Good question!
Answered on Quora. I got a comment on this article from a woman that I think is very interesting. First she said, when I think of America as a person, I feel very uncomfortable. And well you should! Narcissists and sociopaths make a lot of people shiver. Then she tried to answer the question of how in heck did this country end up this way. She traces Radical Individualism, the true and only religion that America has ever had, to the type of immigrants who came to our shores. She may be onto something.
It might sound strange but whenever I picture the US as a person, I am not comfortable.
Where did this culture start? It seems probable that most colonists had this particular mindset. They were economically driven to obtain a better position for themselves, leaving behind nearly everything. Not everyone is cut out to do so, emotionally. So the US were more or less filled with strong willed entrepreneurs, looking out for number one. Religion is for Sundays (Saturdays); your own thrive and survival for the rest of the week. And for the newly arrived: adapt or die trying.
Simplistic? Sounds logical. Something to toss aside though? You decide.
If you are conservative to reactionary, it’s a great place to live, as the US is clearly one of the most rightwing places on Earth and has been for a long time. Do you believe in radical individualism or “let em die” Libertarianism. America is the home for such things. America is one of the most callous countries on Earth and its foreign policy has always been vicious and wicked. It believes that there one set of rules for it and another set for its enemies.
It commits Nazi-like wars of aggression against its enemies all the time. America is the worst bully on the planet and has been for a very long time. America has always been for the rich and the corporations and has always treated its workers, poor, low income, and minorities like complete garbage. It hasn’t even treated its middle classes very well, but it took them forever to figure it out.
The hatred of working people and unions in the US is off the charts. This one of the only countries on Earth that actually hates labor unions. America is one of the only countries on Earth that hates government. Any time the government tries to help the people, Americans react in rage and revolt. This is one of the only countries on Earth where people hate paying taxes because that means that they have to share with other Americans. Americans are the most aggressively selfish people on Earth.
This is one of the only countries on Earth that actually hates public education (because it helps the people), and it has been rolling it back and privatizing it ever since. Botswana is the only country besides the US that does not have a government health system. This is because Americans are so callous that they don’t care if other Americans get sick or die. The message is that if you are not rich, you don’t deserve healthcare and you need to die.
American foreign policy has only helped the top 20% of the people in the countries it engages. Anytime any country tries to help its workers or its ordinary people in any way, for example trying to help the 80% bottom instead of the 20% top, it gets attacked in one way or another by the US.
A prime example is the minimum wage. Many nations in Latin America have been attacked by the US for simply daring to wage the minimum wage! Aristide in Haiti raised the minimum wage and built more schools in eight years than in the previous 200. For these crimes, death squads were sent against its people, killing thousands of them, and kidnapping Aristide at gunpoint.
The President of Honduras raised the minimum wage. For this, he was ousted by a US coup, imprisoned in a foreign embassy and threatened with death, a new coup government was put in by the US, and the US set up death squads that have now murdered over 1,000 people.
Any time a country tries to do anything nationalist to keep from being a colony of the US and its allies, the US attacks it. The US wants to keep most of the Earth in bondage to the US, their resources plundered, their people immiserated, so all of the wealth in the land goes to the US. America is the new Roman Empire and most of the world is made up of our vassals.
The purpose of the US military is to threaten any nation that tries to help itself or its people with annihilation. That’s what you are signing up for when you join the military. Thing is that Americans love all of this. They cheer for it, for this is the essence of US patriotism or jingoism. Even US liberals support almost everything that I wrote above. I am always shocked when I speak to US liberal Democrats by how much they have bought into the patriotic reactionary swill.
The basis for all of this is something called radical individualism. US foreign policy is based on something called US imperialism that says that the US is dictator the world and most of the countries in it are slaves and colonies of the US. The American people love radical individualism and US imperialism. Even many liberal Democrats do. Almost all liberal Democrats support US imperialism to the hilt.
All of this is maintained by a completely controlled media controlled by very rich people and huge corporations. This media is viciously anti-people and only supports the rich and the corporations – the only two groups the US has ever represented and fought for.
We have never had a single day of democracy in this country. We started to finally head that way in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and the rich and the corporations founded think tanks and wrote many papers on how to shut down radical democracy in the US. The results of this are, among other things, mass voter disenfranchisement and Jim Crow style voting restrictions designed to keep Black people from voting.
Since 2000, the wealthy and corporate elite discovered voting machines and started stealing elections this way. They have been doing it ever since and it has only gotten worse with time. In 2000, the Supreme Court legalized an actual theft of an election. In 2016, many states went to court to stop recounts in states that were obviously stolen by Republicans with voting machines. Courts in all of these states ruled that recounting the stolen elections was illegal.
Almost every state in the US is radically gerrymandered so that democracy is shattered. For instance, a Democrat could win the popular vote and still lose 86% of the seats to Republicans. This is the case in Alabama, Wisconsin, Virginia, and many other places. The Republicans only need two more states, and then the rich and the corporations will write a constitutional convention to rewrite the constitution to take out everything democratic in it to perpetuate continuous rule by reactionary rich people and corporations. At that time, democracy will have surely died.
With the election of Donald Trump, we see an actual American fascism taking shape. Of course this fascism has always lurked in the background, and in fact I would say we have always been a fascist country or at least a radical rightwing authoritarian country in many ways. But this is the most overt fascism we have seen in the US in a very long time.
The hatred for democracy runs deep in the bones of Americans and right now, maybe 1/3 of the population is overtly fascist. I would say that America has always been a great country for rightwingers, as it has been a far rightwing country for most of its history. The jingoists, patriots, and flag wavers are almost all rightwingers and always have been. This is their paradise and it always has been.
That is why rightwingers, reactionaries, and fascists have been flooding to the US for many years now. This is considered to be the Rightwing Dreamland of the rich and corporate classes the world over. In fact, our immigration policy was deliberately set up for many years to favor rightwingers and reactionaries and to keep leftwing immigrants out. This only made the country more and more rightwing. Incredibly, the Democratic Party supported this favoring of rightwing immigrants and opposing of leftwing immigrants.
The Democratic Party and Democratic Presidents have been part of the whole process above for most our history. They just push it forward less hard and sometimes they tinker around the edges to do something for the people. We had a large populist uprising from 1910–1920 in the US and then again in the Great Depression. For the first time in its history, the US government actually worked for the people and did many things to benefit the common man instead of just taking money from the bottom 80% and giving it to the top 20% or even 1%, which has been the American Way from Day One.
I would say that if you are a conservative or even a “liberal” who thinks all of the above is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you are correct. America is your paradise. A lot of people love this conservative – reactionary or even now fascist or Libertarian land. It’s their oyster. It’s the apple of their eye. I don’t blame them for feeling that way.
But it has always puzzled me how liberal or leftwing Americans could love this wildly reactionary country. I believe they have been brainwashed by patriotism and bullied into going along with the project. I have seen many liberals and even out and out Leftists shouting jingoistic tripe, screaming that America is the best country on Earth (83% of Americans believe this silliness), and ordering anyone who disagrees to leave the country. The enforced jingoism runs deep.
But really what is there to like here for a liberal to progressive person? Honestly not even one single thing. How could the most rightwing country on Earth be some leftwing paradise? It makes no sense.
So there you have it. America is great for rightwingers. This is their ultimate dream. For liberals and especially for progressive people, it has always been a dystopian Hell, one of Dante’s nine circles.
