07-28-2022, 01:42 PM
(07-28-2022, 04:40 AM)nguyenivy Wrote: I have positions on things but US culture as a whole is just not collectivist in the way(s) [some?] European countries are. There have to be cultural reasons in addition to business reasons as to why we don't have the universal social safety nets and public transportation systems some EU countries have despite both sides of the northern Atlantic being 'Western'. So I have a question: What is a good vision for the future that is compatible with American culture? So far, it seems clear that the 'how we get there' part will be easier once we actually have a vision. Perhaps this is why the S&H archetypes go in the order they do? Idealist/Prophet -> Reactive/Nomad -> Civic/Hero -> Artist -> <loop back>
This aversion to collectivism may just be a Reagan thing. To younger people who have not lived under anything else but Reaganomics neoliberalism, it may seem like the USA can do nothing else. But to many blue boomers like me, Reaganomics seems like an unnecessary and temporary fluke. From the 1930s through the 1970s the USA was in the lead in the world on many policies, after the New Deal, the Great Society, and sixties trends like civil rights,
environmentalism and consumer protection. It's just that the corporate and neoliberal establishment was strong enough to mount a resistance and find a charming actor with a 22-4 horoscope score to run for president and launch the counter-revolution.
Safety nets and public systems are perfectly compatible with American culture, just not with the neoliberal (fake free-market/fake individualist) regime that has been foisted upon us and which has deceived the people temporarily thanks to demagogues like Reagan and Trump. While the USA backtracked after having been ahead of Europe for the previous 50 years, in 1980 many countries in Europe like France took the sixties revolution and ran with it that year and became more collectivist and environmentalist than they had ever been. Others like the UK and Germany had already leaped ahead of (or along with) the USA earlier, and backtracked a bit in 1980, but still remain further ahead of the USA now.
So maybe the fake-individualist, social-darwinian, anti-democratic trend has some strong roots in the USA, but so do more collectivist and progressive trends, green/peace trends, and diversity trends too, even to the extent of being ahead of Europe. It's just a question of decreasing the temporary (uh, only 41-year, extended 3T-influenced) hold that the charming actor and his deceptive ideologies have on middle America, and we can go forward again if we choose to. The idealist Boomers supported these trends back in the sixties, and need to continue speaking up and leading the way on them again now after this temporary backtracking.
What has developed politically is that the political parties today, more so than in the past, have become vehicles for the progressive trends on the one hand (Democrats) and the regressive backtracking ones on the other (Republicans). So now in spite of some who talk about the 2 parties being the same, they are not, and we must support Democrats now.