Ugh, the both sides are bad trope combined with a ton of “my feels” argument.
There’s just a tremendous amount to unpack here.
The United States is a vast, nonhomogenous, capitalistic culture with it’s fair share of issues.
The war in Iraq was a travesty and reconstruction efforts were unmitigated money grabs by a certain subset of well connected contractors.
The war in Afghanistan has gone on for almost two decades and appears unlikely to ever be “won” in any traditional sense of the word.
Despite that, our continuing presence there is actually a rather mature decision to not let millions of Afghani peoples fall back under the oppressive and horrid Taliban rule they were under before.
We have issues with undue corporate influence, and the issue of voting weight disproportionality among our citizens when the Senate, gerrymandering, and Electoral College are taken into account are indeed insane.
However. There is a very clear difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans, excluding this horror story of a Presidency, have something like 38 times the number of indictments as compared to Democrats when taken on an equal number of years in power.
Republicans consistently expand the deficit while cutting social programs.
They investigate Benghazi for six years then moan about a two year investigation.
Enough about that distinction, but it goes on. The Republicans are a drastically different party than the Democrats. And no, the Democrats aren’t perfect.
But you know who had plans for fixing infrastructure and the opiod crisis? Democrats. And they still do. Go look at their policy positions. Staggeringly enough there actually well thought out and decent, progressive policy initiatives laid on Sanders’, Warren’s, and Clinton’s websites.
Finally. The young people of America are fantastic. Gay rights have moved forward dramatically in the last two decades. The MeToo movement is helping to stamp out a culture of sexualization and rape throughout our industries.
We produce culture, and planes, and tremendous advancements in science, and research.
And our framework has held up pretty damn well against a clearly authoratative demagogue.
The post WWII period which has been centrally defined by the rise of American Hegemony features plenty of mistakes, but it’s also been the singular most peaceful era of global history and seen the greatest decrease in world poverty.
So please don’t reduce us to “drugged to muh gills” and “endless war”.