The American Two Party system

[hollodero]

(03-05-2023, 10:42 PM)michaelsean Wrote: My point is not more sophisticated than that. We, or many of us, can be rather sophomoric when it comes to the US. Yes we had a coup attempt that had no chance of accomplishing anything. Assholes can be assholes, but on January 20th Biden became president and it was never in doubt. I don’t mean to minimalize it, but if they went in and killed twenty senators, Biden would still have become President because there isn’t another option. We survived the American Civil War. We’ve had four presidents assassinated. If someone were to lay odds on the country surviving after having the Civil War and then weeks after it’s over Lincoln being assassinated they would not be very good.

I just bring up the moon landing and what we did to produce the weapons and everything else during WWII to show our perspective. We don’t think anything is too big to overcome. I imagine someday we will be wrong, but I don’t think this is it.

I’m not great at expressing myself philosophically. I go off on tangents and can bring up things that seem irrelevant, but make sense in my head because I have the whole picture of what I’m thinking but don’t always lay it all out.

I think hardly anyone does great in expressing ideas in a wholly understandable manner, imho it's the nature of conversation- I guess I understand the jist of your thoughts though. What I will say specifically is that in those examples of stress, like Civil war and so on, the republic wasn't, or at least wasn't just saved through unwavering optimism. I'd say it was also saved by people who understood quite well that this is far from a given and it takes some actual engagement to save the republic. Like people actually fighting for the union instead of just standing by thinking 'ah we're the USA, we exist since I was born, we always land on our feet, look at our many decades of success.'

Just on a sidenote really, I always find it peculiar how Americans bring up the civil war as example for the country's ability to survive, while not addressing so much that there was a devastating civil war to begin with. One that maybe wasn't winnable for the south, but your mythical Union president actually tried a lot to lose it anyways. Did the union win because of US greatness, maybe, but I'd make the point that it also was just good fortune.