> Brain-draining the world is really the key to cementing American Hegemony in a post-Cold War world.
Why should we want that instead of an orderly, well-governed democracy? Do you think people in Sweden or Denmark are upset their countries aren't hegemons?
And what would that do to the country? Do you really think that, say, the top 5% of India and China (100 million people) would do better maintaining a democracy than median Iowans? That's a real bet that your assumptions about how society works actually reflect reality.
My suspicion is that for a lot of people that grew up in and only know the US, there's a sense of impending doom if "American hegemony" ever were to be replaced by something else.
But since there's no real practical experience of how that would actually feel (or rather, how a very high quality of life and subjective happiness are possible without an US salary in many other countries), they instead project from something that does exist in the US: Downward social mobility. (And given how US society treats its less fortunate in many instances, that seems scary to me too.)
Exactly. I had this exact thought experiment of "What if America were no longer Hegemon".
So, I looked at other historic examples. The British, Dutch, and Spanish. (You can add German/Austrian and the French, close contenders).
They're all still very well-off!
I actually grew up in one of these, and I fully agree.
Yes, my country was significantly larger and more influential a century ago. It even was an empire, with an emperor and all! But no, I don't feel like the average person born back then had a better life than me.
> I don't feel like the average person born back then had a better life than me.
This is true for (almost) anywhere in the world. Everybody has a better life _on average_ than 100 years ago.
> It even was an empire, with an emperor and all!
But the fact that your country was the capital of an empire a century ago is a large reason for why it is richer now, and generational wealth was indeed passed on.
This perhaps is visible if you look at countries that used to be subservient to yours, in empire times. Are they not - relatively - still poorer than the former empire capital?
Oh, definitely! Many former empires still benefit from their history.
But all I'm saying is that there's a path to preserving wealth beyond outright remaining an empire. (Whether it's still possible after making hypothetical full reparations is a difficult question I don't know the answer to.)
What you're missing is the role the U.S. has historically played in preserving and protecting democracy in the world and, particularly, Europe.
If America was suddenly no longer a hegemon, it would be qualitatively different. There are other hegemons in the world that would step into the void left by the U.S., and it would be their influence that would be felt most the world over, including by the countries you named.
Exactly. People act like if the US steps back there will suddenly be peace and everyone will get along. What will happen is someone else will step into the US position or multiple someone’s will fight for that position. Neither are probably good for the US or the world.
Another problem (which Trump is idiotically pushing) is for everyone else to grow their military. Do we really think the world is safer with more countries having larger militaries that are an election or coup away from no longer being allies?
At this point, and from this point onward, some other hegemons sound darn good compared to US. russia aint one, they simply lack competence for anything grander than petty squables at their borders. Everybody hates them, inclusing all former soviet bloc countries and only deal with them when they have to.
Ie China is not doing sudden backstabbing of its allies, strongarming weak at their weakest point. In contrary ie it helped develop parts of Africa that were severely neglected by western powers, not for free but that was never the case. They did some not so nice stuff, but so did US in the past, in much higher numbers. Tens of millions of civilians are dead because of failed US policies and invasions which ended in withdrawals and defeats in past 80 years.
With all negative stuff on China (uighur treatment, other cases of human rights violations) its still shines compared to US now. Now for any outsider (>95% of mankind), why should they still ally with US now?
Why do you present China as an alternative? I’d you’re a western country, the CCP is not a body you want anything to do with unless you’re desperate. They do not share western values. If you don’t ally with the US, you really, really want to be a separate center of power, because everyone who isn’t US wants to exploit you dry and admits it openly.
Why not?
China seems a lot more reliable than the US, and has seem more reliable for quite a while.
You speak as if the US does not exploit others dry. The US is a lot more malignant than you make it sound.
Most of the "protection" and for democracy stuff the US has been up to has been to protect their own corporate interests to extract resources from those countries, see all of South America and some of the middle east.
I don’t blame them for how the world works. I’m saying if I need to be under some ‘protection’, I’d rather it is US than China and especially Russia.
If Britain were a US state it would be between Mississippi and Alabama in GDP per capita.
Not sure I’d call the place well off. Granted, a lot of the reason they’re in this situation is because they put everything into stopping the Nazis and thus saving the world. The US kinda lucked into inheriting the UK’s wealth.
GDP is not a measure of wealth let alone well being, it just means Mississippi is more expensive than Cornwall.
Japan is even lower on the list, but personally I’d rather live in Osaka than Mobile.
Though with (for the moment) a rather better social safety net / services provision than the US as a whole, and MS/AL specifically.
I do agree with your larger point, it is however counterbalanced in part. Gross per capita income doesn't reveal the full picture.
The British, Dutch, and Spanish
All whites, all allies of the Hegemon, and most importantly, all colonizers, what a coincidence
if this is a satire, I have to say it's a brilliant one
>Do you think people in Sweden or Denmark are upset their countries aren't hegemons?
Funny that you chose those two countries. Denmark is a founding member of NATO. Sweden is one of the two most recent admitted, almost a year ago.
My point is that it's U.S. hegemony that has protected its own democracy and that of liberal democratic Europe to a large extent.
Sweden and Denmark haven't been hegemons because they haven't needed to be.
> Sweden and Denmark haven't been hegemons because they haven't needed to be.
That's exactly right, and I used nearly exactly those words in a recent comment.
Important to note: The free world - economically advanced democracies excluding the US - is the largest economy in the world, larger than the US by about 30%, with an even larger population.
These countries have a historically unprecedented incentive to work much more closely together now, and there is a massive void to fill.
That is not how it works, many of those countries will need to align with China or be conquered.
We're long past the point where we can say "how it works" from how it used to work.
The incentive is there now, when it wasn't before. Cooperation emerges under external pressures, almost as a rule.
Align with China so they can protect us against the US?
U.S. hegemony has also destroyed and subverted democracies and propped up very illiberal dictatorships. Protecting democracy for white countries only isn't exactly what I think of when I think "world protector of liberal democracy".
The U.S. hasn't been perfect, but I'll take it over the alternatives.
And, I'd say protecting democracy for "white countries only" is a simplification. If you're talking about Europe, then we have to consider that the U.S. has also pretty famously fought against European nations and that our subsequent "protection" there was to serve as a bulwark to maintain a world order that benefited the U.S. and democracy.
And, you have to consider that we later "protected" the non-white Japan, Korea, and Vietnam at great cost.
In some of the countries wherein the U.S. could be said to have propped up dictators, there tended to be other geopolitical realities. For instance, many of these were in the Middle East and the U.S. elected to align with the most pliable of the available alternatives. And, in spite of this, the U.S. has also promoted democracy in the region.
You have to also consider the sentiment in many of the countries or regions is/was decidedly anti-American and the choice to support regimes less hostile to U.S. interests is a practical one. Many do not want democracy and the alternative for the U.S. is frequently to topple regimes and attempt to stand up completely new governments (i.e. nation-building). This is an extraordinarily costly endeavor with a high failure rate.
And, all of this in the context of adversarial nations doing the same to promote their own interests.
Again, we're not perfect but the world is a messy place.
> Many do not want democracy and the alternative for the U.S. is frequently to topple regimes and attempt to stand up completely new governments (i.e. nation-building). This is an extraordinarily costly endeavor with a high failure rate.
Yes, and this is one of the stupidest things about American foreign policy. Every european democracy spent hundreds of years as an authoritarian regime first, while it developed the underlying infrastructure of state and civil society. America repeatedly trying to short-circuit that process by toppling authoritarian regimes is in the long run bad for the people in those countries. Those countries are not ready for democracy and the fledgling democracies that the U.S. has tried to install, like in Iraq, have led to horrors.
Coups in Haiti, supporting gangsters and strongmen, overthrowing democratically elected presidents multiple times - supporting Democracy!
Pushing fake candidates in Venezuela - supporting Democracy!
Ousting left-leaning governments in Australia - supporting Democracy!
Overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran, returning it to authoritarian monarchy - supporting Democracy!
Overthrowing the democratically elected government of Chile, installing a dictatorship - supporting Democracy!
Supporting the overthrow of democracy and establishment of a military dictatorship in Brazil - supporting Democracy!
And so on and so forth, with plenty of logistical and moral support for mass killings, disappearances, assassinations, and political imprisonment mixed in to boot.
We have never promoted democracy, we've only ever promoted the interests of American corporations and opposed socialism.
You are judging the U.S. in the context of an otherwise utopian world that doesn't exist.
Yes, it gets messy. And, yes, United Fruit Company et. al. happened. We've absolutely had government capture and promotion of special interests. But, even these aren't always so neatly separable from U.S. interests, which are not always so neatly inseparable from promotion of democracy. For instance, a weak economy would make it nearly impossible to have influence in the world.
There's a simplified world view that ignores the good, measures each discrete misstep on its own (or interprets every difficult choice as a misstep), then tallies a final score. But this is not realistic in a world where lesser evils are frequently the viable option. America does not operate in vacuum and you have to look at the entire arc.
You'll not see me defending every egregious thing this country has done or endorsing the instances when it has truly veered from its creed. But, to measure us by only that metric and declare the country evil or completely non-democratic is to exonerate other bad actors on the planet.
Worse, adopting such a simplistic point of view makes it impossible to recognize when we've entered a truly treacherous phase, wherein an authoritarian regime comes to power and eschews democracy entirely. Everyone would just throw their hands up and declare "we were never democratic anyway, so it doesn't matter". And, by the time they're shown the difference between our imperfect democracy and frank authoritarianism, it's too late.
I'm not claiming the US is not democratic - by most definitions of democracy, it is. I'm claiming the US has never promoted or protected democracy.
I'm not judging the US in comparison to anyone else. I'm judging it in comparison to your statement that it has promoted and protected democracy around the world.
US interests justify all kinds of nastiness, sure. But we claim to be civilized, claim to be champions of justice and democracy, and say we act for the good of the world. There is no evidence at all to give any credence to those claims. Claiming that other countries would be even worse is just a strawman. We should be better, and we know we should be better, because we feel the need to hide and deny the things we do. I don't care what other countries do - I don't live in them, have no vote in them, and am not represented by them. I want MY country to be good and just, rather than pragmatically evil because we can't let anyone else "win".
>I'm judging it in comparison to your statement that it has promoted and protected democracy around the world
The point I'm making here is that this doesn't always look like we think it should (though it also frequently has). The world doesn't just cooperate. It's a nasty place filled with competing, often hostile ideologies. And sometimes nastiness is required.
>There is no evidence at all...
Of course there is. If I give you examples, you might wave them off as the U.S. merely promoting its interests versus democracy, but these are frequently directly linked. The U.S. does have an interest in promoting democracy in the world, even if there are counterintuitive scenarios wherein we must take a short term approach that reads anti-democratic. For instance, if a candidate were democratically elected, then ruled as a dictator, removing that democratically elected president would conceivably be a democratic action.
Beyond this, the U.S. must protect its interests (and power) if it is to continue wielding influence in the world.
But, it's true that there have also been grave missteps along the way. I want my country to be perfect too. But, alas. Still, I don't believe it's so binary (though I once did).
In any case, we seem to disagree and I'm not sure that this goes much further without us simply repeating ourselves. Thanks for the chat.
India despite flaws is a democracy same as the US. It's a very different country then China. Plenty of immigrants from tyrannical countries are as if not more committed to democracy as those born here
And just because someone was born in China or India it doesn't make them any less American then someone born in Iowa. Their children might be born in Iowa
Democracy isn't created by intentions or "commitment," but rather the culture of the people, their attitudes, and mental processes. An Iowan born in Iowa to Iowan parents who were born to Iowan parents is steeped from birth in a culture that is very different from someone born in India or China--or even the American-born children of Indians and Chinese immigrants.
Immigrants may become legally American overnight, but they don't become culturally American overnight. Cultural attitudes are extrmely durable (https://www.sup.org/books/economics-and-finance/culture-tran...). My mom has lived here for 36 years, and she's still a low-social-trust south asian who has distinctly south asian views on credentialism, education, social hierarchy, etc. Are those attitudes compatible with the kind of egalitarian, self-governed democracy Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about? I am skeptical that's true at scale.
Even having grown up here, my cultural attitudes are very different--and again, distinctly south asian--compared to my wife's (whose family has been here since the early 1700s). If you took 1,000 people like my wife and put them on an island, you'd recreate America--including the parts of America I find perplexing and frustrating. I'm not persuaded that if you took 1,000 people like me and put them on an island you'd recreate America.
The book you cite and more generally the arguments traced in the Deep Roots literature are not very strong and often deployed to support anti-immigrant, anti-assimiliationist views.
I'm not persuaded we could recreate America even if we took any 1000 people, even people who can trace their apple pie eating back to the Mayflower, because you know, America is a country and more generally complex arrangement of stuff that involves and entangles hundreds of millions of people (if not the entire planet).
> often deployed to support anti-immigrant, anti-assimiliationist views.
So what? Immigration is optional. The people supporting large-scale migration from countries without functional democracies should have the burden of proving that cultural attitudes salient to democracy are not durable.
Even in the U.S., I'm not persuaded that the Anglo-American republic as originally conceived survived the mass immigration of continental Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
> 'm not persuaded we could recreate America even if we took any 1000 people,
We have a real-world experiment of this! America, Canada, and Australia are all oddly similar countries, demonstrating strong alignments along many dimensions.
The US, Canada and Australia were all formed at times where the origin countries where not liberal democracies, so where did that "democratic seed" come from, and why should people fleeing totalitarian regimes not have it?
This argument really does not make sense, and lest we forget those "enlightened democratic western cultures" created some pretty gruesome dictatorships in the intermittent years.
The modern Bangladesh constitution, created in the 1970s, has concepts like “due process.” That phrase comes from a 1354 English law implementing the Magna Carta: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt5-5-2/ALD.... If you study British history, you’ll see that foundation for what became America, Canada, and Australia has being built for 900 years, even when British society was ruled by a king.
Turning to Western europe more generally, there are cultural traits arising from Christianity and the historical development of the Catholic Church: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric....
Protestantism also played a significant role. Puritanism in New England heavily influenced what became American political culture: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/37/our-puritan-heritag...
This isn't a good argument as the importance of "due process" in British and American systems differs and diverges significantly both currently and historically.
Actually if you study British history you'll find that what is most striking is that the United States is a departure from rather than a continuation of British legal or governance norms.
I’ve extensively studied British history and British legal history specifically. What’s striking is that America, for all the influences on it, has displayed such remarkable continuity with British tradition.
Obviously there’s differences in application of those concepts after hundreds of years. But the point is that when Bangladesh drafted a modern constitution, it reached for concepts dating back to 13th century England. Democracy as we understand it was a long time in the making. They didn’t reach back to the Mughals or the Nawabs of Bengal. This was no indigenous foundation for law-based democratic society. And experience has proven that you can’t transmit such a system from one society to another with ideas or words on paper. It’s the organic result of mother teaching child over generations.
Remember, the american revolutionaries were fighting to vindicate what they saw as the ancient rights of Englishmen, unlike say the french revolutionaries who sought to institute a new regime.
You haven't studied well enough as due process being largely secondary to both royal prerogative and parliamentary sovereignty, with there being (even to this day) a scepticism and sometimes outright hostility to the role and scope of the judiciary, is something you missed.
Immigration is core to American identity and America's success.
It's one of our core defining values
The American that was originally convinced was imperfect and much worse then the America we have today. We literally had slavery and most adults couldn't vote.
Find my anywhere in the federalist papers (or the anti-federalist papers) that says anything about immigration.
What you’re talking about is a 20th century creation. We never tried to be an “immigrant nation”—we were a big open country with no welfare state, and it was favorable for us to allow extensive immigration to populate the continent and displace the native americans.
In the 20th century we accidentally found ourselves with British Americans being a minority then created this idea of an “immigrant nation” to assimilate all the Germans, Italians, etc. But it’s a retcon.
America has changed significantly since that time for the better much better.
The fourteenth amendment in particular changed the US in fundamental ways (one of which was birthright citizenship).
> we were a big open country with no welfare state
One of the countless ways we are better country today then in the past. No social security, no Medicare
> But it’s a retcon.
It's an evolution and a vast improvement
It doesn't matter what the federalist papers say, as no one is going to argue that your deep-nativist view aren't also espoused by Publius.
You're being informed as to actually, as messy as it might be, what the US is and was. This isn't going to be neatly described in any papers or appeal to core enduring features, however much that might suit your ends
> So what?
The point is you have a view and the after that fact have found an argument (not a particularly compelling one).
Unfortunately (for you) the burden of proof at the very minimum (or maybe more properly on everyone in this domain) is on you as immigration from non-democracies is as older than the United States itself, you are the one advocating for a departure from this historical fact.
The countries you list are actually not as similar as you might like to believe, in so far as they are similar not for the reasons you believe, but it might be your own inability to see the differences here, nor do they prove your proposition that somehow there is some determinism by deep roots (or lack thereof) of people.
Tocqueville was a colonialist who wanted to apply a racial segregation system in Algeria. He also wanted to indemnify slave-owners and traders if the slave went free. In France, we see Tocqueville as an "egalitarian but for the bourgeoisie". That's what the French Revolution was about : abolishing nobility so nobles and bourgeois are equals.
I believe your personal experience may be narrowing your view.
I have a similar family experience with drastically different outcome. Including ties to your idealize Iowan people (born to Iowan w/ Iowan grandparents, great grand parents and so on back to Jamestown for a couple), who are simply that, just people. Most Iowans come from late 1800 immigrants, many from East Europe. Some of my Iowan family lines are outliers in terms of origin (first families), but there is at least one from 1800 East Europe that I know of. If you moved on from British history to American History, you would better understand the real mixing of immigrants/cultures, and that is distinctly American. They did not all stick to their kind, as it were.
Some recent family has integrated with Asian immigrants and they are more "American" than some of my Iowan families in-laws that have been radicalized into anti-American values, much to my Iowan families horror. That has nothing to do with "cultural attitudes" etc, and everything to do with living in internet bubbles.
Iowan's I know and come from are blue through and through--Union loving gun toting Democrats. Most of them have kept their values, some have let Fox "news" take that thinking over for them.
I think America in its best expression is an amalgamation of many different backgrounds and attitudes. Even differing opinions on the functioning of democracy, though I personally think some opinions denigrating democracy are a bit out of bounds and "unamerican" -- though that's obviously a "no true Scotsman" argument, I'm sticking to it.
I guess I'm just arguing for a more expansive view of what constitutes an American. If it was some precious fragile thing that gets diluted by immigration and threatened by cultural mixing and new ideas, well...
Oh... darnit.
> I think America in its best expression is an amalgamation of many different backgrounds and attitudes.
In my view, the best expression of America is somewhere like Iowa--a flat society with intense, local self-governance. In every multicultural society, the democratic rapport that people have with each other ends up being replaced with relationships mediated by an increasingly large and bureaucratic government that can reconcile the conflicting cultures and interests. Democracy is reduced to mere voting.
> In my view, the best expression of America is somewhere like Iowa--a flat society with intense, local self-governance.
You sound very Jeffersonian, but methinks you're idealizing Iowa — have you ever spent time there?
Anecdata: My dad's family is from Iowa — his people were small-holding farmers and village shopkeepers whose immigrant ancestors had come to Iowa from Germany. My dad and his siblings each left the state as soon as they reached adulthood and never once returned to live. Neither I, nor any of my siblings, nor any of our first cousins have ever lived there, nor have many of our second cousins (although we used to go back regularly to visit relatives). Feel free to conjecture why that might be.
> If you took 1,000 people like my wife and put them on an island, you'd recreate America--including the parts of America I find perplexing and frustrating. I'm not persuaded that if you took 1,000 people like me and put them on an island you'd recreate America.
That depends on the constituents of your sample. I doubt a city girl from New York and a farm boy from East Tennessee would have the same approach to life in this hypothetical thousand-person colony. They'll likely work and trade together as needed, but they would otherwise form and primarily associate with their own sociopolitical milieu, thus forming cultural enclaves.
In short, I don't think you could really create another USA without the historical happenstances, upheavals, and transformations that changed country from a collection of colonies primarily divided on religious grounds to a unified secular republic.
after jan6 we can pretty much put all asian democracies (minus pakistan) above the US in terms of democracy. SK recently had a similar coup-lite situation, not tolerated there.
accepting loss is a core tenet of democracy
“Americans have had democracy for so long they now take it for granted.” - an EU friend of mine.
The peaceful transfer of power is not common in human history. It’s a miracle it’s gone on as long as it has in the US.
I'm not persuaded that if you took 1,000 people like me and put them on an island you'd recreate America.'
A rare moment of strong agreement.
How does one commit themselves to democracy?