305 Engine wrote: ↑Tue Nov 03, 2020 10:25 am
This is pretty much every nation state on the planet though.
America is split in various ways but so are most countries. Regardless of size. America is arguably exceptional in that other large countries have only become one and started achieving prominence (China, Soviet Union...) after a strong dose of authoritarianism but these splits on regional, racial or rural/urban lines are pretty consistent throughout the world.
Generally they only really become an issue when people try to exploit those splits. And, I think that is exactly what has been happening in America, and it's the first thing you need to tackle before mapping out anything else.
At one level you're correct and there are some good insights/lessons to be gained/learned from those comparisons.
At another level I'm not so sure that the similarities withstand close analysis. I think you do not place enough emphasis on the distinction you acknowledge between authoritarian roots and the US experience.
Also, the "American Experiment" of creating a country based on something other than ethnicity/nationality, religion or similar unifying and recognizable cultural glue makes for very different experiences and less similarity than you suggest.
In a similar vein, the conquest of the native peoples in what became the US was a precondition to its formation and evolution, but the natives were both literally and figuratively excluded. When they became states, the culture and enabled population of each state was in important ways American, not an assimilation or forced union of other peoples (Hawaii possibly excepted). Compare and contrast the formation and dissolution of the Soviet Union or, say, Yugoslavia. NB that the history of slavery, emancipation, jim crow and civil rights interacts with the model i'm suggesting in complicated ways. I acknowledge those complications and the exceptions or objections they create but that is far beyond the scope of what I can address here.
I also don't see much similarity between the creation of countries such as Germany or Italy out of smaller nation states and the creation of the US out of smaller colonies and expanding states. The creation of countries by mostly thoughtless or clueless colonial fiat created countries w/ regional, racial or other conflicts but I don't think analogies between the US and those countries can be stretched very far. I'm not sure how China fits into any of this.
I think I'm correct in saying that in all these cases, including China, either before or at the creation of the larger nation, power rested primarily at the federal level and the states got the leftovers (very much top down). In the US the states
voluntarily created the federal system and retained much of the power which has only grudgingly been ceded to the federal level over centuries. Beyond that, at least in theory, in the US all power emanates
from the people and from there to the states and then to the federal government. This was something new in the world and even today is not a widely implemented concept.
Collectively, these are important distinctions that have large consequences today.