Comment by RubenSandwich
8 years ago
Part of the American mythology is that government involvement is always bad. It's hard for me to know if this developed because of the myths of the America Revolution, that a small colony won it alone and not because of external factors, and how much is due to people preaching small government politics. Regardless a distrust of the government seems to be ingrained in the American psyche IMO.
Small government just means localized government.
At a more local level, people have much more influence and ability to change problems that they see. At a more federal level, policy is imposed without localities having much/any influence.
That centralization and imposition of policy that half the country opposes is the reason for the political divide that we see today. If the same policies that we argue about so much were implemented at a state level, people would have the ability vote with their feet.
That doesn’t mean some legislation shouldn’t be federal, but there is a reason that the intention was for federal policy to be overwhelmingly agreed upon rather than forced in along party lines.
This is a good summary. The US was designed similar to the EU; each "state" is autonomous, but some things are shared, like currency, etc. Allowing frictionless movement between states is also paramount (and explicitly defined).
The logic being, if a state starts to get out of control, you can just move to another state. This allows states to experiment with various laws specific to the population.
Most of this was undone with the Civil War. As abhorrent as it was, the federal government had no legal power to ban slavery outside a constitutional amendment. The 13th-15th amendments actually banned slavery after the war, not the Emancipation Proclamation. Today, the federal government bans whatever it pleases and uses the commerce clause to skirt the constitution.
Take the drug war for example. Because a group of drugs was federally banned, states were powerless to do anything about it. I think most people would agree that federally banning all drugs ended up being a terrible idea and ruined many lives and families over the course of it's execution. It continues to do so today. If the constitution was actually followed, each state can determine which drugs it would allow. As far as I know, Colorado hasn't devolved into a cesspool of depravity since it legalized pot. Imagine all the hell that could have been avoided if states were allowed to decide which drugs to ban rather than the federal government.
Of course a strong federal government has some plusses as well. It was hotly debated during the country's inception, but the ultimate compromise all the states agreed to is what we got.
Ahaha what? There's no myth that we won it alone. Elementary school texts on the subject lay it out fairly clearly that we did it with the French.
They may talk slightly about the French help but none talk about The Spanish[1] also England was having trouble recruiting for the unpopular war so much so that about ~1/3 of the British fighting forces were mercenaries[2]. The Revolutionary war was won basically because the British Empire was starting to show it's cracks and other countries jumped at the chance to speed up it's demise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain_and_the_American_Revolut... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War#Rec...
There's no doubt that those were factors that aided. As always nothing in world history happened due to a singular factor or cause. But it is not mythology that a lot of brave and enlightened people fought an empire and have become a very successful country. What next? Are we to discount the Allies win over the Axis because well the Third Reich was worn down due to fighting in Russia? I am a US born citizen and criticize our country quite a bit, but it is insulting to say that the uprising here wasn't the main factor in us achieving our independence.
Until the levee en masse in France pretty much all European armies consisted of mercenaries, criminals, and various other people considered the dregs of society, rather than patriotic citizens devoted to the cause.
Also the British Empire lasted significantly longer and a big factor in pulling out was protecting the Caribbean possessions from the French.
There are a worrying number of people in the US who believe in American exceptionalism. When the French are brought up by them, it's generally in the context of "We saved their asses in WWII", not "They were vital in our war of independence".
Trump just spent his formal state visit with Macron repeatedly extolling the role the French played in American independence. Trump addresses almost everything he does to the same audience that elected him (the same people that your premise would imply don't understand how vital France was to US independence). It's blatantly clear that average Americans for two centuries have understood the very important role France played. It is taught in all schools in the US.
Just about all nations believe in their own exceptionalism. Ask a person from Scandinavia what the best nations on earth are sometime. You really don't need to ask, they'll start all of their replies with: in Sweden we are bestest. Ask a French person how glorious their culture is. Ask a person from China how extraordinary their nation is and about how it's going to dominate the world in the future. Ask a German who makes the best cars on earth (they'll volunteer that, you know, Americans should make better cars if they want to fix the trade deficit, snark snark, chortle). Ask a Canadian if their country provides for a superior way of life vs the US - they won't hesitate for a second to proclaim that as a matter of fact their way of doing things is superior. Ask a Japanese person, off the record, if they're superior to the Chinese.
America's exceptionalism, is that it's the only nation aggressively called out for believing it's exceptional.
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Probably a bigger myth is that farmers hid out in trees and picked off stuffy Englishmen foolishly clinging to warfare in lines (so why was von Steuben important, then?), which only comes close to describing reality in places like Kentucky where a bunch of partisans were participating in what we might today call guerilla warfare. But even in that case it was less picking off soldiers and more killing your loyalist or patriot neighbors. Warfare in lines was completely logical given the weapons available at the time.
> There's no myth that we won it alone.
Yes, there is.
> Elementary school texts on the subject lay it out fairly clearly that we did it with the French.
Textbooks are a mixed bag, but most I've seen at K-12 levels do mention that the French eventually were involved in some way, but very few give a real idea of the nature, extent (material or temporal), and criticality of French aid. E.g., approximately zero note that France started covertly arming and funding independence-minded Americans before the Declaration of Independence.
But even if the textbooks told the whole story, that wouldn't disprove the existence of a popular myth, it would just make it's persistence more remarkable.
Even if it were factually accurate that we won it alone, the story of the revolutionary war has still taken on mythic status in our society. The revolutionary war is just as much a mythic story as many religious stories.
Another part of the American mystique is that every politician is for sale via legal bribery where companies donate to their campaigns and get them to do mostly whatever the company wants, totally contrary to the interests of the public.
And somehow people trust those bribing companies more than the politicians?
They do, some folks.
The idea is companies, caring only about their own revenue, are purer of heart than politicians who are interested primarily in their own social status.
... that a kind of bulk morality emerges from many individuals all working to maximize a single product’s sales.
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It's reasonable and wise to distrust government. What is unreasonable is American blind faith in private industry.
This tracking is a great example of the threat posed by industry to individual citizens.
The term "big business" preceded "big government", and has been far more prevalent.
Big government arose as a response to and check on big business.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=big+business%2...
You leave out another option: Americans distrust government because we see it fail us every day. Corruption, police brutality, inefficiency, politician sleaze baggery...
In general corporations provide a much higher quality service than the government in the US.
It always boggles my mind how 1/2 the people that realize and complain about those things go on to recommend more government and that only they should have effective guns.
It’s not half, it’s a tiny percent who recommend those things.
Saying half the country wants those things because they vote D is the same as saying half the country wants to ban Muslims because they vote R.
You can’t treat populations as individuals. You can’t take the many desires of a group of people and expect them to make sense as if they were one mind.
This mindset is the reason political discussion has broken down in this country. Rather than treat each other as individuals with diverse opinions, we treat each other as mini clones of the nonsensical amalgam of the worst aspects of half the country.
You make a good point about the government, but I don't agree it extends to corporations. Corporations do much of the dirty work of the government.
Defense contractors and mining concerns operate hand-in-hand with the government, training police, researching weapons, running prisons, crunching data. Look at the story of this article: it's corporations doing the dirty work the government isn't technically allowed to do.
Furthermore corporations only submit to greatly reduced requirements for attending to those with special needs, like in wheelchairs, deaf, etc. There are some valuable services provided to them, like closed captioning, but only under passioned support from idealists and with profit incentive.
If we left it all to corporations, only the most able-bodied and well-off people would run the country for the most able-bodied and well-off, forming tight-knit circles to maintain their power and never perceiving the world as a place for living, only protecting power.
> ...There are some valuable services provided to them, like closed captioning, but only under passioned support from idealists and with profit incentive.
It's worth noting that video closed captioning had to be mandated by law (Telecommunications Act of 1996) before it became universal[1]. Some broadcasters were ahead of the curve & implemented it prior to the legislation, but it was rarely comprehensive.
Of course, this just underscores your point that disabled consumers were not a large enough group to have their needs met by market forces alone.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/telecommunications-act-1996-and-...