I don’t have a strong opinion on whether the trust and legitimacy that seems to have held earlier in history was ACTUALLY legitimate
I mean, is it ever? All countries have good and bad sides; a country is not a person, it contains multitudes, and is under no obligation to have a single coherent moral code or personality. It has at best vague guidelines, often contradictory ones. Trust and legitimacy are often the result of focusing on some aspects rather than others. It would be bad to be completely blind to the negative sides of a country, but I also feel that utterly cynical “everything is rotten” thinking often tends to lead to nothing good. Yeah, supposedly the criticism is meant as a first step to improving things, but very often it actually never really gets to that part (also because once you’re too trained at rationalising why Things Are Bad you’ll find that every proposed solution is also Bad in some way). No sense of proportion leads to absurdities like arguing that the war in Ukraine is pointless because the US are as bad as Russia and it’s just two imperialistic powers dishing it out, no asymmetry, no way to tell which side is more right. That’s actually fairly nihilistic.
Is it ever? no. Is it overall better or worse? this is a question to explore—it’s multidimensional and different people will have different weights (and even directional preferences) for most of those dimensions, but that can be discussed and explored too.
Mostly, I see this post as “things are getting worse (less stable) on this dimension”, and I wanted to point out that they are getting better on other dimensions, and if it’s the same cause for both changes, it’s perhaps an overall positive direction.
I think there’s a fallacy where people think of countries as if they were people, and then start associating the good with the bad and inevitably feeling that if there was good and bad, then the hypocrisy taints the good, and surely the good must have only been some kind of façade to hide the bad, or even be itself actually secretly bad, because obviously good and bad things couldn’t coexist within the same entity.
So honestly I think it’s fully possible that some aspects of the US in the past were utter trash and some aspects were admirable; that the country is not, actually, some kind of monolith is fully demonstrated by the fact that there was a little thing called a “civil war” fought exactly over one of these major divisions. But lots of political culture wars seem to be between two sides perched up on idiotic views of “it was ALL good” vs “it was ALL bad” and obviously not only there’s no reconciling that sensibly, but it weakens overall trust put in the system as a whole.
I mean, is it ever? All countries have good and bad sides; a country is not a person, it contains multitudes, and is under no obligation to have a single coherent moral code or personality. It has at best vague guidelines, often contradictory ones. Trust and legitimacy are often the result of focusing on some aspects rather than others. It would be bad to be completely blind to the negative sides of a country, but I also feel that utterly cynical “everything is rotten” thinking often tends to lead to nothing good. Yeah, supposedly the criticism is meant as a first step to improving things, but very often it actually never really gets to that part (also because once you’re too trained at rationalising why Things Are Bad you’ll find that every proposed solution is also Bad in some way). No sense of proportion leads to absurdities like arguing that the war in Ukraine is pointless because the US are as bad as Russia and it’s just two imperialistic powers dishing it out, no asymmetry, no way to tell which side is more right. That’s actually fairly nihilistic.
Is it ever? no. Is it overall better or worse? this is a question to explore—it’s multidimensional and different people will have different weights (and even directional preferences) for most of those dimensions, but that can be discussed and explored too.
Mostly, I see this post as “things are getting worse (less stable) on this dimension”, and I wanted to point out that they are getting better on other dimensions, and if it’s the same cause for both changes, it’s perhaps an overall positive direction.
I think there’s a fallacy where people think of countries as if they were people, and then start associating the good with the bad and inevitably feeling that if there was good and bad, then the hypocrisy taints the good, and surely the good must have only been some kind of façade to hide the bad, or even be itself actually secretly bad, because obviously good and bad things couldn’t coexist within the same entity.
So honestly I think it’s fully possible that some aspects of the US in the past were utter trash and some aspects were admirable; that the country is not, actually, some kind of monolith is fully demonstrated by the fact that there was a little thing called a “civil war” fought exactly over one of these major divisions. But lots of political culture wars seem to be between two sides perched up on idiotic views of “it was ALL good” vs “it was ALL bad” and obviously not only there’s no reconciling that sensibly, but it weakens overall trust put in the system as a whole.