What went wrong? Over taxation, over regulation, Send my job overseas deals (officially known as "Free Trade Deals"... NAFTA etc), poor border security and immigration enforcement.....
Just when was America so great, is a better question... and great for whom?
Things went wrong right from the start, when the ancestors of most of us immigrated here illegally and began the genocide of the original Americans. I suppose maybe if the Native American Indians had better border security and immigration enforcement, America would still be great for them? America continued it's campaign for "greatness" by kidnapping and enslaving African people, and building an agricultural base on their blood.
It's only in the last 50 or so years that America has even BEGUN to be great, with efforts to exterminate prejudices and make strides toward equal opportunities for people regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality. It's only in the last 40 or so years that we've begun to realize that we need to conserve and protect the earth and it's resources. Sadly, we now have a president determined to do his best to UNDO many of these efforts.
America certainly was great though its greatness has been in decline for decades. It's a slow incremental process and soon the U.S. will be just like the rest of western civilization unless very decisive action is taken. It has become weak, socialist, and anti libertarian.
The left demonize America because they have no perspective. Talk about slavery etc centuries ago is meaningless because slavery was rife worldwide at that time. The question is not whether America has always been good but whether any other country can claim to be better. The answer is no, at least until very recently.
Most countries that might try to claim the moral high ground are just weak, not moral. The only reason they weren't doing to same sh*t is because they were too weak and pathetic to pull it off.
Deep inside the left has a tendency to hate the winner and sympathize with losers. Usually there is no moral difference between winners and losers. They were both trying to screw each other over. The only difference is that America was strong. Might doesn't make right, but it doesn't necessarily make wrong either.
America has been the pinnacle of civilization since its founding. We'll see whether it continues its slide into socialism and authoritarianism or has a renaissance of libertarian values.
This post was edited by Zeitgeist at June 17, 2017 8:54 AM MDT
The politicians of all countries talk of the greatness of their particular nation. In my countries case, "Great" Britain meant larger, not better, but the latter interpretation makes a handy, jingoistic, catch phrase. Flag waving and singing patriotic songs, catch phrases about greatness, and so forth, are meaningless gestures, and often used to hide the vapidity of a particular politicians message. I will leave it to America to search its own collective conscience, and work out what is morally, intellectually, or practically, good or bad about the country, but I will say this. There is no more vapid a world leader than Donald J. Trump. He ran a campaign totally devoid of vision or content, and is running an administration accordingly, and, it seems to me, with criminality added to the mix. I do not believe in telling other countries who to vote for, but throughout both his campaign, and subsequent presidency, I tried to point out that Donald J. Trump could only make America look foolish, bigoted, and corrupt. His supporters just don't care. They only care that he is a very exaggerated version, indeed, a parody of right-wing politics.
This post was edited by HarryDemon at June 19, 2017 7:53 PM MDT
