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Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
I've been lurking since this was the SlateStarCodex subreddit, but this post finally pulled me out of the cave.
I am a native-born American, and can honestly say I haven't gone more than a month in my adult life without being wildly, joyously grateful for it. Everything you said it true, its wonderful here. I've driven across the continent twice, lived on both coasts and the Great Plains, and visited much of the rest. There's enormous variety in culture and geography (well, maybe not compared to India) and whatever you're looking for, we've got it somewhere. My wife has lived abroad in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and shares my feelings: this is the greatest country on Earth. If you can live here, you'd be crazy to live anywhere else. I enjoy our visits to Europe, I love our European friends, but when I'm there I'm reminded how much I love my home.
It's not so much that we're rich (though that is pretty great!). For me, it's a more intangible sense of freedom and possibility. You can do things here. You really can build yourself up from nothing. It's not propaganda, I know people who have done it. A former colleague grew up in a mountain village in the Himalayas, studied in the US, got a PhD, post-doc-ed at Harvard, founded a company, it went under, and worked his way into managing a major government R&D program. A college buddy grew up on in an isolated island fishing village in Alaska. Last I saw him he was rising star in a BigLaw firm. This all might sound naive to many, but I'm middle aged with a family and mortgage and have seen my share of troubles and dashed dreams: I'm no naif. I spent 15 years starting from age 12 working towards what I thought was a dream career and I failed. But all it took to pivot to something new (and better!) was some hustle in getting my resume into the right hands. A friend in France has spent the last several years trying to change careers, between less demanding and (in the US) less credentialed fields than mine, and keeps getting stalled out and delayed by bureaucratic requirements and credentialism. The freedom to try, to fail, and to try again, in a country wealthy enough to give you a reasonable chance of success, and a decent living if you fail, is invigorating once you've taken advantage of it. I now make a comfortable living doing work I enjoy. If I lived somewhere else I'd probably ride that out through retirement. But this is America, and I think I can do better. My wife and I are going to found a company, and try to build something great from the ground up. And if we fail, we'll still be all right!
I'm not going to pretend there isn't a lot of ugly here, but you should know that part of our culture is we put our flaws on full display. Broadly speaking, we don't hide our problems, we shout them from the rooftops. There's typically some truth (though much exaggerated) to the complaints. But I find that most criticism of America is either comparing the United States to its own ideals and blaming it for falling short, or comparing the United States to an idealized image of some other country or compilation of countries. In the case of the latter, I don't find the worst of America losing to the best of other countries terribly compelling. As to the former: guilty as charged. We do not live up to our ideals. But the ugly condemnations of our nation and each other you see blaring across the internet are the public face of the continuous struggle of the United States to better define and implement our founding principles. How can we improve without frank argument about our problems? America is not a finished product: we are always lurching towards a more perfect union.
There's a great metaphor for the difference between the United States as presented on the internet and the real thing. Doubtless you've seen the meme images of the American highway surrounded by fast foods restaurants and gas stations beneath a forest of garish corporate signage, usually accompanied by condemnatory text. This is Breezewood, Pennsylvania. Had the photographer turned ninety degrees to the left or right, that photograph would have been of the beautifully forested Appalachian foothills. The photographer chose to record the one ugly spot in acres of sylvan beauty, and that's all anyone sees.
Not that you can tell from this snapshot, but I have a pronounced cynical streak. I see the same challenges, the same seeds of eventual disaster that other commenters have highlighted. But every society, throughout history, has always been but a generation from failure, has always carried within itself the seeds of its own collapse. Nothing is fated - we can overcome these challenges, and the arguments are so heated because we have so much to fight for.
In many circles in the US there's a saying: "There are Americans born all over the world, some just need to make it home." I hope you make it, because we're just getting started.
Thank you. At this point so many kind souls like yourself have endorsed my arrival in the States that I'm tempted to muster all of you up and march on the State Department haha.
I'm not writing a longer reply only because I fully endorse everything you've said, and it means a lot to me!
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