Is obsessing over what the founding fathers wanted stupid?

[Brittain33]

It's the only thing that all of us as Americans are expected to agree on, in principle. We need one common element.

[Brittain33]

'Stupid' is a much kinder word than I would use.

I'm going only by the shape of your avatar, but consider what government in various European countries would be like if you didn't have an agreement to a common national or religious identity, only a civic identity. What would that look like? As of now, the answer is either Yugoslavia or Belgium, and neither is a model for stability. At best you end up with a few privileged nationalities and a reduced place for others (as in Switz.) and a reliance on a royal family. The SNP is stronger than any secessionist movement in the U.S.

I'm absolutely not Europe-bashing, although I see that what I wrote above looks like it. This is a way for me to illustrate a way that America truly is exceptional. Despite being very nationalistic, our American nation is not legally defined by its language, only traditionally so, nor is it defined by a religion, as much as it is currently defined by its religiosity, and we've really lost any sense of being defined by a common national origin, because we've never had it. All that we do have to define being American is our Constitution and, less so, our common history. Americans fight like devils over our disagreements about what it means to be an American, the role of our common language, the place of a dominant form of Christianity, and the role of race. Ostensibly the Constitution is all we have that is above dispute at a basic level.

[Brittain33]

Irrelevance. Promoting Mythohistory for the purposes of national/state identity (or arguably any collective identity - though that leaves us with the question: what history is not mythohistory?) is a bad idea. The distortion of this fluff has on political discourse on in America is simply frightening. And yes I am a Euro which for your information came from a country who in the first 40-50 years of independence promoted a similiar version of mythohistory and teleological 'identity' nonsense which had disasterous intellectual consequences.

EDIT: As for the SNP... you do realize how absurd that comparsion is?

Really? What contemporary secessionist movement in the U.S. has had anything close to the success of the SNP, and has led to such extensive decentralization of powers? If you think I was comparing it to the C.S.A., I assure you I wasn't talking about out-of-date historic examples, nor was I arguing that the SNP is about to launch a civil war. But it is hardly controversial to note the centrifugal force afflicting multi-national states in and out of the EU over recent decades.

No, I don't love the idea of having to justify what our government does by going into the motivations of Adams and Jefferson, and I find it limited. Having an amendable constitution does wonders for expanding that particular straitjacket. My point was that absent that, we don't have an official common identity... and the rest of the world would not enjoy whatever kind of nationalist identity we could cook up in its place, and which tends to burst out here and there.

[Brittain33]

Gully, of course there are big differences between the U.S. and European countries, and certainly between states and various nations like Scotland and Catalonia and such. That was part of my point, and why I argue the U.S. defines itself differently from either Scotland or the U.K. Neither the U.S. nor any state is a nation like Scotland, but the U.S. is holding up better as a central power than states like the U.K., Belgium, or Spain, which, whether the people are overtly nationalist or not, are founded on conflicting principles of nationalism and supranationalist institutions like (anachronistic or modernizing) royal families.

The current state of devolution of powers is something akin to what we have in the U.S. today, but the very different velocities of the process of devolution in the U.K. and the U.S. is significant, as is the fact that Scottish devolution has moved this far in order to forestall further moves.

I recognize much of the vote for the SNP has nothing to do with wanting independence, particularly going back to the 1970s, and that SNP leadership uses such charges for leverage, but the rhetoric about referenda and national independence is unmatched by anything in the U.S. short of some Texas nonsense no one takes seriously.

Anyway, I see you spoke more at length in a later post, so I'll read that now.

[Brittain33]

Gully, if you're arguing that plenty of Americans only pay lip service to this ideal, you will get no disagreement from me. You've hit on why many of us felt George W. Bush's policies were dangerous to the country as a whole. The U.S. is not so special that a total economic meltdown wouldn't lead to demagoguery, xenophobia, and racism because "the Founding Fathers" wouldn't believe it. But we need all the tools we can get in order to forestall that from happening, so why tear that down?

We are a significantly younger nation than most others in the developed world. Although as I said on the other thread, many Americans have misconceptions about birthrates in Britain, France, and the Nordic countries.