The Collapse of American Identity | Hacker News Reader

The Collapse of American Identity

newyorker.com

45 pointsmitchbob86 comments

The American identity never had anything to do with economic greatness, military power, equality of outcomes or opportunity, nor even many ‘positive’ rights levied upon others.

Put simply, it was supposed to be the one place where you could speak your beliefs freely, and, barring specific harm done to others, nobody could force you to do anything.

If that’s not good enough for you, if you need to force other people to do something for you to be satisfied, then don’t be surprised what comes of it.

That's a recent myth about America and doesn't have much to do with actual American history.

If the US is not a project of European enlightenment values, what else is it, in your opinion?

Given that the first North American settlers were basically fugitives from Great Britain, and all other colonies were there to exploit local resources and people, the US was first and foremost a money thing. Also for the Boston tea party, which was as much about independence as it was about taxes.

And how enlightened can a nation be that is among the last to abolish slavery, and that had to fight a civil war about that very question.

North American settlers were far from uniform historically. Some were first and foremost after money and power (e.g. the first Southern plantation owners were quite unapologetically so). Other "fugitives" were rather more concerned about pursuing various combinations of public-mindedness, radical autonomy and broad-based opportunity. North American settlement was a rather complex story.

Sure, in the South it was ruthless Europeans trying to get rich. And they did. The Mayflower settlers were more or less fugitives from Britain, while all other colonial powers, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, were only there to exploit. Not very enlightened, even compared to contemporary Europe back then.

among the last? that seems wrong according to this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_sla...

All major powers of the time were faster. Even if Napoleon made slavery legal again in the colonies for a while it was abolished in the main land before.

I don't think it's a good idea to allow one's conception of the US as a major power in the 20th century to impact the knowledge that the US was most certainly NOT a major power for most of the 19th. The US was a backwards, dangerous and poor country compared to the major powers, very much still in development.

The average American was taller and healthier than the average Englishman, Frenchman, etc, not only in the 19th Century but also in colonial times, so it is unclear what you mean by "poor country".

Not really. Backwards poor countries don’t get into wars in the Mediterranean Sea. You underestimate how much relative wealth and power the US had when it seceded. Frontier sure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars

Comparative backwards poor countries get involved in strange things all the time.

Kwame Nkrumah, 1st dictator of Ghana was overthrown when he was out of the country attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between the USSR and the USA during the Vietnam war.

But back to the Barbary Wars. That was conducted against 'pirates' and was done in concert with several European powers. The closest comparison would be modern UN/NATO/ECOWAS led 'police action' style wars against warlords in disputed territories which are disrupting trade.

It's notable that you can't avoid a war with pirates or warlords. They're actively killing your citizens and stealing your import/export material. Even the tiniest of nations has to respond eventually or give up on being a trading partner to anyone.

For example:

> From 1796–1797 French raiders seized some 316 American merchant ships flying American colors.

This overall would force the the U.S.'s hand, regardless of if it was backwards or poor. To do nothing, would be to condemn U.S. foreign trade to being controlled by another power---something that the U.S. was too proud to allow.

ALL major powers? China in 2021 has Uyghurs enslaved.

The first problematic thing with this statement is the notion that a nation can be defined by some ideal or ideology. This really isn't it. A nation is defined by it's people, language, customs, social organization, individual values etc. Those may have little do do with stated ideals.

I'm the last person to support CRT mostly because I think it gets out of hand quickly - but you can use CRT to deconstruct your statement pretty quickly: Slavery, which is antithetical to 'Enlightenment and Classical Liberal Values' - is a core aspect of the American historical reality.

You can't have 25% of your population as slaves and then say 'We're based on Enlightenment Ideals!'. That's an irreconcilable dissonance.

This what I was hinting at in my opening paragraph: 'what you say you are isn't really want you are' ... and also 'what you are is not an idea'.

I think it would be useful to dismiss most of the 'ideals' people think they have or had and just look at the people involved and what happened.

You can see slavery as an institution that the nation inherited in conflict with the Enlightenment values and the conflict between slave states and free ones goes back to the founding. Certainly, to some extent, unity with slavers was needed to gain independence, and the stage was set for the civil war almost immediately

It's a story of progress: yes, white men liberated themselves first, but progress continued and the slaves were next, and then women.

These things don't happen overnight. Just because America didn't live up immediately to her founding ideals doesn't mean that they didn't exist or that she never will

Denying the role of the civil war in our history is extremely frustrating to me as a descendant of a Union soldier. What did he give his arm and his brother for?

"Certainly, to some extent, unity with slavers was needed to gain independence,"

No - this is note true.

America was not founded on a special 'Faustian bargain' with the slavers in order to obtain independence.

The Founding Fathers of America themselves - the originators of the 'Constitutional Values' - were slave owners.

There is an unambiguous dissonance between the 'Constitutional Values' and 'Actual Values'.

While the new 'Constitutional Values' were a nice intellectual foundation, they were secondary to the real power dynamic: that the American Colonial Nobility / Landed Gentry didn't want to take orders or pay taxes to the Empire, even though they benefited from it for the most part i.e. Royal Navy facilitating commerce, and geopolitical protection from Spain/France.

First you have a Landed Gentry who wanted 'most of the power', Second, you have a 'Populist Narrative' of the 'Evil King George' (who really was not evil, frankly) - which is necessary to rally the plebes so that they fight to the death for something which may not really improve their lot. Thirdly, this is supported by 'Constitutional Values' but that's just part of the equation.

More obviously - how do these 'Constitutional Values' line up with the fact that slavery was abolished in the supposedly 'Unenlightened, Evil Empire' long, long before it was in the US? Among other things.

There was effectively no slavery in Canada or Australia.

How would you tell a Canadian that the 'American Constitution' is an effective tool of 'Enlightenment Values' when Americans are the last one's to get the message?

Everyone in Canada and Australia has better personal safety, they face much less crime, have a much more consistent and fair judicial system, they even have healthcare. They didn't have a revolution, or some special document.

One can only wonder if the 'Revolution' were to have happened in the Canadian colonies, while the US remained part of the Commonwealth what history would look like, but I suggest not hugely different.

'What America Is' (or anywhere else) isn't really well explained by the intellectual narrative that it decided to tell itself and it's people. That's a narrative not a reality. They are related, but not the same thing.

Well, America isn't a Europeanist project. It's an autonomous project, for one. Second, I don't trust the fact that the myth of America as a beacon of individual liberty became dominant just when America started to roll out its mass surveillance and censorship-without-censorship capabilities.

It's not all that recent - de Tocqueville wrote about it

Every story of history is a myth.

It's not 'recent' and it's not a 'myth' - but it should be pointed out that it's only a small part of the measure of 'identity'.

This is your ideological, moral perspective, which is frankly kind of a distortion of the historical reality of those aspirations.

But the 'American identity' is something more objective, i.e. what Americans and others thought of themselves over time. Obviously we can debate a lot about how to interpret reality and history, the point being 'what it is' is a matter of record, not a matter of 'what you think it ought to be'.

No doubt that 'classical liberal' ethos (as you hint at) is part of it, and that the US is quite different than other countries in that way ... but in the end I think culture, language, customs and institutions are the primary artifacts of everything, just as in other places.

If you were to take the 'classical liberal ethos' and overlay it into a different colonialist situation, with a different cultural foundation - that nation would look completely different.

> Put simply, it was supposed to be the one place where you could speak your beliefs freely, and, barring specific harm done to others, nobody could force you to do anything

Unless you were a slave, or black in segregation times ( which ended what, in the 1960s???), or Chinese until the 1960s, or Japanese during WW2, or a pregnant woman up to and including today.

It's like that Family Guy joke - freedom for all, but not exactly.

> Put simply, it was supposed to be the one place where you could speak your beliefs freely, and, barring specific harm done to others, nobody could force you to do anything.

All of this was contextual. You could speak your beliefs freely as long as they were some kind of Christianity, nobody could force you to do anything unless you weren't a straight cis white man, etc.

For a long time our society was dominated by people for whom this was true, then suddenly all kinds of different people started having a voice:

- atheists and other non-Christians

- communists / marxists / anarchists

- women, people of color, LGBTQ people

And our society--predictably and not unlike many others--did a big "whoooooa no thank you" and people were imprisoned, beaten, murdered, disenfranchised, etc.

Or another way of putting it might be that when the Founders wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution/Bill of Rights, humanity had just barely invented the swivel chair, polite gentlemen drank coffee out of saucers, and phrenology was a _future_ theory. Mythologizing those times does a disservice to us in these times; the Founders were just weird people like all of us, with the attendant blind spots and potential for greatness.

> All of this was contextual. You could speak your beliefs freely as long as they were some kind of Christianity, nobody could force you to do anything unless you weren't a straight cis white man, etc.

This tells us very little because every society can be viewed as "contextual" in that sense, and pre-modern societies only more so. Consider the history of religious controversy in Britain, or the medieval remnants in the social structure of then-prerevolutionary France. What matters however is that the U.S. was intended to be far less contextual than its contemporary societies, a key advancement towards deeper modernity.

> This tells us very little because every society can be viewed as "contextual" in that sense

Oh yeah that's definitely what I mean. Every society at the bottom of it is "might makes right", and then they can be judged by what they do when they obtain a monopoly on might. And at least some of the time, the US used that might to stick up for the rights of people many others wouldn't. But also we drove Native Americans from their homes in a super brutal fashion, practiced one of the most violent forms of slavery in history, etc.

And I assume people of the future will look back on us and recoil at some perfectly regular things we do now, like work in coal mines, use air conditioning, eat meat, put kids in schools, whatever. We exist in this context too. All humans everywhere fail, but I think it's what we aspire to that defines us.

And so I think the jury is still out on the US. I think it's not even really clear what we aspire to at this point--it maybe was in 1789 but that context is gone. In this new context, what is it we stand for? We need to have that conversation as a society. I think it's worth pointing out that we're ultra bad at it, but maybe if we reify this concept, we can start getting better at it.

The USA was defined by how superior it was to the rest of the world, how their companies were the best and standard of living the highest. I still remember an episode of the Simpsons laughing at how few dollars you get in exchange of a bunch of foreign coins and bills.

That reality does not exist anymore.

Reaganomics, discussed in the book, and low taxes in the USA created a lack of investment for the past three decades. Meanwhile Europe has become the place in the world with the higher standards of living, and China the fastest-growing economy. Both thanks to investing in infrastructure, education and health care.

How to solve it? It is hard. I am from Spain, a former empire, and there is still people that does not want to accept that Spain relevancy in the world is pretty low (even that it lost its colonies more than 100 years ago). Can the USA catch up with the new reality fast and recover? Or does it needs to sink lower before taking action?

American Exceptionalism

After about 1970, cognitive dissonance carried it further than could be delivered as excellence in all things declined. Self-deception is about all that remains when many things are honestly comparable to a third-world country.

The only way to "solve" it is if the "patient" wants to admit to it and then wants to solve it. There's too much false pride (future hubris) preventing self-reflection.

> if the "patient" wants to admit

You are being down-voted. So, I guess that the answer is "no, we do not want to admin any problem" , at this moment, here in Hacker News.

I've been noticing similar downvoting recently for calling out too America-centric topics recently so I'm inclined to agree

I downvoted. I did so because of this line:

> many things are honestly comparable to a third-world country.

I do not believe that to be an accurate assessment of the situation. It feels accurate, to some people, but it's a distorted view of reality.

Which lets you classify me as "no we don't want to admit any problem", and write me off. I'd encourage you not to do that, for two reasons.

First, I've been seeing a pattern here on HN rather frequently lately: Someone states fringe view X as being obviously correct, and states that everyone is willfully blind to not acknowledge it. This gets downvoted. The author then points to the downvotes as proof that people are willfully blind (and therefore that X is in fact correct). But this ignores that X can be downvoted because it is obviously incorrect, or just because the author is being a jerk. You cannot use downvotes to confirm anything other than the fact that you were downvoted.

Second, assuming that everyone who disagrees is a fool or acting in bad faith is how you trap yourself in a filter bubble. But the question remains: Are you actually right, or actually wrong? Trapping yourself in a filter bubble means that, if you're ever wrong, you'll never find out.

I've seen that referred to as "Post-imperial delusion", and I believe it explains Brexit as well as Russia's belligerent behavior. Britain lost its super power status less than a century ago, Russia only in the 1990s.

There are apparently quite a few people in these countries that have yet to accept that they are not as relevant as they once were, and who long for any kind of action to restore their country's status to what they think it should be. Very dangerous.

> After about 1970

Yes, the moon landings were peak-USA. Never mind that we were mired in "world-building" in Southeast Asia as well.

> lack of investment

What? You’re grasping. If you want to see the problem, compare government budgets and look where all the money goes.

They probably mean non-military investment?

IMHO it's complicated: US military spend includes tons of R&D, including stuff far from direct weaponry. Sure, it's a small % of the budget, but still vastly more R&D spending than most countries.

>55% of the federal budget goes toward social services and welfare. <11% goes to military spending. There is no lack of investment, just obscene mismanagement, at best. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2020_US_Federal_Budget_In...

Entitlements are an 'investment' into loyalty to the federal government and the system it presides over. The military is cheap by historic standards. The entitlement system is so expensive that it stymies any significant federal policy ambition that requires resources. Our political leaders generally gave up on trying to reform entitlements in the 2000s (when it was last a TV dinner issue), so instead most just try to distract from the issue with trivia.

Thinkers these days tend to be frightened about trying to come up with alternative, more cost-effective ways to secure the loyalty of the population. The default position is to just not bother shifting away from the inevitable path to failure, because letting it fail might be an easier way towards creating consensus for a solution than trying to avert the failure. If the system fails because of collective inaction, no faction can be directly blamed for the failure (so the thinking goes).

The US government spends a similar amount per-capita on health care as France, but provides health care for a much smaller fraction of its population.

There has been a massive increase in entitlement spending since the 90s with very poor results on terms of a social safety net.

I'd like to know what the Gini coefficient is for entitlement spending by individual adult recipient.

I suspect that it would be similar to the income distribution, given so many special programs for child, medical, and disability entitlements.

On top of that, with states cutting unemployment, a lot of people that previously would have been on unemployment are on disability now. There are a lot of perverse incentives in some of these systems.

I feel like your comment has a serious anti-welfare-state slant to it.

The US government is (well, let's stipulate anyway) a democracy. It represents the will of the people. We've decided we like stuff like Social Security and Medicare and we're cool paying for it.

You frame this like it's some kind of scheme to enthrall Americans, but our government is us.

If you want to talk about inefficiencies in the social safety net, let's start with the weird public/private meshing of providers and facilitators written into our laws by conservatives who wanted to "unleash the efficiencies of the free market" (i.e. give government contracts to their peers and later themselves).

It's not like "thinkers these days" have been frightened into silence by a mob addicted to social services. They've been disenchanted by the depth of corruption in our system.

> You frame this like it's some kind of scheme to enthrall Americans, but our government is us.

Well said. The government is the will of the people, to remove the government from all social negotiations leaves the poor, and the middle class unrepresented.

> conservatives who wanted to "unleash the efficiencies of the free market"

"efficiencies of the free market" that are not applied to big corporations, that get the advantages of a social-democracy by being helped during crisis. Corporations are treated with more compassion than fellow citizens. "People is lazy", "Corporations are hard working" is part of the indoctrination.

> The US government is [...] a democracy

No. It's not, or at least, it wasn't. By law, it is a constitutional republic. It was specifically designed to prevent tyranny, regardless of the source.

> If you want to talk about ...

You're just using one form of corruption to justify your chosen form. They're both bad. Tolerance of one leads to the other.

> No. It's not, or at least, it wasn't. By law, it is a constitutional republic.

Woof, I gotta say I super dislike the parsing out of "republic" vs. "democracy". It almost always deliberately misses the point: our government is supposed to represent us. And honestly, what does "by law" add here?

> You're just using one form of corruption to justify your chosen form.

There's nothing corrupt about social programs? That's not what "corruption" means.

>The default position is to just not bother shifting away from the inevitable path to failure, because letting it fail might be an easier way towards creating consensus for a solution than trying to avert the failure. If the system fails because of collective inaction, no faction can be directly blamed for the failure (so the thinking goes).

This describes the EU better than the US. The Eurozone in its current state is incomplete. It can't work the way it is currently set up. It's failure is inevitable. There are opportunities to build the most advanced monetary union in the world but nobody is taking them. Governments collectively decide to do nothing except wait for things to get better. Of course there are institutions that have to face reality. Some of those institutions cannot just wait, in fact they are forbidden from waiting. What happens is that the central bank now has responsibilities that in an ideal world no central bank should have to take on. They do it (the futile attempt to save the euro) because they are the last entity that is responsible for the system as a whole.

It's similar to that article that said engineers should solve climate change through engineering and bypass politics. Our central bankers should solve the Eurocrisis (it's ghost is still here haunting us) through monetary policy and bypass politics. What good are politicians nowadays if all we ever do is ignore them through loopholes/escape hatches? Sure, having escape hatches is good but relying on them is bad.

The US is in a different position. Politicians are doing something, they are addressing problems, maybe in an incompetent/biased way with some collateral damage over the short term but you can bet that they are setting the stage for good years to come. For the US the pandemic is merely the end of the bad days. Meanwhile in the EU it is business as usual.

Trump tried to support low skill jobs in the US with the trade war. Biden is creating infrastructure jobs that cannot be moved overseas. Both have the same idea but they execute them in different ways.

Was there any information or opinion in there? It sounds like you have a lot to say, but aren't saying it.

> It's failure is inevitable

Why?

> There are opportunities

What?

> Politicians are doing something

What?

> addressing problems / setting the stage

How?

> Entitlements are an 'investment' into loyalty

Ha! Not working! Not even preventing outright social violence.

Social security is a separate trust. Medicare is far more efficient than private insurance. It could be even more efficient but is hamstrung by corruption in Congress. Being unable to negotiate drug prices is a good example.

I think the split happened before Reagan. About the closest we got to raising the standard of US society even higher was Roosevelt's second bill of rights speech in 1944:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights#Roosevel...

Now we fight over some fraction of a part of one of his ideas, like lowering medicare eligibility to 60. It's mildly depressing to consider where we could be.

The great society programs by LBJ should not be ignored. It created Medicare and Medicaid. They declared a war on poverty. They stopped people from littering literally everywhere.

> Meanwhile Europe has become the place in the world with the higher standards of living

Umm what?

Have you seen the salaries and house prices in the EU.

Their average salary is about $150k for software engineers, in the EU it's about 50k. None of the taxes or any other differences make up for that.

Americans have got it easy.

You do realize there are other people than software engineers?

Yeah OP is just factually incorrect here. On paper many countries are poorer, and on the ground you can see standard of living is either worse or slightly worse.

Sure there is less corruption in EU healthcare, but outside of that sector Americans get better homes, cars, and disposable income.

OP is correct, actually. I am not sure how you define or measure "standard of living" but common measurements include human development index [1] and quality of life index [2]. by both measurements the US lags behind many european countries. life expectancy in the US has been declining [3]. and the corruption in US healthcare is massive [4], especially considering that it can be three times more expensive for worse outcomes, and because it takes up such a large portion of the economy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...

[2] https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...

[3] https://www.bmj.com/content/367/bmj.l6753

[4] https://mebassett.info/healthcare-ppp.html

PS Am a US citizen who lives in the UK and travels (or did precovid) to the east coast and west coast of the US and to EU capitals regularly.

> besides for healthcare

Ignoring people's actual health in exchange for more expensive things seems like a backwards metric.

Better in what respect? Larger? That's true, but is largely a reflection of land prices, and if you're able to steal the land it makes it a lot cheaper. In Europe most land was stolen a long time ago and there isn't so much to go around now. In terms of build quality here it is rubbish. Houses here have more in common with sheds than houses in most of Europe.

Is that why German cars are selling so well in the US, because US cars are better? I also doubt that on average US housing is better than European housing. Don't get even started with health care. All numbers I know show, that consumer debt is way lower in the EU than the US.

A country is much more than just one of its higher paying industries, especially if that industry is such an outlier like SV.

Ok, it's the first time i'll go into it here, and i'm probably not the best writer (especially in english), but this typical of the bourgeois mindset.

You don't have to have capital (social/economic or cultural) to have the bourgeois mindset. It two things in my opinion: either you're aware that your capital, your capital esperance, or your comfort is iniquitous and you're justifying this iniquity by any myth or legend you can invent, either you're not even aware of the iniquity and how your less fortunate peers are doing.

I've been thrice in the US. California, Ohio/West virginia, and New-York/Maryland. I've talked to people trying to get the tenderloin moving, i've talked to dockers and construction workers, and i've spent a lot of time with back-to landers but also "rednecks", ex-miners or truckers in WV. I guaranty you, a Polish trucker have a better life quality than a West Virginia one. And i would rather be a construction worker in europe, anywhere, even in Croatia, than in Maryland. At least i could hope to survive my 60s.

Our standard of living don't mean much. I mean, i go sail as a leisure almost every day, i'm 2 minutes away from the sea (by foot), i've got enough money to buy a house outside the city if i want to, my main issue this day is that i need to weld a support on my bike to be able to bring my kite board with me, as the best place to kite is 20 minutes away, and doing it by bike would be shorter.

Having more than 55k/yr at 30 wouldn't make me any happier. The new fablab and engineering "courses" i will try to make for the less fortunate kids of the city with 3 friends next year will probably though.

The standard of living in the US is pretty good if you're rich like a software developer. The standard of living in many EU countries is imo better than in the US for median income households. There are also many differences that are poorly reflected in standard-of-living calculations. For example I like living in dense cities with good public transport and good bikeability because I really don't like driving. Those are harder to find in the US than in the EU.

It's not even that good if you're high income. High rent and housing prices suck most of that money out of the the working class.

The taxes might not.

But the education and healthcare costs might.

Also, you're much more likely to be shot or put into prison in the US, which are quite some costs too.

I don't know the numbers, but it seems to me that despite being payed better, the average US citizen carries a much bigger risk to their life than the average EU citizen, even when you include the east of the EU.

GP is right, if he’s only looking at Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Otherwise, if you look at PPP-adjusted disposable income, even after factoring in non-monetary income (e.g. welfare), Europe is significantly poorer than US states[0]. If France were an American state, it would be the 8th poorest.

[0] https://mises.org/wire/these-us-states-have-higher-incomes-n...

> 150k for software engineers...

That may be true in the Valley. The media US salary is $36k. Only about top 16% of the US population gets $150k aor over.

I wonder if SWE compensation is related to how valuable the profession is perceived too, by both employers and societies.

Even in the US, the compensation is bimodal. You have companies like FAANGs where SWEs are paid into the mid or even upper six figures and even juniors are making six figures. Then you have most companies outside of the SV tech industry where you'd be lucky to break $200k (in a HCOL city) retiring after many decades of work.

In terms of countries, the US now considers SWEs a "hot" or prestigious line of work. In many other countries, this is not the case. You're just another salaryman, far, far, far below the ranks of doctors, lawyers, accountants, government civil servants, etc. etc. and your compensation reflects that.

> Reaganomics, discussed in the book, and low taxes in the USA created a lack of investment for the past three decades.

In the last three decades, three trillion dollar companies - Amazon, Google and Facebook - were founded in the US.

> and China the fastest-growing economy.

It's a lot easier to grow fast if you just have to catch up.

Of the four factions identified, only one - Just America - cannot stand having any opposing factions in the same body politic. And now that very faction prescribes its overriding value of equality as way of proselytizing, rather than coexisting with, the other three factions. Not going to happen - the other factions have grown distrustful[1].

[1] https://www.axios.com/media-trust-crisis-2bf0ec1c-00c0-4901-...

Really? I mean, you don't think Real America also has a problem with coexistence? It's all the fault of the hippies?

I mean, just trivially: to a Real American, Smart Americans are The Globalist Elites controlling their lives and Just Americans are the domestic terrorists who burned down the country last summer. This kind of rhetoric is everywhere among the Trumpist right, not just among shitposters on the internet but coming out of the mouths of media figures, elected officials and thought leaders.

The problem with naivete and idealism is that they actually rob you of agency and the ability to engage reality on reality's terms.

The most dangerous thing you can do is to try to immanentize the eschaton. Every time someone tries to straighten humanity by force, the crooked timber snaps, heads roll, and our understanding darkens.

So you have to be prudent about the changes you make. Idealists will always be disappointed by anyone who tells them that their vision, even if ostensibly good, is unachievable and its pursuit harmful.

i had never heard the term "immanentize the eschaton" - i looked it up and learned something new - thank you!

While I agree that trying to immanetize the eschaton can cause harm, politically the phrase is often used to attack reasonable, incremental improvements.

I guess I don't super understand this. Is this an argument against coercive policies? Are seatbelt laws bad?

The United States has been fractious since the beginning. It degenerated into a Civil War that had been brewing since its inception. The Constitution was full of rules designed to grant extra power to those who went on to secede anyway.

Nor did the end of the war settle anything. The reconciliation project was quickly put down, and the losers of the war set about memorializing and lionizing their heroes. The violence continued, but quietly.

The next century is what we think of as that "American identity", where we were too busy making money and becoming the international superpower to wage large-scale violence on each other. That fractured after World War II, when the people who weren't benefitting from that demanded an end to discrimination.

That's been the story for the last half century, as the gradual success of marginalized groups gives that original urge to fracture America a new urge to express their grievance. And that grudge is so old that it's practically impossible to talk about. You can see it in this thread already. They see it as a personal and modern imposition, talking about great old days that simply did not exist -- not for everybody.

> ... Nor did the end of the war settle anything. ...

You can try to tell that story and it's not without merit, but the logical consequence of it is that reconciliation hadn't even been tried in a meaningful way until the 1980s, when Southern elites finally internalized the outcomes of the 1960s Civil Rights era and set out trying to build a new foundation for economic freedom and development, that could ultimately benefit the winners and losers of that conflict alike.

We're still very early in that project, just like we're early in the project of reducing and ultimately ending discrimination of marginalized groups. These endeavors should ultimately be seen as complementary, not oppositional. But the divisive politics we're all too familiar with seems to have very little room for such a nuanced POV.

It's getting off to a bumpy start. It corresponds to the start of the Southern Strategy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Despite the consistency I was describing, the political map changed radically during that time. The electoral map today looks awfully reminiscent of 1860, but between then and now it was completely different.

The Civil Rights era prompted a return to Civil War geographic lines, albeit with the parties flipped. Most prominently, a lot of Southern Democrats switched parties at exactly the time frame you mention, precisely to avoid being part of that reconciliation.

There may ultimately be a reconciliation and a win-win scenario, but it's not going quietly. There's a lot of benefit to stoking those very old grievances.

Post Vietnam, has there ever really an American identity? It seems like there’s a sort of “politicians compromised so there must have been more shared culture” assumption.

I think Russians have the common problem with identity.

I am glad that the author calls out Smart America, or what others call the professional/managerial class, for having the same fundamental ideology as Free America. Smart America is the subset of Free America that is smart enough to recognize that persistent inequality reveals flaws in liberal meritocracy, and they are working to fix it because they love meritocracy.

However, I think creating a category of Just America is a cop-out, because virtually all of Smart America thinks of themselves that way. They recognize that judging people around them in meritocratic terms is unjust, and they're working on fixing that. The overlap is huge, as the interviewer pointed out. I don't think it's a useful distinction. I think it would be more useful to draw an ideological line between Smart America, aka liberals who aren't idiots, and people who think liberalism is the problem and can't be saved, who are keen to disprove the end of history.

> The book opens with an essay on the state of the U.S. during the pandemic, and then offers sketches of four different visions of the country: Free America, of Reaganism; Smart America, of Silicon Valley and other professional élites; Real America, of Trumpist reaction; and Just America, of a new generation of leftists.

Forgive me for being glib, but all I see is an enlightened centrist decrying the evils of lib left, lib right, auth left, and auth right.

One person's "enlightened centrist" is another's "bluepilled normie".

This article is funny because the author comes from a place that has no problem with identity when it comes to Palestinians. Curious!

Dunbar-Ortiz has a good take on this, for her the US American identity is basically a European settler/covenant identity, much like the whites in other settler colonies: Australia and South Africa or Rhodesia (as they were). Unlike in Mexico, where the native history and identity formed part of the identity of the identity of the new country "everyone's an Aztec", the real history of the US prior to European invasion and colonisation was marginalised. Even today US American schoolchildren know more about European history than the history of America. Is that settler/covenant identity collapsing? Great, hopefully it will mean that treaties are more likely to be kept and that stolen land can be restored to its original owners.

It is well known that only the US society originated in settlers, and that everywhere else, the local people simply sprung from the bedrock.

"hopefully it will mean that treaties are more likely to be kept and that stolen land can be restored to its original owners"

I do not find it particularly likely, especially in case of land that is actually in use. Are Hispanic or Asian landlords more friendly towards Native compensation/restoration claims than whites? Or do they mostly care about their own interests first, just like most landlords do?

As far as historical grievances go, slavery is on the top of all conversations, because 40 million Americans actually are descendants of former slaves and are identifiable as such. Natives have either died out, or mixed with the rest of the population so thoroughly that their heritage can no longer be easily discerned. Tribes numbering more than 1000 people are rare, and this corresponds to their relative weight in public discourse.

>hopefully it will mean that treaties are more likely to be kept

I hope that too, Gorsuch started to get the ball rolling there in the Supreme Court I think

>stolen land can be restored to its original owners.

I don't think that's possible for most stolen land at this point.

> hopefully it will mean that treaties are more likely to be kept and that stolen land can be restored to its original owners.

What do you mean exactly by “original owners”?

If you simply mean that the US should return land to whichever group was occupying it when the US took it, that doesn’t seem particularly fair in cases where that group “stole” said land themselves. So how far back do you want to trace land ownership?

I want to live in a Smart Real Just Free America that has common-sense and isn't divided-and-conquered with intentionally-manufactured consent and ignorance. Fuck hate, fuck PC, fuck classism/snobbery, solve most inequality, fuck for-profit essential human rights strip mining like US healthcare and PPP's, and fuck tribal factions.

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