look where it got us

I mean, you can easily point to the atrocities that the USA was built on and feel a deep sense of shame, and we collectively should, we should remember the horrors of the past. But having a social democracy exist and survive as long as it did was proof of concept of an experiment that was not supposed to work. It's proof that we can do better if we unify just a little. Yes, it could have been better or lasted longer, but we don't exactly have a lot of alternatives. We're fucking animals. The fact that we can do any of this at all is amazing.

But we can easily play this "would we have been better off" game forever. Back until we first started killing each other for thousands of years which led to our brains developing into this absurd thing we have now. Would we have been better off if the USA was never founded? Would the Native Americans have been better off? Would the Europeans? (Read Pastwatch, good speculative ideas on all this.)

The reality is though that we're here now and we're better off as a society than we've ever been. Yes, there are bad things happening, but it's in the decline. We just feel bad because we don't live long enough to see that long arc of history and cannot see that tangible, powerful decline in war, disease, suffering, murder and rape and so many other every-day horrors we all had to live with for literally thousands and thousands of years. I can easily count the number of times my house has been raided, and that number is one time, and it wasn't even an armed militia, it was just some random, confused person. That's a MASSIVE improvement historically speaking.

What I think is fucking with a lot of our heads is that we imbibe in fictions without taking away the good lessons and grounded, material lessons. We read novels or watch Star Trek and believe that we're entitled to the stars, that we have this glorious, unified future just around the corner, that all we have to do is make X policies and elect candidate Y and we will have world peace and food replicators.

Nah dog, we're not going out there. We're not going to get better than this. Maybe our non-human descendants in a very, very long time from now, but currently, creating a democracy that lasts more than 200 years might be the absolute best we can do.

I’m not so sure good policy is the way to do it… but I do know from political experience that good policy is something EVERYONE hates. Precisely because it doesn’t benefit them exclusively.

Our problem we're butting up against is this, that as individuals we are resistant to the bitter medicine we know will help us. So we have no choice but to elect leaders we know will trick the population in some way, but we never know what's a trick and what's a power grab for personal gain. (Present admin excluded, they're a painfully transparent consequence of our society abandoning community and education.)

But we had a social democracy in the US that lasted more than 200 years. That's not a bad run, it's proof of concept. Maybe the USA will splinter and fracture, but from that will come new ideas, new areas of democratic progress and new alliances and power groups who now know that such a thing is possible.

I don't think we're going to have a unified world, at least not in our lives and certainly not with our existing social systems, but war and disease and atrocities broadly are on a decline across the globe. It may spike again in places and at times, but despite that we are living in an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity, that shows that something we're doing is working, but we have to manage and maintain it by resisting apathy and nihilism. If we stop seeing the positives and stop caring, we backslide to raiders looting our houses and raping and pillaging our communities.