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I feel torn about this.
America is the slavers but also the abolitionists.
America is the corrupt corporations but also the Battle of Blair mountain.
America is an imperial army but is also the anti-Vietnam War protesters.
In order to embrace more of the good of America, we need to learn more about the bad.
There are way more of the former than the later.
Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria? Venezuela?
mfs like you making it seem like basic human decency is "American" is putrid propaganda you tell yourself.
That tension has been with us since the beginning. Jefferson was the perfect example. "All men are created equal," but only if you're white, male, and own land. A history of compromise on slavery in order to "preserve the union", only to have it rupture anyway. It goes on and on. This is America, and will be until we decide to make some real changes. I don't see that happening.
I believe we will make a new America after this! A beautiful one!
We don't have to live by the past. In fact we definitely shouldn't, but in order to create a better future we do have to be aware of the both the good and the bad, or we risk just repeating them instead of progressing.
That's the truth about America. It is us. All of it, good and bad. How do we build the America we want instead of trying to recreate a past that didn't really exist?
It's a fact that slave holders signed the declaration of Independence saying all men are created equal.
But it's also a fact that this country was built from the ground up and made great by marginalized and oppressed people. America was built by slaves, it was built by women, it was built by poor people who didn't own land, it was built by different waves of immigrants who faced discrimination upon arrival, and continue to face it to this day.
It's also a fact that the marginalized people who built America were not granted the right to vote until they demanded what should have been inherent to any country that believes in equality. (As an aside, there are some very wealthy intellectual conservatives who argue "all men are created equal" should be interpreted as only applying to a heirarchy of land owning white men, because they believe strongly in what they call a "natural" order of heirarchies. They also claim democracy is incompatible with freedom...)
The fact that marginalized people achieved those rights after fighting for them means that this is indeed a country that valued equality because they shaped it into one, but it also means that this is a country that has constantly battled established heirarchies standing in the way of equality. It's a history of good and bad. This is America.
So instead of looking to the past to recreate an ideal that never really was, why not look into the mirror and figure out where we go from here?
By and large, the second group is always in the electoral and organizational minority. It's always on the back foot, always in retreat, always losing.
Talking about the America That Is Imperial versus the America That Is Protesting is like talking about Vichy France relative to the French Resistance. This latter group isn't institutional. It isn't endemic to the social project that is the nation state. What you're pointing to is a kind of weed that the national government needs to root out every so often in order to grow its fascist garden.
These groups may be American by residency or outward fashion or in the superficial tokens of identity. But they are enemies of America as an administration. They are anti-American in deed. They're an insurgency that the American socio-economic system seeks to snuff out.
I don’t understand your logic here. Yeah, a lot of new ideas are pushed forward by fringe or oppressed groups. Those fringe groups can grow in size and power to challenge, and thus change the institution itself.
MAGA was not institutional at first. They were fringe and weird. No one took them seriously. Look at where they are now.
Slavery was institutional at first. But then the Republicans, an institution, were created to counter slavery. Abraham Lincoln literally tricked American citizens into supporting the 13th Amendment, thinking it was necessary to stop the Civil War. In reality, Lincoln kept the Civil War going longer than necessary to pass the Amendment.
Was that the case at the Battle of Blair Mountain or via the anti-war movement during Korea and Vietnam?
The Republicans, as an institution, existed for a historical heartbeat. They took power in the midst of the Civil War in 1861, struggled for 16 years, and then surrendered to the slavers in exchange for a single term of the Hayes Administration. Lincoln ended the plantation system and gave a single generation of African Americans an opportunity to flee their southern oppressors, before "moderates" in the party slammed the doors shut. Then it was another century before civil rights for African Americans was raised to national prominence again.
The Radical Republicanism of the 1960s couldn't survive the end of the decade. The 13th amendment's "prison" clause was ruthlessly exploited almost immediately, creating a state sanctioned plantation system that persists to this day. And the expansionist policies of the Republicans during and after the post-war era turned the white supremacist tendencies of the Confederate South into transcontinental genocide and imperial expansion, culminating in the globe-spanning American Empire presided over by the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan Administrations.
We didn't end slavery. We internationalized slavery.
This is a weird perspective, considering the war ended and Lincoln died before the 13th was ratified. I’ve always been taught the 13th was to settle the legal status of slavery nationwide in a more permanent way than a presidential proclamation.
Oh I was wrong. I learned about this from Lincoln the movie. Turned out prolonging the war was added for dramatic effect. Thought it was true.
The people have always been separate from their government. What we see right now is what this country has always been, but as empires crumble they are more open and extreme in their oppression as they try and hold onto that power.
I like your name lol
The actuality is that there isn't an America.
We're too vast with too many different cultures to ever work. Driving through the Northeast could cover several nations on Europe. IMO what's happening with our hyper-polarization was always guaranteed, even without Adolf Diddler in office.
This will never, ever work, and we need to split up. I live in a left-wing stronghold, then have to vote every four years alongside folks in rural Alabama who currently right now believe the Biblical Levithian is rising from the sea off the coast of Virginia.
The left wing states need to secede and form some sort of union. Once the cash flow from organized, leftist states stops being spoon fed to republican strongholds, they'll inevitibly collapse. They'd probably attack us, but oh well, they're attacking us now while we're in one union.
Horseshit. People assert this and never justify it, and it’s just a right wing scare tactic to normalize the idea that people of different cultural backgrounds can’t live together. Any multicultural city you go to in America is, almost without exception, going to be a better place to live than some suburban white enclave.
Pretty sure I'm as left wing as they come and deduced this on my own, but okay.
Also, people living together in a city =/= running an entire superpower. Horseshit example.
Maybe abolishion was just a way to legalize it.