That's a recent myth about America and doesn't have much to do with actual American history.

If the US is not a project of European enlightenment values, what else is it, in your opinion?

Given that the first North American settlers were basically fugitives from Great Britain, and all other colonies were there to exploit local resources and people, the US was first and foremost a money thing. Also for the Boston tea party, which was as much about independence as it was about taxes.

And how enlightened can a nation be that is among the last to abolish slavery, and that had to fight a civil war about that very question.

North American settlers were far from uniform historically. Some were first and foremost after money and power (e.g. the first Southern plantation owners were quite unapologetically so). Other "fugitives" were rather more concerned about pursuing various combinations of public-mindedness, radical autonomy and broad-based opportunity. North American settlement was a rather complex story.

Sure, in the South it was ruthless Europeans trying to get rich. And they did. The Mayflower settlers were more or less fugitives from Britain, while all other colonial powers, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, were only there to exploit. Not very enlightened, even compared to contemporary Europe back then.

among the last? that seems wrong according to this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_sla...

All major powers of the time were faster. Even if Napoleon made slavery legal again in the colonies for a while it was abolished in the main land before.

I don't think it's a good idea to allow one's conception of the US as a major power in the 20th century to impact the knowledge that the US was most certainly NOT a major power for most of the 19th. The US was a backwards, dangerous and poor country compared to the major powers, very much still in development.

Not really. Backwards poor countries don’t get into wars in the Mediterranean Sea. You underestimate how much relative wealth and power the US had when it seceded. Frontier sure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars

Comparative backwards poor countries get involved in strange things all the time.

Kwame Nkrumah, 1st dictator of Ghana was overthrown when he was out of the country attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between the USSR and the USA during the Vietnam war.

But back to the Barbary Wars. That was conducted against 'pirates' and was done in concert with several European powers. The closest comparison would be modern UN/NATO/ECOWAS led 'police action' style wars against warlords in disputed territories which are disrupting trade.

It's notable that you can't avoid a war with pirates or warlords. They're actively killing your citizens and stealing your import/export material. Even the tiniest of nations has to respond eventually or give up on being a trading partner to anyone.

For example:

> From 1796–1797 French raiders seized some 316 American merchant ships flying American colors.

This overall would force the the U.S.'s hand, regardless of if it was backwards or poor. To do nothing, would be to condemn U.S. foreign trade to being controlled by another power---something that the U.S. was too proud to allow.

The average American was taller and healthier than the average Englishman, Frenchman, etc, not only in the 19th Century but also in colonial times, so it is unclear what you mean by "poor country".

ALL major powers? China in 2021 has Uyghurs enslaved.

Well, America isn't a Europeanist project. It's an autonomous project, for one. Second, I don't trust the fact that the myth of America as a beacon of individual liberty became dominant just when America started to roll out its mass surveillance and censorship-without-censorship capabilities.

The first problematic thing with this statement is the notion that a nation can be defined by some ideal or ideology. This really isn't it. A nation is defined by it's people, language, customs, social organization, individual values etc. Those may have little do do with stated ideals.

I'm the last person to support CRT mostly because I think it gets out of hand quickly - but you can use CRT to deconstruct your statement pretty quickly: Slavery, which is antithetical to 'Enlightenment and Classical Liberal Values' - is a core aspect of the American historical reality.

You can't have 25% of your population as slaves and then say 'We're based on Enlightenment Ideals!'. That's an irreconcilable dissonance.

This what I was hinting at in my opening paragraph: 'what you say you are isn't really want you are' ... and also 'what you are is not an idea'.

I think it would be useful to dismiss most of the 'ideals' people think they have or had and just look at the people involved and what happened.

You can see slavery as an institution that the nation inherited in conflict with the Enlightenment values and the conflict between slave states and free ones goes back to the founding. Certainly, to some extent, unity with slavers was needed to gain independence, and the stage was set for the civil war almost immediately

It's a story of progress: yes, white men liberated themselves first, but progress continued and the slaves were next, and then women.

These things don't happen overnight. Just because America didn't live up immediately to her founding ideals doesn't mean that they didn't exist or that she never will

Denying the role of the civil war in our history is extremely frustrating to me as a descendant of a Union soldier. What did he give his arm and his brother for?

"Certainly, to some extent, unity with slavers was needed to gain independence,"

No - this is note true.

America was not founded on a special 'Faustian bargain' with the slavers in order to obtain independence.

The Founding Fathers of America themselves - the originators of the 'Constitutional Values' - were slave owners.

There is an unambiguous dissonance between the 'Constitutional Values' and 'Actual Values'.

While the new 'Constitutional Values' were a nice intellectual foundation, they were secondary to the real power dynamic: that the American Colonial Nobility / Landed Gentry didn't want to take orders or pay taxes to the Empire, even though they benefited from it for the most part i.e. Royal Navy facilitating commerce, and geopolitical protection from Spain/France.

First you have a Landed Gentry who wanted 'most of the power', Second, you have a 'Populist Narrative' of the 'Evil King George' (who really was not evil, frankly) - which is necessary to rally the plebes so that they fight to the death for something which may not really improve their lot. Thirdly, this is supported by 'Constitutional Values' but that's just part of the equation.

More obviously - how do these 'Constitutional Values' line up with the fact that slavery was abolished in the supposedly 'Unenlightened, Evil Empire' long, long before it was in the US? Among other things.

There was effectively no slavery in Canada or Australia.

How would you tell a Canadian that the 'American Constitution' is an effective tool of 'Enlightenment Values' when Americans are the last one's to get the message?

Everyone in Canada and Australia has better personal safety, they face much less crime, have a much more consistent and fair judicial system, they even have healthcare. They didn't have a revolution, or some special document.

One can only wonder if the 'Revolution' were to have happened in the Canadian colonies, while the US remained part of the Commonwealth what history would look like, but I suggest not hugely different.

'What America Is' (or anywhere else) isn't really well explained by the intellectual narrative that it decided to tell itself and it's people. That's a narrative not a reality. They are related, but not the same thing.

It's not all that recent - de Tocqueville wrote about it

It's not 'recent' and it's not a 'myth' - but it should be pointed out that it's only a small part of the measure of 'identity'.

Every story of history is a myth.

> Put simply, it was supposed to be the one place where you could speak your beliefs freely, and, barring specific harm done to others, nobody could force you to do anything

Unless you were a slave, or black in segregation times ( which ended what, in the 1960s???), or Chinese until the 1960s, or Japanese during WW2, or a pregnant woman up to and including today.

It's like that Family Guy joke - freedom for all, but not exactly.

This is your ideological, moral perspective, which is frankly kind of a distortion of the historical reality of those aspirations.

But the 'American identity' is something more objective, i.e. what Americans and others thought of themselves over time. Obviously we can debate a lot about how to interpret reality and history, the point being 'what it is' is a matter of record, not a matter of 'what you think it ought to be'.

No doubt that 'classical liberal' ethos (as you hint at) is part of it, and that the US is quite different than other countries in that way ... but in the end I think culture, language, customs and institutions are the primary artifacts of everything, just as in other places.

If you were to take the 'classical liberal ethos' and overlay it into a different colonialist situation, with a different cultural foundation - that nation would look completely different.

> Put simply, it was supposed to be the one place where you could speak your beliefs freely, and, barring specific harm done to others, nobody could force you to do anything.

All of this was contextual. You could speak your beliefs freely as long as they were some kind of Christianity, nobody could force you to do anything unless you weren't a straight cis white man, etc.

For a long time our society was dominated by people for whom this was true, then suddenly all kinds of different people started having a voice:

- atheists and other non-Christians

- communists / marxists / anarchists

- women, people of color, LGBTQ people

And our society--predictably and not unlike many others--did a big "whoooooa no thank you" and people were imprisoned, beaten, murdered, disenfranchised, etc.

Or another way of putting it might be that when the Founders wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution/Bill of Rights, humanity had just barely invented the swivel chair, polite gentlemen drank coffee out of saucers, and phrenology was a _future_ theory. Mythologizing those times does a disservice to us in these times; the Founders were just weird people like all of us, with the attendant blind spots and potential for greatness.

> All of this was contextual. You could speak your beliefs freely as long as they were some kind of Christianity, nobody could force you to do anything unless you weren't a straight cis white man, etc.

This tells us very little because every society can be viewed as "contextual" in that sense, and pre-modern societies only more so. Consider the history of religious controversy in Britain, or the medieval remnants in the social structure of then-prerevolutionary France. What matters however is that the U.S. was intended to be far less contextual than its contemporary societies, a key advancement towards deeper modernity.

> This tells us very little because every society can be viewed as "contextual" in that sense

Oh yeah that's definitely what I mean. Every society at the bottom of it is "might makes right", and then they can be judged by what they do when they obtain a monopoly on might. And at least some of the time, the US used that might to stick up for the rights of people many others wouldn't. But also we drove Native Americans from their homes in a super brutal fashion, practiced one of the most violent forms of slavery in history, etc.

And I assume people of the future will look back on us and recoil at some perfectly regular things we do now, like work in coal mines, use air conditioning, eat meat, put kids in schools, whatever. We exist in this context too. All humans everywhere fail, but I think it's what we aspire to that defines us.

And so I think the jury is still out on the US. I think it's not even really clear what we aspire to at this point--it maybe was in 1789 but that context is gone. In this new context, what is it we stand for? We need to have that conversation as a society. I think it's worth pointing out that we're ultra bad at it, but maybe if we reify this concept, we can start getting better at it.