Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Ten things I grew up believing about the United States that turn out not to be true

A few days ago the Biden administration granted Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sovereign immunity over the brutal execution of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.  If this had happened under the Trump administration I would have immediately listed it as yet another reason that Trump was unfit for office.  So why should I not apply the same standard to Biden?  The administration tried to justify this by saying that "the doctrine of head of state immunity is well established in customary international law" but this is clearly bullshit.  The United States holds heads of state accountable for crimes all the time.  The fact that Saddam Hussein killed his own citizens was cited by the Bush administration as one of the justifications for initiating war against Iraq, so the idea that the United States gives a rat's ass about "the doctrine of head of state immunity" doesn't pass the laugh test.

It turns out this is far from an isolated incident.  The mythology of the United States that I was raised on turns out to be shot through with lies.  Here are ten examples.

1.  The United States was founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights

Do I even need to explain this one?  Google the phrase "three fifths" some time.

But even beyond the obvious hypocrisy of founding a nation with legal chattel slavery on the premise that it is a self-evident truth that "all men are created equal" (at least they were straight-up about leaving out women) the United States has never accepted that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are unalienable rights.  We alienate people from those rights all the time.  We imprison people, sometimes for years without charges.  We have a death penalty.  We allow people a nearly unfettered right to own firearms, despite the fact that those same firearms will be used to alienate innocent people from their supposedly unalienable right to life.

It is an inspiring phrase, but it has never been a reflection of reality, not at the founding, and not now.

2.  One of the bedrock principles of the United States is that there should be no taxation without representation

The residents of Washington DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa (and a few other places) have to pay taxes despite the fact that they have no representation in Congress.  The United States was born in a revolution against a colonial oppressor, but it is itself a colonial oppressor, and has been pretty much throughout its history.

3.  The Civil War ended in 1865

It is true that the armed conflict ended then, but the underlying political divisions did not just magically disappear.  The northern states effectively conquered the southern ones, and then proceeded to make an absolute hash of the reconstruction process.  Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln after his assassination, was essentially a Southern sympathizer who inherited a military victory from his predecessor but failed to leverage that victory into actual legal protections for newly freed slaves.  The result was 100 more years of black servitude under Jim Crow laws.

4.  The fight for civil rights was won with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act

These two landmark pieces of legislation were passed about the time I was born, and so when I was coming of age I was taught that civil rights were a fait accompli.  Demographic trends made it inevitable that social progress would continue unabated into the indefinite future.

It is true that things are still vastly better now than they used to be, but the intellectual heirs of the people who perpetuated Jim Crow for 100 years are still very much with us, and they have been gaining power and influence for the last 30 years or so, culminating in the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the subsequent shift in the Supreme Court to a (so-called) conservative majority.

5.  We are the Good Guys

I came of age in the heady days of the shadow of our victory in World War II.  The United States was the only nation on earth that emerged from that conflict with it industrial base intact, and we pretty much literally ruled the world for several decades.  To go along with our unequaled military, economic, and political clout we cultivated a myth of heroism and self-sacrifice: we saved the world from the Nazis.  We made the world safe for democracy.  And there was some truth to that.

But the conduct of the United States has not been one of unalloyed heroism and philanthropy, neither during the war nor since.  There were plenty of Nazi sympathizers in the U.S. before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made it unfashionable, and despite the Holocaust having cemented Adolf Hitler's place in the popular imagination as the very archetype of villainy, there are, sad to say, still plenty of neo-Nazis in the U.S. today.

To say nothing of the fact that we have behaved like absolute assholes in the Middle East with disastrous consequences both for ourselves and the people who live there.  We deposed the democratically elected government of Iran and (re-)installed the Shah (for the oil, of course).  We instigated wars of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan.  All of these things have ended in disaster, so they are not even defensible on practical grounds, let alone moral grounds.

And that is jut the modern United States.  If you go back in history things are even worse, starting with our treatment of indigenous peoples, including Hawaiians (which are on my radar at the moment because Hawaii is where I happen to be).

6.  America is the Land of Opportunity

Like the previous myth there is a grain of truth to this.  America is certainly the land of opportunity for some people.  It was for me.  But opportunity is not exactly uniformly distributed here, nor is the playing field anything close to level.  The best predictor of your socioeconomic status here is your parents' socioeconomic status, and the second best is the color of your skin.  Social mobility has declined dramatically since World War II.  And before that, of course, it was confined mainly to people with white skin and Y chromosomes.

7.  The U.S. is a democracy

Democracy is a continuum, not a dichotomy, but the general idea is that decisions are made based more or less on what a majority of the citizens want.  The U.S. is not like that, and never has been.  The U.S. Constitution intentionally gives disproportionate power to citizens of states with lower populations.  American is anti-majoritarian by design.  And this is woven so deeply into the fabric of our system of government that you can't even change it by amending the Constitution.  Article V explicitly prohibits amendments that deprive a state of its equal representation in the Senate.  (OK, it allows this to happen if a state consents.  But come on...)

8.  Democracy (or whatever this is) ultimately produces good results

The theory behind the structure of the U.S. government is that its system of checks and balances will prevent crazy people from taking over.  It was easy to believe in this myth, at least until 1980, when an actor was elected president.  Still, Ronald Reagan was not too crazy, and things soon reverted to the mean.

And then came George Bush the second, who was installed in the White House by the Supreme Court, and proceeded to lead us into two of the most disastrously misguided wars in our nation's history.  But even Bush was not really crazy, just stupid.  (It is arguable that the country was actually being run by Dick Cheney, and that Cheney was crazy, but that is neither here nor there, because...)

Then, of course, came Donald Trump.

Now, anyone who has read my blog knows that I think Donald Trump is crazy, but that is not the point.  It doesn't matter whether or not I am right about Trump being crazy.  What matters is that a lot of people agree with me that he's crazy.  We may be right, or we may be wrong, but that is neither here nor there.  What matters is that we have so far been unsuccessful in removing him as a major influence in American politics.   Even if Trump himself eventually fades away, the movement he launched will outlast him.  Xenophobia, misogyny, and open contempt for expertise and even facts are now thoroughly established.  They will be nurtured and catered to by Republican politicians long after Trump is gone.  And this will happen despite the fact that a majority of Americans vehemently oppose it.  (To say nothing of the fact that substituting ideology for expertise and facts rarely ends well.)

9.  The United States is the Land of the Free

Again, there is a grain of truth here.  There is quite a bit more freedom in the U.S. than in other countries.  You can, for example, cross state boundaries without showing identification.  You can change your residence without having to get approval from the government.

But there are a lot of things you cannot do.  You cannot start your own bank.  If you try, the government will come down on you like a bag of hammers before you even open your doors.  Depending on where you live it might not even be legal to open a lemonade stand.

And the government is not the only entity that constrains your freedom. Most American's freedoms are curtailed much more severely by economics than the law.  Corporations and wealthy individuals have so much de facto power that they are essentially quasi-governmental entities unto themselves.  Want to run your own code on your iPhone?  Sorry, can't do it without paying Apple.  Want to buy glasses from a store that is not owned by a single corporate monopoly?  It's possible, but good luck figuring out how.  Want to work at a job where you are treated with respect, as if you were an actual human being rather than a replaceable cog in a machine?  Again, it's possible, but most people aren't so lucky.

American freedom has always been reserved for a select few.  America was certainly not the Land of the Free blacks before 1965 (and certainly not before 1865), nor women before 1920, nor gays before 2015.  It has never been the Land of the Free for native Americans.  It is still not the Land of the Free for undocumented immigrants.  And yes, I get that we have to protect our borders and reward people for following the rules, but deporting people who were brought here as children and have never known another home doesn't seem like the right answer either.

10.  The United States is in an inexorable decline

This is not something I grew up believing, but it is something that a lot of people around me seemed to believe at the time, and that a lot of people still seem to believe, except that the demographics of the people who believe it have changed.  In the 70's this was mostly believed by conservatives.  Today it is mostly believed by liberals.

I think the conservatives were wrong then, and I think the liberals are wrong now, and this is the motivation for writing this post.  I don't want to just gripe and complain about how horrible the U.S. is.  I want to point out that, although despite the fact that the United States has never lived up to its lofty ideals, those ideals have always been worth striving for, and they still are.  The United States are not a democracy, but they should be.  The United States are not the Land of the Free, nor the Land of Opportunity for All, nor always the Good Guys, but they should be.  I want them to be.  Living here has been very good to me because I'm white and male and I chose my parents well, but I want everyone to have the opportunities that I have had.

I also want to emphasize that, as bad as things may be, they are still vastly better now than they were for most of our history.  Far from being a story of inexorable decline, the story of the United States is one of more or less continuous improvement.  We are far from our professed ideals, but we are a hell of a lot closer than we have been in the past.

But you can't solve a problem without first admitting that you have one.  And we do still have one.

6 comments:

Sabri said...

Majoritarian democracy is not the only kind of democracy! It is common to rule via a non-majority in most democratic states. In the UK, the ruling party has only twice had a majority vote share in the last century: https://www.statista.com/statistics/717004/general-elections-vote-share-by-party-uk/

ejd said...

Do you still believe what you said for #10?

Meaning, that we are not in decline?

Ron said...

@ejd:

> Meaning, that we are not in decline?

I think we're in decline, but I don't think it's inexorable. The history of the U.S. has always been one of ups and downs. I'm not tremendously optimistic at the moment, but neither am I ready to give up.

ejd said...

There is a strong argument to be made that this time it's different . . . but then, that's what everybody says during their time.

Me? I'm very pessimistic. I was hoping we'd limp along at least until I turn into associated atoms, but now I'm not so sure.

That's not to say we're done for, but people who lived through great upheavals in human history seldom had a good time of it. Thinking things might be better 50 years from now does absolutely nothing for me now.

But I'm open to any good thing that might add to my optimism or at least lessen my pessimism.

Know any?

Ron said...

@ejd:

That depends. What does a good outcome look like to you?

ejd said...

Boy, I wish I knew.

I guess no civil war, no WW III, a sudden reversal of climate change, better race relations, the extreme left and extreme right suddenly being teleported into a parallel universe where they will be happy, responsible and conscientious politicians, altruistic corporations working for the betterment of society as opposed to maximum profit . . . I could go on, but it keeps sounding increasingly improbable.

I think I'll be OK, but I fear a lot of people will be hurting, at least in the short run.