Is it ever? no. Is it overall better or worse? this is a question to explore—it’s multidimensional and different people will have different weights (and even directional preferences) for most of those dimensions, but that can be discussed and explored too.
Mostly, I see this post as “things are getting worse (less stable) on this dimension”, and I wanted to point out that they are getting better on other dimensions, and if it’s the same cause for both changes, it’s perhaps an overall positive direction.
I think there’s a fallacy where people think of countries as if they were people, and then start associating the good with the bad and inevitably feeling that if there was good and bad, then the hypocrisy taints the good, and surely the good must have only been some kind of façade to hide the bad, or even be itself actually secretly bad, because obviously good and bad things couldn’t coexist within the same entity.
So honestly I think it’s fully possible that some aspects of the US in the past were utter trash and some aspects were admirable; that the country is not, actually, some kind of monolith is fully demonstrated by the fact that there was a little thing called a “civil war” fought exactly over one of these major divisions. But lots of political culture wars seem to be between two sides perched up on idiotic views of “it was ALL good” vs “it was ALL bad” and obviously not only there’s no reconciling that sensibly, but it weakens overall trust put in the system as a whole.
Is it ever? no. Is it overall better or worse? this is a question to explore—it’s multidimensional and different people will have different weights (and even directional preferences) for most of those dimensions, but that can be discussed and explored too.
Mostly, I see this post as “things are getting worse (less stable) on this dimension”, and I wanted to point out that they are getting better on other dimensions, and if it’s the same cause for both changes, it’s perhaps an overall positive direction.
I think there’s a fallacy where people think of countries as if they were people, and then start associating the good with the bad and inevitably feeling that if there was good and bad, then the hypocrisy taints the good, and surely the good must have only been some kind of façade to hide the bad, or even be itself actually secretly bad, because obviously good and bad things couldn’t coexist within the same entity.
So honestly I think it’s fully possible that some aspects of the US in the past were utter trash and some aspects were admirable; that the country is not, actually, some kind of monolith is fully demonstrated by the fact that there was a little thing called a “civil war” fought exactly over one of these major divisions. But lots of political culture wars seem to be between two sides perched up on idiotic views of “it was ALL good” vs “it was ALL bad” and obviously not only there’s no reconciling that sensibly, but it weakens overall trust put in the system as a whole.