@gulfgal98

on a very insightful article. Two quotes from the article stand out.

Moral universals anchor a society in a genuinely shared prosperity. Not just because they “spread the wealth”, though they do: because, more deeply, moral universals civilize people. They are what let people grow to become sane, humane, intelligent human beings.

A little further down, Haque also writes (my emphasis):

So: what really went wrong in America? Moral universals civilize people, but there aren’t any moral universals. The public goods universals result in educate, inform, train, school people, let them live long and peaceful lives. But Americans — whether it is today’s extremists or yesterday’s slave-auctioneers and owners — believe that moral universals are just a “cost”, a “tax”, and so forth. They have never seen — and still don’t see — the benefits: the civilizing process that democracy depends vitally on.

Thus, in America today, there are no broad, genuine, or accessible civilizing mechanisms left.

When we examine our country's values as compared to the neoliberal ideology, we can see that we are the epitome of that ideology. In my series on neoliberalism, my very first essay recalled a training program that was instituted for every city employee back in the 1990's. My political awareness was limited to just local politics back then and therefore, I was totally unaware of the neoliberal ideology. However in retrospect, our training was based heavily upon the neoliberal ideology in that it emphasized that competition would become the driving force behind everything we would do in our work, including competing with one another.

I referenced an article by George Monbiot as my inspiration for that first essay. In it Monbiot states the following (my emphasis):

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Your essay shows that we never really had the moral universals deeply ingrained into our national psyche from the beginning. Like with everything else, our nation has played around the edges just enough to prevent revolution, but has never truly committed to those moral universals. Now, as a result, we are not only a nation in decline, but even worse, a society in decline with no universal moral compass to save us when we most need it.

@UntimelyRippd

however, i will say this: the American Experiment as envisaged and driven forward by diversely-opinioned people like Adams and Hamilton and Madison and Washington and Jefferson and Hancock and Franklin did not depend on african slavery, it only accommodated african slavery -- and then, not for long (post-1783, i mean) in the general scheme of things, and at extraordinary eventual expense.

jefferson's dream was that they could create a society in which the state quite explicitly existed to serve the people, rather than vice versa, and that given authority over the governors, the people could sustain such a society, if they were given the requisite education and access to information -- i.e., if the government were forbidden to render the mass of the people illiterate, ignorant, and misinformed.

Everything is not the fault of neoliberalism, nor of neoconservatism. But these have been the primary motivating factors in the downfall of the American Empire since WW2. The first downfall of the US came to a large portion of what was then the Union due to slavery. The malign effects of slavery are still with us, but that is something slowly fading (too slowly for certain).

With the rise of neoliberalism, we see the perversion of the "rugged individualism" from allowing a self-sufficient population, sufficiently empowered through education and socialization to work both for themselves (and families) AND for the betterment of the whole of society; into a progressively more selfish interpretation generated by the more successful against the less successful. This is actually the end-result and cause of our current national decline.

Neoconservatism, besides scooping up money for engines of war, has done NOTHING to further humanity, including its own citizenry. Spending more than half of the income generated primarily by the less well-to-do to transfer it to the wealthy, while committing destruction not only on foreign nations but objectively and obviously on the majority at home.

Neoliberalism exults in privatizing things, like schools, roads, health care, thereby making them less accessible to persons of lesser means. Do you think George Soros gave a damn when he caused the pound sterling to crash? No way. He was only interested in racking one more billion to his own bank account. I will not go through the list of other economic plunderers of which many examples are well-known.

Here's a paradox, though totally predictable. By outsourcing much, although not the majority, of our military procurements, our country is actually weaker. Not mere financially or morally, but because we then have to rely upon a new supply chain. A supply chain that can be choked off anywhere off-shore.

i would call the American Experiment, but i do not think that on this day i have the heart for it, as i struggle through a particularly difficult valley in my existential journey.

however, i will say this: the American Experiment as envisaged and driven forward by diversely-opinioned people like Adams and Hamilton and Madison and Washington and Jefferson and Hancock and Franklin did not depend on african slavery, it only accommodated african slavery -- and then, not for long (post-1783, i mean) in the general scheme of things, and at extraordinary eventual expense.

jefferson's dream was that they could create a society in which the state quite explicitly existed to serve the people, rather than vice versa, and that given authority over the governors, the people could sustain such a society, if they were given the requisite education and access to information -- i.e., if the government were forbidden to render the mass of the people illiterate, ignorant, and misinformed.

Yes, being wealthy bourgeois or landed gentry, they were uninclined to create institutions that threatened their own status, but they nonetheless had a fundamentally progressive worldview, which was the truly revolutionary thing that set them apart from the movers and shakers of their European forebears: They believed that the physical and psychological state of the mass of humanity could be slowly but continually improved, if society were ordered so as to permit the fruits of technological innovation to be shared. (Another way of putting it is that they believed in real economic growth as something that in the first place was possible, and in the second place could better the lot of the average person.)

Significantly, they were right about that. And Jefferson was right about almost everything else -- about the dangers of standing armies, about the eventual horrific penalty the US would pay for slavery, about the unsustainability of the monarchical/aristocratic European societies, about the social negatives of dense populations and industrial economic organization, about the threat posed by a corporations and financialism, etc.

If it makes you feel better about your moral superiority, feel free to despise TJ for his slave-ownership, but think hard and carefully before concluding that you possess insights superior to his, regarding the essential problems of social organization, justice, nationhood, and self-government.

But yeah, the experiment has clearly failed, in the sense that certain parameters definitely needed to be set differently at the get-go.