Whew, that’s a relief to hear.
Your recent FQ post is a great metaphor for the way you’ve been conducting yourself in this thread:
Didn’t notice this until after the edit window. Agreed, I’m done with this as well. I don’t think it warrants a pit thread, but feel free to start one yourself if you wish.
Moderating:
Debate respectfully or don’t debate at all. If you find the debate ill-framed, it’s fine to point that out – but then stop “debating.”
If you think a thread is better suited to another forum, flag it for mods to consider your request. Don’t opine on how you would moderate if you were a mod.
You’re being a complete jerk in this thread, making needlessly provocative statements and dripping with scorn in your responses. Knock it off, or stay out of the thread. You can make your arguments without insulting the views of others.
By coincidence, I happen to be reading Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation, a very good book by Steve Luxenberg.
Did you know that three of Massachusetts’ first railroads, back in 1838, forced blacks into separate cars and prohibited whites from sitting with them? Frederick Douglas made it a special issue. The debate went into the Mass. legislature, where the railroads won.
Probably a random dip into any page would refute the notion that the modern day conservative lunacy is somehow a bigger crisis or yields more serious crimes against Others than at any random time in the 19th century.
Slavery and Jim Crow are obvious markers. Less remembered is something else brought up in this thread: feelings about immigrants.
Born in the North a decade earlier [than 1854], the Know Nothings could trace their ancestry back to a trio of stealthy societies with a common agenda: preventing immigrants from exerting any influence in American government or politics.
In 1854 the Know Nothings were still a secret society, requiring an oath at a secret ceremony for admittance. By 1856 they shed that to form a public political party, the American Party[!], and ran former president[!] Milliard Fillmore as a candidate. With the South and North breaking into regionalism, they sought to find an issue that would draw the two together. They found one: immigration.
[They] denounced foreign influence in state and federal elections, dismissed Roman Catholics as more loyal to the Pope than to the United States, and decried the country’s citizenship and voting laws as lax and easily abused.
The party did not officially call for violence, but on election day in 1855 in Louisville was:
the site of “Bloody Monday,” a show of force by a Know Nothing mob that started with a promise to “police” the polls and ended with twenty-two dead and a Catholic neighborhood in flames.
History rhymes.
I somewhat understand why people don’t want to read real history books. Unlike what we were told in too many textbooks we were brought up on, the reality is that every single aspect of life today - political, social, economic, medical - is wildly, hugely, unbelievably better than at any time in the 19th century. And the 20th century as well.
Wait, the 21st century is better? You may yell at me that we have fascists crawling out from under their rocks into the sun, that healthcare is inferior to the rest of the western world’s, that bigotry against the color of one’s skin pervades police forces, that part of the population lives in a bubble of hate and participates in a cult of personality. All true, those and dozens more. I’ve railed against those my entire adult life. (Nixon, Nixon, Nixon)
The past was worse. Not because the American Experiment by whatever name failed. The American Experiment became the dictionary definition of democracy because small groups kept fighting against the American Stench and winning battle after battle. Yes, sometimes that devolved into two steps forward and one step back, as we’re seeing today. I also see people everywhere fighting battles of all kinds and winning many, even when those victories surprise everyone.
Read history. The perspective it gives one on today’s world is extremely helpful in making some sense of the lunacy and near-certain hope for the future. Even for us pessimists.
The Voice of Reason-- thanks! Very sensible.
If the Republicans have their way, no one will ever hear of this history-- at least not in school.
And not just America. Hans Rosling has written, and written well, why the world is becoming a better place. It may be true there have been some recent backward steps with the forward progress. But too soon to call that failure.
I read history and it hasn’t done any of the things you say, for me. There have been much worse eras both here and elsewhere than the situation in the US right now. But that doesn’t prove that the American Experiment is either a success or a failure. It just means situations change over time.
Right now, the US is in a bad way, worse than it’s been since the Civil War, in my opinion, and all for the same fucking reasons too. White people who are completely hostile to pretty much the whole of Enlightenment thought we inherited from the founders, most especially the natural trajectory of that thought which is more enfranchisement of and tolerance for a greater number of marginalized, oppressed, and silenced groups, and a greater diversity of thought.
I hear a lot of speechiness about this is the Last Gasp of the hate-filled white supremacists, but you can make a good case that it is the opposite.
I don’t think the A.E. has failed, or succeeded. It’s a story about the US, that was never particularly true, and isn’t true now, except in certain places for certain people at certain times. Some groups have not made much headway at all, and some have clawed their way out of the pile into the glory of almost-as-good-as-white-men.
Utopia is a fantasy. Hubris, something empires always have in abundance, will last as long as power does. Then we’ll be thinking something else.
I rather liked the Americans’ rejoinder that the Brits were: Underpaid, undersexed, and under Eisenhower.
As for the question? I’m old enough to have seen real progress in my lifetime, and the evils of Trumpism have shaken my optimism, but I think the AE is not a failure. It can’t be. Neither can it be a success. It will always be a process, and it’s up to us to make that process move in the right direction.
[last lines; the gang faces an endless onslaught of demons]
Spike: And in terms of a plan?
Angel: We fight.
Spike: Bit more specific?
Angel: Well, personally, I kinda wanna slay the dragon. Let’s go to work.
I think, IMHB, that a lot of this debate is subject to various perceptions. I believe that we can say, absolutely, that things are better than they were.
However, from my POV, things are far worse than they should be, and teetering on the brink of some historical decision point that is dependent on the successes and/or failures of a significant number of morally corrupt, power hungry, anti-science and anti-critical thinking wackjobs. We are at a potential cusp of the US sliding into a culture of moral relativism in which fact is up for debate.
If the wackjobs pull it off then the American experiment will have failed and you (the US) will be a Christian theocratic dictatorship.
This could, however, take a very long time to come to fruition one way or another.
ell, everybody seems to like Scandanavian countries as exemplars of wonderful peaceful societies [I personally like their prison system, real rehabilitation and not treating the inmates like animals is a good thing] however until very recently the only “nonwhites” for the purposes of indiginous population abuse would be the Saami, [and really they are white, just not pasty white Germanic or Anglo-Saxon folks] so one can’t say they have racial equality. Most of Europe until the people from their colonial holdings opted to move to Europe was pretty much all pasty white folks. Chinese really dislike nonHan and do their best to quash the nonHans, and we would see them all as “Chinks”, “Nips” and so forth. I can see a physical difference between say Korean and Han, or Japanese and Ainu but in many cases the differences are being ‘bred out’ of the various populations because of intermarriage. So, does a nonwhite based nonUS difference matter or do we want parity world wide? Going to have to do something about Russia and their ex-holdings - they are currently trying to exterminate the Ukrainians by taking the kids away and adopting them out to good Russian families and killing off as many Ukrainians as they can manage to get done.
SO pinning all this hatred onto the US is sort of disingenuous, it happens anywhere there are 2 cultures trying to rub along, color nonwithstanding. Visual difference is not the only way populations discriminate. [You really didn’t want to be Mongolian under Stalin. ]
Underline and boldface that “should” and I believe that ought to be beyond questioning.
Things are always worse than they should be. People have been screaming about how awful the world is every year I’ve been alive. There is no utopia, not even close. Why, did you really except one?
But the point is, what constitutes a failure here?
The US is indeed in better shape for most social metrics: overall violent crime (not mass shootings), equality, less discrimination, provision of healthcare etc than in the past.
But the same is true of almost every country. It’s the overall trajectory of the planet.
Surely we should compare the US metrics to other wealthy countries, in which case the picture has looked consistently poor for metrics like those I listed above.
Yes what you said deems valid. I think the OP was trying to define ‘failure of the American experiment’ from US immigration policy but it was originally in the thread about January 6th. I think the thread was lost because it was vague.
Taking an extremely limited POV, my definition of “The American Experiment” has nothing to do with an ethnic or racial melting pot or the ability to improve personal fortunes through hard work. To me, the “experiment” consists of nothing more than a system of government in which leaders are elected rather than appointed by heredity or religion, and in which the losers of the elections accept those results and continue to work with the winners in a cooperative government.
That had never been tried at scale before. It was audacious and could easily have failed. It teetered, but held, for almost 250 years.
What we’re seeing now, with a large proportion of Americans refusing to accept the results of elections, is new, and IMO the greatest threat to the experiment since the Civil War.
It hasn’t failed yet, but next year is make-or-break.
Not just about immigration. And not vague. Post #9 above by @madmonk28 summed my qualms up nicely.
…up to enslavers and traitors and people become irate at the idea we take them down.
Hardly a month goes by without a fascist terrorist incident.
Our Supreme Court is manned by the openly corrupt and yet Americans argue with a straight face that America isn’t a corrupt nation.
And then there is climate change. As the effects become worse and become obvious to even the most benighted corners of Red State America, the tensions will become untenable. Millions of violent, uneducated, but well armed red staters will be displaced.
Almost all of it can be traced back to American exceptionalism and racism, the cancer on our soul.
Hitler sucked. I’m sure we would have been better off had he never lived. But he did and many people followed him.
And we all could have sat by and said nothing, done nothing, and I’m sure there’s a scenario where Germany does have its thousand year reign with Hitler and whomever inherited the tradition. If you’re truly willing to do nothing, will never risk anything, will simply stand by and let bad people have their way time after time, bad people could indeed wind up ruling the world. If you’re not willing to do anything or believe in anything yourself, if all you do is complain about the bad people and how inevitable it is that they reign, you’re not going to stop bad people when they are around.
My understanding of the time is that many people took actions against Hitler and the Japanese and these forces were eventually defeated and a better world was created. I’m sure it wasn’t fun, many people lost their lives, decades of living they would have preferred to do something else. But they believed in the future they were creating and defending.
My suggestion would be that to have a better future you may need to believe in your ideals and fight for them from time to time. I am sorry if you consider this an inconvenience and would rather simply complain how inevitable a thousand year reign by Trump and company is. Others fought a lot, risked a lot in the past. Maybe we can find time in our days to fight just a little, risk a little. Or maybe people simply find this too taxing, the world should bend to their will and if it doesn’t it’s curtains for our way of life.
It would be a success if people like Trump never had the faintest prayer of getting to the White House except with a visitor’s pass.
Seriously. If we had responsible Republicans running against responsible Democrats EVERY shot out of the box, with no demagogues, racists, conmen, or criminals even thinking that they had a chance for higher office–that’s my definition of a success, so we could either make consistent slow progress (IMO, with GOP POTUSes) or consistent quick progress, and sometimes (IMO with especially progressive POTUSes) PDQ progress.
Instead what we get is backsliding and descents into outright fascism, which it takes us decades to repair. That ain’t progress. It’s staying stuck where we were, and “where we were” sucks.
I agree with you on this point. The problem is, as others have mentioned, it’s human nature that we’re going to have those kinds of people among us. IMHO a big part of the problem came up when the racists, demagogues, criminals, etc. began to become concentrated in the Republican Party rather than spread roughly equally between both sides. When it comes to the bigger picture, of trying to get rid of those kinds of people, then we’re no longer talking about the America experiment, we’re talking about the human experiment.