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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?
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.
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.
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.
France, Spain and Portugal had different objectives in establishing their colonies than England. They were establishing extractive colonies, with the goal of sending ressources back to Europe. England, sent people with the goal of expanding. While the early americans were building farming capacity, the french were going hunting for pelts deep into North America with the natives, and the spaniards and portugese only were interested in maintaining as many people as were necessary to keep the slaves under control. Of course when push came to shove (so to war) the english colonists had a large advantage by then.
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