The less well educated a population is, the easier they are to control. They can only get shit jobs, can’t afford college or healthcare and thus become fodder for the type of jobs billionaires create i.e. Amazon warehouses where they will work you until you die, ready to be replaced by the next generation of uneducated people in poor health.
Christian nationalism is trying and very near to succeeding in controlling what you are taught, what you are allowed to do with your bodies and what your laws are. The first people they seduced are your military just in case you get any ideas.
While, long ago, I’d have taken this to be hyperbole; you are absolutely right. The latter part especially. The rural south is pretty much already a theocracy and its absolutely insanity to me.
The US has been the Land of the Free* since it was founded. It is going to take a lot of work to break that as a single country. I don’t know if it’s honestly viable anymore. Sometimes I feel like we should just scrap the whole thing and try again,l.
*terms and conditions may apply based on race, gender, and wealth
The founding of America was a little rough but it’s amazing that they got as progressive as they did. Seeing as republicans nowadays support removing those fundamental rights that some old men laid out hundreds of years ago.
Edit: guys guys calm down. Yes, I know about the slavery stuff. I’m just talking about the amendment, stuff like the first amendment about free speech. States like Florida immediately come to mind because they’re trying to erase and change history.
I’m not going to pretend that not having borders is a solution to the problem, but I’m not going to pull the ladder up from the people looking for a better life, because that’s exactly what my ancestors did, and the first batch of Europeans weren’t exactly welcomed either.
What I meant is that it’s an important historical event that the first settlers were welcomed. Not that this says anything about respect towards modern day first nations.
Much of what is taught about that historical event didn’t really happen, or was conflated together. No real evidence to suggest it’s proof of the settlers being welcomed any more than tolerance of a technologically superior group of people.
When you put it that way, oh look it’s projection again. We can’t let these foreigners in because they’ll just murder us all… because that’s exactly what our ancestors did when they came here.
There was a brief moment where Europe was colonizing the Americas but hadn’t yet started up the slave trade and ensuing racial caste system, so yeah it was probably fine to be black in the Caribbean in like 1500 (or at least no worse than being a typical poor white person shipping off to the colonies at that point).
No, no, no. You just don’t understand the founding fathers right. They never wanted to give people fundamental rights, they wanted to make a proud patriotic America! /S.
(Why does my sarcasm feel less and less sarcastic these days?)
Many of our founding fathers were progressive. But the ones with the most power were just rich assholes. If I remember correctly, George Washington stopped Philadelphia or the state of PA from trying to abolish slavery. Many also wanted to aboliah slavery in 1776, and… that didn’t end up taking place.
They passed a law to stop slave importing that took effect decades in the future, and hoped shit-for-brains conservatives would naturally phase out slavery and avoid a civil war.
Whoops. Turns out we had to kill a bunch of traitors to get rid of slavery.
We never got rid of slavery. People like to ignore the full text of the 13th amendment: “…except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. States just started passing laws to invent new crimes to selectively enforce, and slavery lived on in the form of prison labor.
The American political system was built to manage the contradiction of having 30% of the southern population being black slaves. It was designed to have a “democracy” where it would take 400 years from black people arriving as slaves to still being mass incarcerated and killed in random violence today.
You can’t accomplish that without having some veneer of democracy and fairness otherwise it would have been overthrown in a slave revolt in 1850 instead of being kept alive by false hope in the civil war.
Here’s the thing, folks: even Lincoln had doubts about manifest destiny and the governing challenges it would present.
What if, hear me out, America is too vast and different to ever be cohesive? What if the best path to success is avoiding shitty cultures that devalue the things you value?
Why are we so bent on homogeneous outcomes? I found my oasis, and I’m building something that will live longer than me. What about you? Is your city/state representative of your values? If not, what’s your migration plan? You have one, right?
Administrative Attrition is what I call it. It’s real. China and India know it well. It is why tyrants and fascists will always fail. They cannot grasp that it is impossible to maintain order when the population out scales the administrative control. Which it has.
Are you seriously arguing that racists should be allowed their own territory? I agree, if only for us to bomb them out of existence immediately upon founding.
I think this logic is accelerationist, and we need to try and preserve and improve the country as we have it. We could actually reform representation, the electoral college, etc.
Prager U does not represent all Republicans. It just represents one asshole with money who wants to ruin the country.
With the latest and greatest EU threaty driving for ever closer political, legal and fiscal union, which was the whole point of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU could have made the same mistake. Not only did this terrible idea start the calls for Brexit, it may well reduce further membership growth.
Edit This is not a pro Brexit statement and I don’t understand the downvotes. I stated that the Lisbon Threaty was a terrible idea and I’m making the point that it caused another terrible thing. The history is well documented. Blair made an election promise for a referendum on Lisbon. When he saw the way the referendum would go, he abandoned the idea and signed Lisbon anyway. Cameron, in the opposition, therefore, made an election promise on membership, and he won the General election and a change from Labour to Conservative government. He followed through with the referendum, very confident he would win the remain vote. Johnson lied his ass off and convinced enough people to win the leave vote. My only fucking point is that I agree with the poster I am replying to and here’s another example of trying to take homogeneous union too fucking far.
My comment is a reflection on the somewhat fragile nature of the USA as a single federal nation, as alluded to in the comment I was replying to, and how the EU is driving well beyond what has been tried there - for example fiscal union is not a goal in the US. People can downvote me all they want, but it is not a pro Brexit statement. It’s very rare for people outside the US to understand the very strongly independence each individual state is, with limited fiscal and political union. Unfortunately the Lisbon Threaty has set the EU on a path of ultimate destruction, which will happen whether you downvote me or not 🤷♂️
It’s because young and/or dumb people think it’s a legitimate institution. They grab their audience with semi-moderate primers before easing into much more extreme dogma.
I was almost grabbed by them when I was early in high school before realizing it’s all bullshit because I grew up.
Are you an enlightened centrist? I basically feel that this country is barely redeemable. The working class people, yeah we are all family. I’ll get along with anyone who doesn’t literally want me dead for my beliefs. But activists and protests keep pushing the buttons of the system, and it just… it’s barely moving. Even a little bit of power has people extremely resistant to auditing and reform.
Many, many people have died for the ideal that is America - created equal endowed by a creator with rights that cannot be taken away.
We strive to live up to that standard and it’s worth fighting for. We fall short but it’s important not to let go of the aspirations set by those that came before us
In my opinion one of the failings of the current population, isn’t just the dislike of the direction America is going (that’s fine) but a doomism about everything America has ever done. We’re never going to improve this country if we don’t want to.
The thing is, saying that it’s doomism about everything America has ever done is really reductionist to the actual point being made:
Like, one part of the actual CRT discussion (not whatever Florida/Praeger U thinks CRT is) is pointing out that post WWII, many families were able to take advantage of the GI bill and the prolific creation of new housing projects to get a higher education, get a house out in the 'burbs, and pull themselves out of poverty.
But at the same time, many benefits of the GI bill were denied to vets of color, and red lining meant that many they could not buy houses in the cheap new housing developments. So many black families weren’t able to join the new middle class, and weren’t able to start accruing generation wealth, and between what I’ve stated and many other policies that families of color were still barred from, and many things I’m glossing over, are still poor now.
And, okay, cool, that happened. The US did a racist thing, and it has repercussions into today. But if you try and have a conversation about what to do about it, you get this response that… well I didn’t do that, that happened in the '40s-'50s, I wasn’t even alive, why should I care? You just hate America.
And they’re right, it’s not the fault of most people alive today. But people are still reaping the generational benefits of those policies, and people of color are not. Other families are still impacted by a lack of generational wealth. People alive today.
And there is a real conversation to be had about what to do next about it. Are there policies in place that disproportionate impact the poor, who are disproportionately people of color because of the policies above? Iunno. But not talking about it only benefits the people who have already benefitted.
So it really is a conversation about what to do next, but one with any historical context at all.
But instead you have this Praeger U response, which says that we shouldn’t teach children that anything bad ever happened in history. We weren’t racists because slaves wanted to be slaves. Therefore people of color who are poor today are just lazy (even if they did the same things your family did to get out of poverty), and we don’t need to talk about it.
You have made a good point but I don’t think that’s really the point the OP response tweet was making which was more of a lazy taunt and broad rejection of America as a whole. Not to say what Praeger U’s vague dismissive appeal to patriotism is itself a good point, it is not. But the question here isn’t just whether there is a case for social justice in some form, it’s whether “American values” should be rejected wholesale for being tainted.
For instance, the equal protection clause of the constitution, which was used to dismantle various segregation laws, stands in the way of some race based remedies to past racist disenfranchisement. There is a value that the law should not discriminate. Whether or not that value is correct or could be questioned, I think it merits some reverence that isn’t nullified by gesturing at the sins of the nation.
We have records of exactly who was denied. If they are alive and want that privilege, they should get it. But afaik it’s private info and only people closer to the issue can work on it. On reparations it’a fucking hard to prove who “deserves” them, and we can literally never pay enough to pay back wages for slavery. I’d rsther bring the conversation back to classism. If I agree that black americans deserve reparations, then we are all just one working class anyway. Let’s get the conversation back to current issues where we can win.
Well, yeah, you’re hitting on the the kinds of things I was thinking of when I said
between what I’ve stated and many other policies that families of color were still barred from, and many things I’m glossing over
I was focusing on one narrative that I could speak to well, because that’s specifically the policies that helped my family, and I know they were not available to people of color. There are hundreds of different narratives that have caused the class divide and the race divide in this country to be so closely associated.
But overall, I agree: If we didn’t spend so much money and resources trying to appease the greed of a few dozen people for whom everything would not be enough, then I think a lot of these problems would go away…
That said, I’m not sure how easy it is to talk about boosting up the working class without having a conversation about race. Enough people buy into, and fear, the welfare queen idea. You wouldn’t want to give them free money.
I just wanted to say this has to be one of the best explained and written opinions on CRT and things surrounding “affirmative action” (in quotes because this kind of loosely fits maybe?). I’ve always believed that racist events from the past affect the current lives of the population disproportionately but had neither factual examples or any idea of what this means for how to move forward. Thanks for writing this down, I’ll save it.
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