This is a continuation of what got us here. This one focuses on the United States.
The USA started as a free-spirited crowd of cantankerous Protestants and high-risk entrepreneurs. They felt safer homesteading a new land than enduring the Catholic Church’s persecution.
This political situation selected out the most risk-taking (and therefore entrepreneurial) Europeans for the colonies. They were an unwieldy crowd of people and regularly defied their home nation’s commands. For example, when the Crown sent a governor to a colony, the colonists ejected him and assigned someone else instead.
Growing dissent
In the 1750s, many colonists attempted to unify under a central government with the Albany Plan. It didn’t go anywhere, but many colonists changed their minds a few decades later. First, the Crown forced them to fight in the French and Indian War. Then, the king forced them to pay taxes when the war didn’t go well for Britain.
This was too much for them, so they formed a founding nation, starting in 1776. This triggered several remarkable things in a comparatively short time:
- They won against Britain.
- They successfully spent the next few decades building a government (through the Articles of Confederation).
- They rebuilt it once it failed (under the US Constitution).
A new value system
Their entire mindset was the most non-king-based and egalitarian society that had ever existed. Even by today’s standards, they’re still more meritorious than most nations:
- Many of them believed slavery was a cancer but were optimistic that it would quietly fade over time. The 13 colonies were a shaky alliance, so they omitted it from their founding documents.
- Land ownership was proof of citizenship before our current spread of endless specializations. Females at the time were rarely landowners as a matter of cultural attitudes.
- In effect, one vote per white land-owning male meant one vote per household.
The emerging culture from this new nation was unprecedented. Their enthusiasm mixed with extreme individual wealth broke population records. There was an average of 13 children per married woman. For a few decades, American society was an example to the rest of the world.
Starting in 1827, the British coined the term “individualism” to define several unique characteristics of Americans:
- They quickly compared themselves with others. Comparisons almost always guarantee admiration, ambition, or resentment.
- They made more international connections and built plenty of organizations and systems. However, they weren’t particularly loyal or compassionate.
- Their religious background made them unusually evangelical. This meant they were unusually open and involved in their community.
The first American currency was actually “mind your business” and not “in God we trust”. John Quincy Adams stated it clearly: “The American Republic invites nobody to come. We will keep out nobody. Arrivals will suffer no disadvantages as aliens. They can expect no advantages either.”
Slavery
Unfortunately, slavery did not go away. There was enough power in owning people that the slaveholders did not want give it up.
Abolitionism was a consistent discussion topic for decades. It wasn’t uncommon all the way into the 1861 war to hear open discussions about whether slaveholding was moral.
At the same time, the “cotton engine” made cotton fabric the high-tech item of nearly the entire 19th century. In the southern states, some people felt cotton was impervious to anyone’s criticism, including the slave workforce that ran it.
Eventually, the newly minted Republican Party took a risk with Abraham Lincoln in 1858. He didn’t succeed in the election, but his debates with Stephen Douglas drew ideological lines in the sand. When he became president in 1861 by an electoral win, the southern states concluded they’d lose too much economically. Their solution was to form a new nation.
In response, Lincoln declared war on the South. The American Civil War was severe, and about 700,000 soldiers died in a four-year war, not including civilian casualties. The war led to slavery’s abolishment, along with citizenship and voting rights for African Americans. However, the war utterly devastated the American South. In a more existential way, Southern slaveholders’ cultural destruction efforts still heavily affect African American culture to this day.
Despite this, the nation slowly unified into a far more pervasive solidarity, and the American experiment continued. Somehow, the results and shared hardship of the war brought a shared identity to the nation.
Progressing
In the 1890s, Americans began looking to European philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular, their philosophies were uniquely deconstructive and postmodern. They severed the connection between God and ethics, and the trend captivated the American intellectual mind. They envied Europe’s culture and wanted to reproduce that attitude. This was the start of the Progressive Movement.
Many American thinkers cast aside presumptions everyone largely held throughout human history. Among these, they came to believe that human nature itself, as a collective, changes. Many scientific and engineering ideas mixed into this thinking. The assertion was that the correct inputs could make an entire society adapt to any desired goal.
Collectively, though, human nature really doesn’t change. Individuals often change, but every baby has nearly the same parameters as babies thousands of years ago.
This all seems high-minded and abstract, but these ideas come with tremendous implications:
- If humanity doesn’t change, approaches proven by history will still work well to manage our worst problems. Any changes we make should be minor and intentional.
- A constantly changing people, however, means history is a bad indicator of any success. If a system was good 100 years ago, it’s almost irrelevant. We must re-examine all known-good rules, all reliable approaches are suspect, and changes should be frequent and dramatic. The longer it hasn’t changed, the more likely it needs changing.
Further, these ideas interconnect with religious beliefs. If our ancestors were apes, we must evolve to meet new circumstances. If God made us, we are already at least somewhat sufficient in our current form.
The “Social Gospel”
One of the major drivers of the Progressive movement came from the “Social Gospel”. They replaced the individually focused Christian gospel with a more practical mindset focused on community improvement.
This new mode of thought rejected many aspects of Natural Law and its implication of Natural Rights. Instead, they adopted a wide variety of philosophies that included Utilitarianism, Darwinism, Sociological Jurisprudence, and Legal Realism.
In particular, the leadership sharply distinguished between human rights and property rights:
- Nobody was arguing against human rights.
- However, the government believed they provided property rights for people and it wasn’t implicit like everything else. It was paternalism by another name.
To implement this approach, the government needed centralized control, so it had to grow. Instead of elected or appointed officials, they believed it required people isolated from politics. Those administrators could make necessary decisions to wisely decide what people could do. The Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, for example, took 20 years for the courts to accept it as legal.
Expanding power
Politically, the Progressive Era provoked the United States to look beyond its borders. Their attempt to imprint a freedom-loving society onto Cuba sparked the Spanish-American War in 1898. In the ensuing chaos of that war, the US acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
To this day, we still see unpleasant proxy battles run by the United States to spread its ideals. It represents the paradox of a home break-in with the perpetrators renovating your house and taking some money as “payment”. Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq have all seen the paradox of national paternalism branded as spreading freedom.
The centralization was finally complete in 1906 when Congress gave more power to the executive branch. The idea was to overthrow the legislative and judicial branches and create a “new nationalism”. This would consolidate power and give the federal government more control than individual states.
A new value system
The Great World War enhanced the Progressive Movement. World War I was a contrivance of many European nations crashing against each other. The United States entered late into the war in 1917, but they adopted a type of “war socialism”:
- They set prices on anything related to the war effort.
- They illegalized converting wheat into whiskey.
- The Sedition Act limited freedom of speech.
This centralized power was only present during the War, but they saw how to do it. Roosevelt’s administration used very explicit language that framed the concept of a welfare state.
Their concept of “rights” was closer to the idea of “entitlements” than “freedoms”. This set of values created an implicit “second Bill of Rights”:
- Everyone deserves a new level of prosperity regardless of station, race, or creed.
- Everyone deserves a useful and well-paying job.
- Everyone should earn enough money to have adequate food, clothing, and recreation.
- Everyone should earn enough to sell the surplus of what they make.
- Everyone should have a decent home.
- Everyone should have adequate medical care, as well as the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
- Everyone should receive adequate protection from the risks of old age, sickness, accidents, and unemployment.
- Everyone deserves a good education.
Required rights maintenance
These ideas assumed someone deserves things but didn’t really consider the rights of the people responsible to maintain those things:
- Prosperity comes through finding meaning much more than what anyone else can do for us. Making it a right creates professional victims.
- A useful and well-paid job requires specialized training. This requires someone to opt into working to learn, as well as someone else consenting to teach them.
- Adequate food, clothing, and recreation require paying someone for them, and it’s difficult to define “adequate”.
- To sell the surplus of what we make, we must desire to live frugally enough to have a surplus.
- Everyone needs a home, but it’s difficult to define “decent”.
- Adequate medical care is difficult to define, given that we will all eventually die.
- The government can’t protect us from old age and can only prevent some sickness. When we make decisions that create adverse consequences, nobody can protect us from accidents or unemployment.
- A good education requires good teachers, who are often worth more than most people are willing to pay for them.
At the same time as this, the continued individualism expanded with women’s voting rights in 1920. This fully migrated one vote household to one vote per capable adult person. This trend continues into today and works against the natural formation of American community bonds through shared responsibility and identity.
Foreign meddling
This discussion of freedoms also expanded to foreign policy:
- The United States should enforce everyone’s freedom of religion.
- The United States should enforce everyone’s freedom of expression.
- The United States is responsible for enforcing everyone’s freedom from fear.
- The United States is responsible to give people freedom from scarcity.
This set a precedent that has marched along into today. Beyond providing safety in exchange for taxes, the government sees itself as providing humanity’s desires. This mission is constantly expanding, and the government’s role has become very vague and somewhat contradictory.
Fear and greed
People don’t tend to like governments encroaching on their liberties, and the public wasn’t happy with the Progressive Movement’s changes. However, people will react to a crisis by trusting powers greater than themselves. This is the basis of many religions, and governments can certainly be a religion in a secular society.
As stated elsewhere, Europe’s aristocratic class needed a new vehicle for its wealth after the Great World War destroyed Europe. They found it in the United States’ living trust expanded into a corporation. This arrangement directly tied their wealth to free market capitalism and generated untold prosperity for typical Americans. Most modern conveniences (e.g., indoor plumbing, electricity) had quickly become a standard part of a typical 1920s American home.
More government
In 1929, the government significantly hiked taxes, and this triggered a massive speculative drop. While the Great Depression’s cause is still a present political debate, both sides were at fault:
- There was an absurd hype bubble around stock ownership.
- The new taxes made people spend less.
The Great Depression triggered the 1930s, which were a decade of impoverished struggle. The government made many programs to give jobs and every other public need, but they didn’t alleviate the hardship. The situation had become bad enough that there were even echoes of a potential revolution. The Social Security Administration was among these programs. It was an optional program (at first) to give entitlements for the elderly. To this day, Social Security entitlement culture has contributed to a looming government insolvency.
Meanwhile, Germany was changing. They had combined the above-stated postmodern thought with resentment against their legitimately unfair treatment following the Great War. This attitude became a new government party called the Nazis. They advocated for a more efficient, self-sufficient nation, as well as complete separation (and eventual annihilation) of multiple people groups.
Even now, there is a desperate, unyielding darkness within postmodern dialogue that’s still taboo to address. If humanity only creates values (without anything that transcends us), humanity has no worth except for people we like. The Nazi party was the first full implementation of those thoughts, and it hasn’t been the last.
Empires Clash
After years of tension in the late 1930s, Germany finally conquered Poland in 1939 and allied with Italy and Japan. The rest of Europe fought back with any support they could gather from the rest of the planet. America was still reeling from the Great Depression until Japan ambitiously bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. At that point, in December of 1941, America rapidly changed its mind about their involvement in the war.
In 1945, Europe, America, and the USSR soundly defeated the Germans. Shortly after, the Japanese also surrendered when the United States used their brand new atomic bomb technology.
The aftermath of World War II was quite severe, and its consequences still ripple to today:
- The Nuremberg trials unveiled the tragedy of the German Holocaust. This tragedy is a portion of why Israel is its own nation. We still see territorial disputes between the religions of Islam and Judaism over that region.
- The United States created an agreement with Japan that they’d have no standing military. In return, the US would jump to their aid if they ever needed it. Beyond economic reasons, China’s presence in Asia directly affects the USA because of Japan.
- The United Nations formed as a shared alliance to prevent the risks of further large-scale evil. They have now incorporated nearly every nation, including terrible dictators, under allegations of solidarity and world peace.
West vs. USSR
The USSR didn’t give back Germany’s land after World War II. Instead, they claimed ownership of Germany in the name of the Soviet Union. The Western powers formed NATO as an alliance against Russia’s imperial power. While NATO has been largely ineffective against Russia to this day, governments still send taxpayer money to it.
Europe and America feared the Soviet Union, but they were battle-weary and very afraid of nuclear war. Therefore, they didn’t want to escalate anything with the USSR.
Many American political strategists predicted the USSR would starve itself out over time. They predicted that stiff embargoes and tariffs would make the Soviet Union collapse in 10-20 years. They were correct, but their prediction was short on timing by about 25 years.
During this entire time, the Cold War created a constant existential threat for everyone across the world. Everyone felt that one angry phone call could lead to tens of millions of people dying instantly.
Post-military
Of the 132 million-ish Americans in 1941, 16 million of the men aged 18-45 had become active-duty military. Further, many women worked at home to support the war effort.
Further, the news of the Holocaust gave extra honor to their actions. They had defeated a genocidal regime, meaning they had engaged in a just war. Further, since the Soviet Union wanted to expand, the military was both an obligation and a support network. It was 3/4 of the way to being its own religion. This embedded military culture into almost every American household.
By the late 1940s, Americans had normalized into civilian life again. However, most of them had found some identity with their rigid, structured military culture. The nation normalized harsh, subordinating, hard-working, top-down hierarchical conformity, and union membership was at a record high. The American spirit was now a strange, interdependent, autonomous mindset built on duty and moralism.
In this, the nuclear family unit suffered as the men worked hard to avoid thinking about their war trauma. Even saccharine, idealized TV shows like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best showed this mindset. The ideal represented children guided by a well-meaning and emotionally unavailable father. That father worked like a slave to make his family wealthy, and the mother embraced her role as homemaker.
The prolonged state of the Cold War reinforced this mania. The period’s propaganda from both sides only showed part of the story. Either it was a battle between independent freedom and tyranny, or it was a battle of national solidarity against chaos. In practice, the battle was between workaholic fathers and victims of a new dictatorship branded as socialism.
Bigger Military
In this incredible military power struggle, the Military Industrial Complex was born. It consisted of truckloads of government money aimed at expanding military presence. Every branch of the United States military grew dramatically, with each branch becoming an entire army unto itself.
The government drew the private sector into its network to expand operations through manufacturing equipment and researching new technologies. Even now, civilian technologies continue to benefit from declassified technologies in many domains. However, the heavy funding from the military has contributed to the government’s looming insolvency.
There is much more to this, but addressing it is even more divisive and taboo.