American Exceptionalism Redux-io ad Absurdum
Criticizing America’s past, & liberal ideas harm us irreparably, so they say.
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I have been a White American male for my entire 60 years. My wife and I have two twenty-something daughters. I’m a liberal Democrat, and often progressive. Yet I am likely conservative in some ways too. My father served in the US Navy during WWII. My mother became a nurse at the same time. I’d call myself a patriot, but the term has been corrupted in the last fifty years. Those are just a few of my personal stats. What kind of American does that make me?
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Do I hate America? Should I just go live another country? Am I a socialist, a communist, and-or an Antifa radical? Yet maybe I agree with some, or many, of the things you disagree with. At what point do I become your enemy? Or a hater of my country? Furthermore, why is being an Exceptionalist a prerequisite to loving my country? And why is (blindly) loving my country the acid test of my Americanness? Finally, why does you seeing every (other) liberal or Democrat as socialist saboteurs, preclude me from seeing various problems like racism, wealth and income inequality, and gender discrimination in our country? Either what I see is correct, or what you see is correct, or more likely, we both have at least some small truth that shouldn’t be drowned out by the…
