Comment by jimkleiber
1 day ago
I think the biggest question the US needs to ask itself is do we want to be normal like most countries or better?
1 day ago
I think the biggest question the US needs to ask itself is do we want to be normal like most countries or better?
At this point the US is the kid eating glue, it looks like.
USA has been far better for over 100 years. But that had to end at some point. So now we're seeing it end.
It did not "have" to end, it's merely a political choice by one political faction being forced upon the entire nation.
It's unfortunate, by and large the republican voters seem to have looked at the wreckage of the USSR and the continual looting and decline in quality of life that countries like Russia are enjoying under a kleptocratic regime, and they took their fingers out of their collective noses for just long enough to say "yeah I want that for here!".
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People hate to be reminded of this, but that "faction" is the voters, in record numbers for the party.
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You mean the elected one?
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100 years?
In the 1920s and 1930s the US had:
- Forced labor
- Peonage
- Debt servitude
- Jim crow laws
The 19th amendment was ratified in 1920, so that barely missed the cutoff.
The US has not been some beacon of moral righteousness for the majority of its existence.
USA accepted more immigrants between 1900 and 1980 than every other western country combined.
A hundred years? Maybe after WW2. The Great Depression was pretty rough over there.
Far better than who?
DO you have a good reason why?
Because the industrialization of America is over, and has been for decades. USA doesn't need low-wage, immigrant workers anymore. The railroads have already been built, the fields have been plowed, and now that's all done by big automated machines. Everything that cheap workers used to do that was valuable is now automated.
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Nah, there was just more economic activity to draw people in. By every other measure it’s been more hostile than average.
But you are right that it is ending, just wrong about what: it’s the high economic activity that attracted people which is disappearing thanks to the same people that hate migrants.
> By every other measure it’s been more hostile than average.
I'm not sure there's a "just" here: compared to peer countries, the US is either middle-of-the-pack[1] or significantly more accepting of immigrants[2] depending on which number you pick.
(This isn't to somehow imply that the US isn't hostile to its immigrants, because it is. But the question is whether it's more hostile.)
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-share-of-foreig...
[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/stocks-of-foreign-bo...
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