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It's Time For Progressives to Reclaim the Fourth of July
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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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America has in-groups and out-groups of "real" Americans and outsiders, and this stems from its legacy as a settler-colonial state; internal colonies of oppressed peoples and settlers that benefit from oppression. We have never achieved equality because this fundamental contradiction within American society persists, because it's foundational to America's government.
Of course, but it's also foundational to America itself, from the very beginning. Over time we've even seen waves of immigration go from out group to in group, like the Irish.
I just take the viewpoint that patriotism isn't blindly supporting your country. I see that as nationalism. To me, patriotism is celebrating strengths and progress, recognizing and condemning our faults, and advocating to fix those faults. It's looking out for other Americans and fighting for their rights.
Too often, I think we see America for its faults -- and there are very many of them -- and we forget that there's another America that's always tried to fix and address those faults. We can celebrate that as the true American spirit.
The "America" that's always tried to fix and address those faults is always at odds with the American government. American society only ever improves when American institutions and American society are challenged. You need to resolve that contradiction.
Stop clinging to your identity as an American. It's just lines on the map. You have more in common with a worker in Canada and Mexico than you do with your American boss.
There is ironically nothing more American than a group at odds with the government. The country was founded with great mistrust for government and an executive, to the point that the first iteration of the constitution had to be completely redone.
Yep. The founding fathers were extremely anti-government. Jefferson famously supported Shay's Rebellion; I think it's literally true that if they were around today, most of them would advocate for revolution, not protest. I think in their farmer-centric view, they would view the vast majority of modern Americans as de facto slaves, too timid to end their slavery.
It's not just ancient history, either. Something changed after the 80s, but as recently as one generation ago a lot of classically American things like "Rambo" and Bruce "Born in the USA" Springsteen actually got popular specifically because they were expressions of pure disgust at the American system. John Rambo was a homeless, psychologically destroyed veteran, abused by corrupt police, who literally fights a guerrilla war against the system. The end of the movie, if you haven't seen it, is him breaking down in a babbling, hysterical flashback to his traumatic experiences from the war, and then presumably getting arrested. There's no victory, and nothing good about the America that's represented, at the beginning, middle, or end. That's what resonated with people and elevated it to blockbuster status.
The enemy recast Rambo and "Born in the USA" as something else, so successfully that the origin is mostly erased. But the origin that America got so fiercely behind was fundamentally "anti-American," if you want to define that as meaning "against the system."