# Is the U.S. really a nation united by political ideals?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [September 18, 2019, 12:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430 "2019-09-18T12:23:45Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)
#### Post date: [September 18, 2019, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430/21 "2019-09-18T21:46:25Z")
> [@Snowboarder\_Bo](#):
>
> In my 50+ years on this planet, I have never known Rs to have even the same definition for those words as the rest of the population and have most often seen them act to restrict, rather than enhance.
But you’re proving my point.
Republicans frequently invoke “equality” in pushing against affirmative action (“why should one race get an advantage over others”?), “morality” in abortion (“it is murder to kill the unborn”), “responsibility” (arguing for “personal responsibility” all the time in issues like welfare, urban poverty, school performance,) “justice” and “respect for law” in illegal immigration (“we need politicians who will properly enforce the laws on the books and eject illegal immigrants,”) “freedom” in gun rights (“Second Amendment gives freedom to own guns,”) etc.
The fact that you cannot see that shows that people interprets those terms only from their own lens. Bear in mind that ISIS also has an extremely strong sense of morality.
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### Author:  [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)
#### Post date: [September 18, 2019, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430/22 "2019-09-18T21:56:26Z")
(Before someone misinterprets my words, I’m not comparing the Republican Party to ISIS; I’m just saying that just because you disagree with someone doesn’t mean they don’t have a strong sense of morality. Plenty of good and bad things are done in the name of morality.)
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### Author:  [@octopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/octopus)
#### Post date: [September 18, 2019, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430/23 "2019-09-18T23:26:12Z")
> [@Chad\_Sudan](#):
>
> Many of us were brought up believing that the United States was a “propositional nation.” In other words, it was a nation united not by ethnicity but by broad political ideals, such as representative government, rule of law, personal liberty, and egalitarianism.
>
> The idea (as I understood it) was that both people born into this community and people who immigrated into it would grasp the advantages of such a system and make sure to raise the next generations with the same values.
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> But in the last three years, we’ve seen that ~40 percent of the population may well have a different idea of what America is. We see that they are pleased to have an authoritarian-minded, ethnonationalist White House and will defend it, come what may. (And some of them reject the “propositional nation” concept explicitly.)
>
> Surely, America can’t be a nation united by shared ideals if it includes 63 million MAGA supporters insisting otherwise?
>
> Could those of us who believed in the “propositional nation” have been wrong all along?
That’s sort of a bad premise with a lot of bad assumptions. Just because people vote differently than you’d like them to vote doesn’t mean _they_ are the ones opposed to democracy.
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### Author:  [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2019, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430/24 "2019-09-19T14:06:49Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#):
>
> Everybody here (none of whom are MAGA supporters to my knowledge) keeps saying that these are not at risk to any greater extent than all the other times they’ve already been at risk…
Which is not at all the same thing as saying that they’re not at risk.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2019, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430/25 "2019-09-19T15:55:23Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#):
>
> Which is not at all the same thing as saying that they’re not at risk.
Right. They are \*always \*at risk. At the same time, the safeguards against that risk have proven to be extremely strong. There is no evidence to my eye that those safeguards have vanished or are unequal to the task today. I lived through the Civil Rights/Vietnam era under Nixon. That was scary. Today is merely clownish by comparison.
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### Author:  [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2019, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430/26 "2019-09-20T14:00:50Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#):
>
> I lived through the Civil Rights/Vietnam era under Nixon. That was scary. Today is merely clownish by comparison.
I lived through that era also. This one scares me worse, for two reasons:
For one, in the 60’s and 70’s everyone was pretty much watching the same three TV channels, and had a similar idea of what was actually going on. There was a lot of disagreement as to what should be going on; but people were less likely to be drawing on an entirely different basis of information. And nobody, or effectively nobody, was saying that little girls hadn’t actually been blown up in their church, or burned by napalm.
For two, a lot of the disagreement about the Vietnam war was between generations within the same families. This made it nastier in some ways (and I don’t want to diminish how nasty such things can get; families split during the Civil War, after all, and risked actually killing each other), but it also made it harder to entirely write off people of different opinions as being people who just shouldn’t matter. – it occurs to me that reason 2 doesn’t apply anywhere near as much to the civil rights issue, though there was some generational shift there also.
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### Author:  [@Red\_Wiggler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Red_Wiggler)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2019, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430/27 "2019-09-20T15:02:32Z")
This is worse than the Nixon era because of the blatancy of the grift and partisanship. There were a lot more traditional conservatives in the electorate than there are now but they knew corruption and power grabbing when they saw it. Today’s right fears losing power far more than it does losing respect for governing dishonorably.
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2019, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-u-s-really-a-nation-united-by-political-ideals/840430/28 "2019-09-20T15:45:09Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#):
>
> I lived through that era also. This one scares me worse, for two reasons:
I agree that the split realities are a very real threat. I’m not as sure as you that this is something new.
I’m a science fiction writer. Many decades ago, way before anyone thought of the internet, I had an idea for a novel set in a civilization based on two rival newspapers that reported news in opposite fashion, and the growth of two parallel timelines based on them. It was too complicated to work out so I never wrote it. But I sure wish I had, because it would now be cited as almost supernatural prediction.
I hate to be an optimist on anything, but I don’t believe the current situation is permanent. Demographics doom the aging, rural, white conservative core to become ever more a minority while today’s minorities will become the majority - and the majority electorate - sooner rather than later. Trump’s loss will break their power structure and there doesn’t seem to be anybody out there to replace him. President Tucker Carlson? Don’t think so.
As has been said earlier, both sides still agree on the same ends. They disagree on means. That’s also been true many times in the past. America will survive its idiot populations. That’s what optimism looks like.
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