here all along.
Whether we can ever get it cured is a damn good question, to which I don’t have an answer; but the damage isn’t new, any more than the infection is. Both infection and damage predate the existence of the USA as a nation.
Well, sort of. But “everyone” was defined at the time, by most people making the decisions, as “white males”.
I’ve said before that I think the whole history of the country can be seen as one long, vehement, and sometimes bloody argument about just what it means to say “All men are created equal”. The phrase turned out to be a lot bigger than the men who originally signed on to it had in mind; and is still growing. The fact that we’re still fighting about it – sometimes rhetorically, sometimes literally – doesn’t mean that anything new has gone wrong.
The “melting pot” image wasn’t about diversity. It was about people losing their diversity in order to fit in. It assumed that having those differences disappear was a good thing.
But they don’t, most of them, need to disappear in order for people to get along; any more than every restaurant in the country needs to offer only the same style of cooking.
And to a large extent we are, still, agreeing to live under the same umbrella; even when some of us are loudly shouting that they won’t. For an instance: everybody, or nearly everybody, assumes that the highway system will keep functioning. And nearly all the roadways would immediately become unusable if almost everybody didn’t agree to use them by more or less the same rules.
Not what I’m saying; or what I think others referencing the history of the country are saying.
We’re saying, this is a very old fight, and it’s still worth fighting. The outcome is uncertain, as it always was; but the claim that it’s certainly decided now, in the wrong direction, can’t be backed by saying that things are worse now than they ever were; because they’re not worse now than they ever were.
So the USA has simply never existed? nor has any society that includes people from different backgrounds, even from only two – which includes a large number of the societies in the world?
No governing entity ever has complete control; not for very long.
It’s a very long battle and it’s pretty much always three steps forward and two steps back. Occasionally it looks like four steps back but so far it hasn’t stayed there – and I wouldn’t say it’s there now. We’re arguing whether children should be told of the existence of gay marriages; some people are still arguing about the existence of gay marriages; but hardly anybody (in the USA, anyway) is arguing that gay sex should be a capital crime.
Yeah, there’s backlash. There’s always backlash. It’s naive to expect everything to be all better, all at once. But it’s the counsels of despair to say that it’s all over and not only the battle but the war is lost.
And the counsels of despair, if followed, will lose the war. It’s by far the likeliest way for it to be lost.
I think there’s only one person in this thread saying everything is fine. I think most of us are saying quite a lot of things are fucked up, so what else is new? and why does that mean we should declare it’s suddenly become impossible to fix, or at least improve them?
I think we hit a speed bump with Trump. A pretty big one, and we’re still feeling the after effects. But I also think we had been on a very long streak of making major strides prior to that. I’d say from the election of FDR through the blocking of Merrick Garland to the SCOTUS, we were on a a good 80 plus year run. Had things turned out a little differently in 2016, we’d be in a MUCH better place as a country. All it will take to resume our previous progress is having a Democratic POTUS appoint the next 3 SCOTUS justices.
It revealed the ugly underbelly of the American public. It is no longer sufficient to dismiss the racism, the corruption, the intolerance, the intellectual emptiness as illusions. They’re here, they ain’t going away, and they’re strong and growing.
Some prefer to think it’s a speed bump and we’ve driven over it.
I’m not claiming things were perfect. But they were clearly getting better over time. As a kid attending school in the 80s and 90s, I never had the experience my mother and father had in the 50s and 60s of principals and teachers telling them they couldn’t speak Spanish in school. My parents didn’t have the experience that their parents did of being told they wouldn’t be hired for anything other than picking cotton in the fields or some other kind of manual labor. That’s just part of my personal background, but I think it’s obvious that as a country we were better off in 2015 than we were in 1955, and that we were better off in 1955 than in 1915 during the Woodrow Wilson years, and that despite Wilson’s best efforts we were better off in 1915 than we were in 1880, and so on. Trump wasn’t the first speed bump (I already mentioned Woodrow Wilson, but there was also the assassination of Lincoln before that, the appointment of Roger Taney to the SCOTUS, and Andrew Jackson’s election spring to mind as other major bad events). I think one has to take a “perfect is the enemy of the good” type point of view to believe that we haven’t made any progress as a country.
ETA. I think we’re in the process of driving over it. We’re not over it yet. If Biden wins in 2024, a Democrat wins in 2028, Democrats manage to regain and hold Congress, and replace Thomas and Alito on the SCOTUS, we’ll be over it. It’s going to take several years, but assuming we don’t hit yet another bump, it can and will be overcome. I think there’s a better than even chance we’ll be better off in 2030 than in 2016 if those things all happen.
I’m quite curious just which ethnic identities need to be melted in. I mean, we’ve got folks who are six and seven generations away from ‘the old country’ that still hold their ethnic identities to be more important than their national identity . . . but somehow I don’t think we’re talking about, say, the yutes on The Jersey Shore when we’re talking about folks that need melting.
Yes, and not just white males, but upper-class, land-owning, slave-owning white males, for the most part.
But the American Ideal that I was taught in Elementary school was that America is the land of opportunity, that everyone who’s willing to work hard and obey the rules will prosper, regardless of “race, creed or color”.
Of course that was largely a myth. Even for many white folks born to impoverished circumstances. But still, I believe there was, and still is, a kernel of truth there.
If all that happens, and it’s unlikely we’ll draw this straight flush, we’ll just be back to where we were in 2008. Same shit, different day. At that point, we’ll make a little progress until the next Trump rears his ugly head. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Do you think we were better off in 2008 than we were in 1988? In 1988 compared to 1968, and so on going back in 20 year increments? I think so, and by quite a large amount in some of those time periods. If you don’t I’m not sure there’s anything I can say that would convince you otherwise. We would just have to agree to disagree. For the record I’d take 2008 over an other year in our history other than 2009 through 2015.
You can point to improvements in some things, which is true, but you neglect to point out the backsliding. Gerrymandering, Citizens United, Dobbs, corrupt Supreme Court are all serious steps backwards. And there’s much more to add to those examples.