The moment that the Founding Fathers cease to be the mythology glue holding the nation together will be the minute that the country fractures into 20 different nation-states.
People seem to take the unity of U.S. for granted. But there is nothing granted about it.
The former Spanish colonies from Mexico to Argentina were part of the same empire, speak the same language, derive their legal systems from the same framework, but they shattered into 20 different states and even led wars against one another.
The only attempt to build something bigger out of them, Greater Colombia, only lasted from 1819 to 1831, and the country split precisely on the centralist vs. federalist question.
In contemporary intellectual climate, it is almost a heresy to say this aloud, but American political model proved to be messy but durable. Of course, it may yet split on the social network toxicity much like it did split in 1860, but its longevity is pretty significant.
Of course, it helped that U.S. is isolated from other powers of the world by two great oceans. Invasion by an external enemy was by far the most frequent cause of problems in my corner of the world. Being located right in the center of a historically violent continent is a recipe for trouble.
> People seem to take the unity of U.S. for granted. But there is nothing granted about it.
I agree completely. It’s hard for us to imagine seeing it break up but there is nothing that prevents that except our general desire to live together.
I think large democracies with functioning governments are very unstable over long time horizons. The reason I mention functioning is that if the government of a large democracy is largely non-functional than you can mostly keep doing whatever you want with whatever cultural norms you have where you live. But a functional one will actually pass laws and actually enact things that affect your life that you may disagree with - look at the current abortion stuff. There is no reconciliation to be had on many of these issues. Or look at the Republicans rhetoric around the debt limit “they’ll have to do it without us” - yikes.
The US has lasted as long as it has because for most of the time the country was somewhat homogenous and where it wasn’t you could “go fuck off into the woods” and nobody would bother you. With that being less of a possibility the country was always on a collision course for instability, but WW2 and the Cold War kept people united around a common enemy that threatened basically held beliefs. With that gone we will either have a new uniting enemy, or we’ll eventually just form some different governments.
An entire bloody Civil War was fought over (among other things) whether or not it was possible to break up the USA. The outcome was: States cannot leave. The Constitution does not address secession, but the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the Constitution to have created a union that is in their words, indestructible,”[1] and ultimately the Civil War seems to have pretty convincingly established the illegality of unilateral secession.
> It’s hard for us to imagine seeing it break up but there is nothing that prevents that except our general desire to live together.
That thing that prevents it is evidently the [EDIT: Supreme Court's interpretation of the] Constitution, so it's not just a matter of losing that general desire to live together. We'd have to at the very least go through the difficult process of amending the Constitution to allow it, in order to actually legally break the union up.
Ah I see. I don't see a legal dissolution occurring so that wasn't something I was really tracking (but hey maybe that's the black swan event?). Much more likely IMO is another civil war (unlikely though because we're fat, happy) or the system becomes so dysfunctional that people aren't willing to shed blood to get rid of it, but they largely ignore it.
> The moment that the Founding Fathers cease to be the mythology glue holding the nation together will be the minute that the country fractures into 20 different nation-states.
No, it won't.
Because the Founding Fathers aren't now the mythology glue holding the nation together. American national identity is mich more (and much fuzzier) than that.
Appeal to the Founding Fathers is just a tired political cliche.
To continue on the "American national identity" trope. Could the (un)conscious fear of the country loosing cohesiveness the reason for displaying national US signs in many contexts of American life so frequently, in order to counter any possible de-federalisation movements?
Flags are frequent on walls of event venues, people put them on cars as stickers/flags or on their clothing (rarely, I know), and the US populace displays national symbols much more frequently than elsewhere (maybe with the exception of war/conflict zones for other reasons).
Living in Europe, the flag is used typically in the "us vs them" (sport, marking of some products maybe) and in official (army, embassies, governmental buildings and posts) contexts. Of course, there are exceptions.
The "proud to be American" saying doesn't really seem to answer the question, as it's on some level just word salad which begs for another set of explanations, so I was thinking that my original thesis might be closer to the reality.
The American Flag is a symbol for a set of ideas that we actually hold sacred. Call it a religion if you like.
I got one behind me. I put it up the day after Seditionists attacked The Capital. My uncle gave it to me after I returned from an actual war 20 years ago.
I think we got reasons to be proud. The Enlightenment was first conceived in goverment here. As a result of that awareness I read all the original European philosophers who made up that 17th century intellectual movement, and I have a deep appreciation for that wisdom and what it helped create. And I think the ideas within are worth defending. I can't speak to a Europeans relationship with his or her country, but there is a good reason both historically and ethically, that ours is so prominent, and I think that identity has been good for the country.
And honestly just as an observation it seems more benign to have a flag as a symbol that actually means something to people when there isn't a war or a soccer game, than only trotted out when there is one.
