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Wishing each and every American a blessed 4th of July. The United States is an exceptional country and no American should take for granted the lottery of life that they won merely by being born in that country. Regardless of your political affiliation, a president is temporary and will never define the country any more than the robust private sector as well as the accomplishments, ambitions, charity, altruism, warmth, and resilience of the American people. America remains the global hub of innovation, entertainment, and academia. When I think of a dynamic society that is readily transparent about its flaws to a fault, receptive to change and development, I think of America. Unlike most European states, America isn't under the illusion that endless subsidies, bureaucratic bloating, and clientelism can keep the ball moving. America is the world's sole meritocracy, where diligent and conscientious work is all but guaranteed to yield a comfortable life in a safe, upper-middle-class suburb where people keep their garage doors open and allow their children to play outside until midnight. American research infrastructure, budgets, connections, corporate R&D, venture capital, and job markets are unparalleled. Billions of people on this planet would sacrifice anything to set their feet on American soil, let alone be born and raised there. Many people put their lives at jeopardy by doing so on a daily basis, making or attempting to make the treacherous journey through the Darien Gap of the Colombian-Panaman border.
My family comes from a third-world dictatorship and I've had the privilege of witnessing them reaching the American dream first-hand. Things I take for granted today were precious commodities for them. I was raised in a 70% Republican neighborhood in the South, and at all times, I was viewed solely as an individual who happened to have a non-Anglo-Saxon name and a member of the community, judged by my character and work ethic rather than my caste or creed. I am enamored with many aspects of life in Norway, but I will never earnestly feel a sense of belonging in the society here, I hit a dead end by constitutionally failing to fit the Norwegian mold. On paper, I did everything right, I speak Norwegian at C2 fluency, Knausgaard's My Struggle series are one of my all-time favorite reads, yet the country has an idiosyncratic social code I've yet to fully decipher, there's an invisible barrier between ethnic Norwegians and me that has led my social circle to consist of fellow American or continental European expats. Western Oslo is home to several upper-middle-class communities with 1-2 million USD homes making it some of the most expensive real estate in the country. People there believe that their postal code is a referendum on their self-worth and are content to live in a dated wooden house that can be found for a third of the price on the opposite end of town, and the vast majority of people residing there would not be able to purchase a house in 2026; they typically pool in resources from their extended family, have inherited a residence, secretly live in a condo, or entered the housing market in the 1990s when it was not this oppressive. Despite Norway priding itself on being an egalitarian country, "keeping up with the Joneses" is much more of a thing here than virtually anywhere in the US. People here believe the opportunity cost of going into debt for some puffy vests and quarter-zips outweighs that of using their wealth for edifying and intellectually stimulating experiences. They vacation in the same tacky Spanish resorts that the lower-middle-class scourge 15 miles away does, rather than saving some funds for a trip to Cuzco or Singapore. The wealth in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Detroit, Columbus, Houston, and Dallas, which also share the same reputation of being flashy and stuck up in their respective metropolitan areas, feels much more meritocratic, as I know it is possible to be a homeowner there as a common man who righteously ascended the social ladder. Paradoxically, the average income in those communities is much higher than anywhere in Norway.
My time abroad in 26 countries has made me realize that every country has its fair share of pros and cons, and in that regard, grasping the extent to which America’s pros outweigh the cons has reinforced my American exceptionalism. America's cons are reversible and tractable, but the solid foundation remains intact. I dream of the day I get to return to the United States. I will drive a camper van from coast to coast, staying at KOA campgrounds. I will see the multitude of landscapes that the American national park system has on offer. I will marry a cute blonde Utahn girl at BYU before I begin my postgrad in an Ivy League institution. I can't wait to pay a measly $100 out-of-pocket monthly for world-class medical care.
"The tenets of American democracy are particularly cherished when you are not born with them but with deliberation and conviction adopt them for your own." -Marjorie Lynch
I hate this. I want to find whoever coined this "lucky to be born a X" meme and torture them in the most luxurious way I can possibly imagine.
There is no lottery to being born in America, any more than there is a lottery for a TSMC foundry to produce silicon chips as opposed to burittos. Americans conquered this land, established it's institutions, and then fucked. They fucked a lot. And they made more Americans as surely as Indians make more Indians, or Africans make more Africans.
The mistake of America is believing anyone else could possibly achieve this. It's resulted in 100 years of global misadventures trying to spread "Americanism" and failing every single damned time when 3rd worldism just drags it back down to the lowest common denominator. And it's going to fail even harder when it tries to make Americans domestically out of another billion third worlders.
You are killing the America you love so much. We'd all be better off admiring it from afar. At least then there would still be something left to admire. I wept during the festivities today with the certainty that America won't exist in another 50 years. I recognize nothing of the country I was born into only 40 years ago already.
So what is you explanation for American exceptionalism, if it is not the ideals? HBD of its white population? Or something metaphysical, that during the independence war God let the Holy Spirit descend on the Americans and their descendants in a way which he did not bother with for the Latin American nations?
Probably both. It can't just be the ideals, we have Liberia as a counter-example.
It's probably something like "A heavily selected portion of Europeans with the right ideas at the right time".
Liberia literally isn't ruled by America-descended blacks; it was overthrown by a cannibal warlord named 'General Butt Naked' who left a power vacuum for the usual pack of savages.
The fact that they could be overthrown by a 'General Butt Naked' probably indicates there were some flaws with the society they'd established, though.
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Estimates for the population of Liberia that is descended from African-Americans range from 2.5-5%, the indigenous Bassa and Gio ethnic groups resent that cohort and there have been severe tensions between blood-and-soil Liberians and those descended from returnees as the latter did not integrate well. By that time, they have lived in the United States for centuries which has formed a great chasm between the cultures and religious traditions.
Even if you are so vitriolic about black people, the fact of the matter is that they are more productive in the United States than in any other country. George Washington Carver would have never realized his innate talent in a country like Liberia. If you believe black people are so lazy and violent, you should still desire the damage to be minimized by allowing them to remain in America, where they can provide the greatest benefit out of any country in the world. It is the United States where professional African-Americans have thrived in communities such as Prince George County, Metro Atlanta, and Missouri City. African-Americans are an integral part of the American ideal; they have given us jazz sounds that play in every dance scene of a WWII movie, the banjo, iconic Southern soul food and Creole cooking, legendary stories like To Kill a Mockingbird, and honorable men and women such as Justice Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Thomas Sowell, and Condoleeza Rice.
To Kill A Mockingbird wasn't written by an African American unless I'm learning very new information about Harper Lee. Also the majority of contribution is either entertainment where there's a substantial thumb on the scales to both put them in the spotlight, and to overly lionize their contribution to the formation of the art forms.
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I'm not? I'm just saying Liberia basically forked the US constitution and it didn't produce results above what you'd expect from any another African nation.
I'm not accusing you of doing so definitively; I meant in case you are. I just don't consider Liberia to be a compelling example, as they haven't truly embraced the values that have yielded America's prosperity, even if their non-binding constitution may suggest otherwise prima facie. Freedom of the press, consent of the governed, and the rule of law are alien concepts to the vast majority of Liberians who have no connection to the US to speak of.
Botswana, while far from perfect, is a case study of an African country that has managed to successfully lift itself by its bootstraps. It was once a landlocked country with no paved roads and only 100 educated people in a country of 1 million inhabitants, but through an export-based economy and democratic institutions inherited from the traditional kgotla system, has become the wealthiest country on the continent. Their recent presidents have unfortunately seemed to reverse much of what has facilitated this transformation, but nevertheless their living standards are about on par with those of Moldova or Bulgaria's. Botswanan poverty is not the same as that of its eastern neighbors in Zambia or Zimbabwe.
Bulgaria and Moldova are not basically the same in terms of economic development. In terms of PPP and nominal, Bulgaria's GDP per capita is about twice that of Moldova's. Bulgaria is 55th and 59th in ranking of countries by GDP per capita PP and nominal, respectively, while Moldova is 93rd and 89th.
Moldova is not in the EU, while Bulgaria is and this year even joined the Euro Area.
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I think this is a fully general point regarding immigration, and applies to a thousand little things besides that season the secret sauce that makes America America.
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Yes.
Less flippantly, do I need an explanation for gravity to prove it's effects? Are 250 years of history not enough?
If you're claiming only this specific idea of gravity could do x, probably yes. The US was a huge mostly empty resource heavy new frontier. It's why we called it the New World. I think a counter-factual nation of French Americans seems pretty likely to have been hugely successful as well.
If you want to say only this version of Americans could have done everything its not a claim thats well backed up by evidence if you don't know why.
Excuse me, counter-factual?
I think he's saying essentially rerun American history but have the Quebecois either end up in control of the greater USA or just replace the 12 Colonies with roughly-equivalent Francophones.
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You know, this is the same argument I saw in a random youtube video ages ago, about why North America is an OP starting position for a civilization. They made all the usual arguments about natural resources, fertility of the soil, and a few I'd never heard before about how especially navigable America's waterways and coasts are.
Except there were people here before the land was conquered and turned in The United States, and they didn't do any of that shit. In fact, there were many, many unique peoples here, and none of them did any of that shit.
So excuse me if I don't entirely buy the argument that anybody living in America would have been as great as The United States. History shows there were, and they weren't.
I think reality is actually more complicated than that. There's reason to believe that the North America that the European explorers saw was essentially a postapocalyptic wasteland. There's good archeological evidence there were very sophisticated societies in North America (as there were in South America when Cortez arrived) that had collapsed – Cahokia might have been larger than the London and Paris of the time at its peak around 1100, for instance.
Now, I tend to agree with you that these nations likely would not have been as great as the United States if they had not collapsed or been overrun, but this is for moral reasons as much as any other: the Cahokians, like the Aztecs, appear to have practiced human sacrifice. As simple as it is to say that being "too stupid to have invented guns," is slightly more important than whether or not you practice human sacrifice, I tend to think that European success (including in the sciences) was due in no small part to their religious outlook, which was upstream of their culture, which in turn produced the scientific method.
TLDR; American Lore is even cooler and more hardcore than you were taught in school (and if you ever get a chance to go to a North American mound, I highly recommend it).
Fascinating reading.
It would be really fascinating to know what actually happened. What's the largest or most recent city in Eurasia to be completely abandoned like that?
Cahokia seems to have been completely abandoned before contact with Europeans.
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Eurasian diseases absolutely wrecked the Americas and the Australias. Making up a huge amount of the initial suffering/damage/deaths inflicted.
Like it's always struck me as kind of stupid when people try to whataboutism Australian history since unless they somehow had an impermeable bubble until the invention of vaccines there was no way that that exchange wasn't going to lead to 90% of Australian Indigenous dying horribly of smallpox et al.
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Many good examples in Southeast Asia. One of the examples that comes to mind for me is the Khmer capital of Angkor, which at its height in the 13th century boasted a population of approximately 900,000 people (London at that time had a population of approx 80,000; Angkor's population was over 11 times larger). It's likely to have been the most populous city in the world during its heyday. There isn't consensus about the causes of the empire's decline and the city's eventual abandonment; some explanations I've seen relate to increasing competition by neighbouring kingdoms such as Sukhothai and Ayutthaya who would regularly conduct raids and incursions onto Khmer territory, others stress the effect of environmental shifts that resulted in poor harvests and clogging of the canals that irrigated the city, causing out-migration from the area. Certain other hypotheses suggest that elites freely moved elsewhere to take advantage of burgeoning trade networks accessible from the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. The coup de grace that spelled the end for Angkor was when the Thai sacked and burned the city in the 15th century, at which point the remnants of the Khmer court moved south to Phnom Penh.
Funnily enough this would later happen to the Thai as well in an act of historical karma - the city of Ayutthaya eventually ended up amassing a population totalling 1,000,000 around 1700 (one of the world's largest cities at the time) but they were then sieged by the Burmese Konbaung dynasty in 1767 and destroyed. It's a less compelling candidate than Angkor though, since the city was not fully abandoned and is still a provincial capital.
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Sure, but there is a large gap between no-one else can do it and anybody else can do it.
Your claim was no-one else, my claim is likely someone else. I don't claim it is everybody else.
The French kind of did, though. There weren't as many of them as the English, but they were a sizeable minority population. Paul Revere was the son of a French settler. "It could also be done by some close cousin populations who were literally involved in the real life one that actually happened" is a pretty thin expansion.
Sure, but with an absolute position i only need a thin expansion to disprove it. And of the if the French could and so could the Spanish, then it seems like the Ottomans could have and so on and so forth.
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Are we invisible? We're still here! Quebec is a large province with what, 8 millions of population? It's not just an historical eccentricity that some people and places have french names and a few people have learned french; the first language and the one everyone is expected and indeed in many cases forced to learn, is french. We've maintained as much control over our own affairs within the canadian confederation as we could short of independance. We fight and struggle as every western country to maintain our culture against globalism, with the extra difficulty of the political weigth of the canadian structure which finds us mightly inconvenient, and the juggernaut of American culture, but we are, so far, still here!
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